Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX9

Performance
Using the same 1150mAh Lithium-ion battery as the FX8, the FX9 performed well for approximately 250 shots on every full charge--complete with zooming from wide to telephoto, shots intermixed with flash (and without), picture review and card formatting. The manufacturer claims' of 270 shots were, in fact, 30 less than the FX8 (300 shots). We believe this was a result of the higher-resolution LCD sucking up more juice.

Shutter lag in our tests were negligible when the optical image stabilization was turned off. Even with the stabilization kicking in when the shutter was released (Mode 2), shutter lag was barely noticeable. A fast startup of about 1.5 seconds means you won't miss that impulse shot again. However, turning off the camera took a sluggish 3 seconds until all activity ceased.

VGA (640 x 480) video recording at 30fps should please general photographers who want to take that occasional video. The only gripe we had was its inability to zoom during recording--which hasn't been improved from the FX8. Otherwise, for still image shots, it took us 2 seconds to move from the wide-angle end to the telephoto end (3x optical zoom).

Shot-to-shot performance came in reasonably well at slightly under 2 seconds when flash was forced off. It took approximately 1 second more when the flash was on and 2 seconds extra when the anti red-eye flash was activated.

Continuous burst mode at 6 megapixels (JPEG Fine quality) on our Imation 1GB Secure Digital card was limited to six shots at both High and Low speeds. If you happen to have a finger that never says die, the FX9 can record continuously at approximately 1.2fps until the capacity of your memory card runs out.

The built-in flash proved strong though our pictures tended to get blown out when shooting too close. However, this was easily solved with minor tweaking on the exposure values.

Image Quality
The FX9 produced images that were vibrant in color and with good overall details. We noticed very slight color fringing in some of our shots which were nonetheless unnoticeable in normal printouts.

In addition, there was mild vignetting--darkening of corners of the frame--in our shots with a large portion of blue skies or where there were big areas of flat tones.

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