I've been a photographer for several years now and am very familiar with cameras and doing manual photography. This is my 4th high-end camera, and my previous cameras were Panasonic, Canon, and Fujifilm. This is my first high-end compact camera, however.
I like this camera for pretty much the very reasons that drew me to it. I wanted a quality camera that I could carry around as an alternative to my bulky canon, since I found myself not taking pictures often just because I never had a camera on me. I did a lot of research and I liked this one because of its wide-angle, 5x zoom lens, optical image stabilizer (which is featured on all Lumix's), Panasonic brand name (I had a good experience with my first Panasonic, until I lost it), and incredibly small size. This camera does essentially everything my big cameras did, except without as much zoom and the ability to manually set aperture and shutter speed. It may even do some things better.
Additional features are its HD video recording, 16 megapixel resolution (which in my opinion is more than necessary), and intelligent auto which really is quite intelligent. Now it apparently has two modes of capturing videos, one in HD and another in motion J-peg or something like that... I don't know. I honestly don't care, but I have taken some videos and they turned out fantastic.
Pros:
-Wide angle lens (hard to find on compact cameras) which can create more depth of field
-optical image stabilizer
-plenty, but not too many, scene modes to give me a sense of control in taking the picture (not nearly as good as manual, but sufficient for a compact)
-5x zoom, not bad for a small camera
-trademark Panasonic picture quality, with good exposure and balanced colors (see my customer pics)
-amazingly small! I can't believe all of this is in such a tiny device.
-intelligent auto mode which will take great pictures for those who don't know what I'm talking about in this review
-reasonably priced
Cons:
-No manual shutter speed/aperture control. I won't complain since virtually no small cameras have this, but it would have been nice if Panasonic had added this feature.
-No mode dial that some cameras have. I list this as a con because some people might consider it one. I personally like it the way it is, although sometimes it takes me a while to get it set the way I want it. The controls are simple enough so I'll just have to get used to it.
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