Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55

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Features

Like most compact cameras, the FX55 doesn't include manual exposure controls. Instead Panasonic includes a bevy of scene modes to cover shooting situations that might confuse the camera's auto mode. New to the Panasonic feature list this year is the company's Intelligent Auto mode. It activates the camera's optical image stabilization, Intelligent ISO Control, which automatically boosts the ISO to keep a fast shutter speed and combat hand shake, and Intelligent Scene Selector, which analyzes what's in the frame and chooses what it thinks is the correct scene mode for the given situation.

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This mode also activates continuous auto focus, so that you don't have to press the shutter button halfway to prefocus and the camera can capture a photo faster than if it needs to focus before snapping a photo. Meanwhile, the camera's Face Detection system can find faces in the frame and use them to set focus and exposure so that the camera won't try to focus or expose for something else in the frame instead of your friends and family.

An 8.1-megapixel CCD sensor is at the heart of the DMC-FX55's imaging system. A 3.6x optical, 28-100mm f/2.8-5.6 Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens feeds light to the sensor, while Panasonic's Venus Engine III processes the images captured by the sensor. Sensitivity ranges from ISO 100 to ISO 1,600 at full resolution. Panasonic advertises that the camera can extend to ISO 6,400, but you have to access a special high-sensitivity scene mode that automatically selects an ISO between 1,600 and 6,400, but also reduces the pixel resolution to 3 megapixels.

Similarly, the camera offers a High-Speed Burst mode in addition to the normal burst mode, though that'll cost you even more pixels, reducing the pixel count to 2 megapixels. Since Panasonic is fond of marketing hype, the company misleadingly labels the digital zoom, another resolution-robbing feature, Extra Optical Zoom.

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