By Leonard Goh
04/05/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39005881,44503098p,00.htm

The rugged camera market was once dominated by Olympus which produced hardy point-and-shoots such as the Mju Tough-8000. However, other brands have since followed suit and Panasonic's Lumix lineup welcomed its first tough brethren earlier this year with the DMC-FT1. While it may not be as rugged as the toughest Olympus camera, it comes close. The FT1 survived drops and dived into the deep end of the pool, returning unscathed. This shooter is possibly the only hardy snapper that can record HD-quality video clips. Can this camera unseat Olympus from the throne of rugged shooters? We find out.

Design

Similar to many tough cameras, the FT1 doesn't have a protruding lens design. This gives the shooter a brick-like appearance, though the variety of available colors (orange, blue, silver and olive green) makes the point-and-shoot look a bit more fashionable. However the FT1's aesthetics is more clunky and hefty, which make the snapper look hardier than your typical compact camera.

We noted some resemblance in design between the FT1 and the Olympus Mju Tough-8000. Both shooters have almost similar dimensions and look, though the Panasonic camera doesn't have a sliding lens cover to protect the optics when the shooter is not in operation. In place is a piece of hard, clear plastic. Panasonic said it went with this design because a rugged camera shouldn't have too many moveable parts. While this makes sense, we discovered that the hard plastic was easily smudged by fingerprints and tended to produce shots with a soft, blurry look which we didn't like.

At the top of the camera are the zoom lever, power and shutter button. The zoom and shutter control have ridged surfaces to provide a better grip for users. We think this will come in useful when you are using the shooter underwater.

At the rear of the camera are the mode dial and a range of buttons for operating exposure compensation, flash, self-timer, focusing modes and playback. The mode dial has several commonly-used scene modes such as sports and beach. The underwater mode can be found only within the menus, which is strange considering that the FT1 is marketed as a camera suitable for casual divers. We also noticed there is a snow mode on the dial, but we felt that the small buttons may prove to be difficult to operate for users who are wearing gloves or have larger fingers.

There is also a dedicated button for movie recording, which makes the shooter more intuitive to use.

Features

The FT1's main selling points would be its rugged capabilities--waterproof up to 3m and shockproof from drops of 1.5m. These features held true and we had no trouble taking pictures in the pool and survived drops on hard concrete surfaces from waist level. In fact, it even left a small dent on this reviewer's wooden table when he deliberately dropped the point-and-shoot on it to test the camera's shockproof capability.

At 4.6x, this Panasonic shooter has one of the longest optical zoom ranges among the rugged compacts in the market. The optics is widest at 28mm and can reach up to 128mm. This gives the FT1 an advantage over the Tough-8000, which has a zoom range of 3.6x and lens that extend from 28mm to 102mm.

What also makes the FT1 unique is its ability to record HD-quality video clips, and we were also glad we could zoom while capturing videos. It uses Advanced Video Codec High Definition (AVCHD) Lite compression which promises to reduce video file sizes without compromising quality. A 20-second clip shot using AVCHD Lite took up 35.8MB, while a clip with a similar duration recorded with QuickTime Motion JPEG format measured 65.9MB. There weren't any noticeable quality differences between these two formats.

However, clips compressed with AVCHD Lite have an .mts extension, which isn't supported by QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player. Panasonic did bundle the PHOTOfunSTUDIO software with the camera, and you can import AVCHD Lite files to view and edit on it. Alternatively, you can use a third-party application such as the VLC media player to watch the movies you have recorded. We hope Panasonic can use a more common file format for its AVCHD Lite clips because not everyone will have the same programs as you do, and this may make sharing videos a hassle for some users.

The FT1 has an LED lamp which you can set to activate automatically when the scene is too dark during video recording. It also functions as an autofocus illuminator when taking still shots. It's a pity though, that we cannot turn it on as and when we want for use as a torch light, but that's a small issue because not many other cameras on the market can do that anyway.

As with other Lumix shooters, this rugged point-and-shoot has the intelligent Auto (iA) mode which recognizes scenes and optimizes exposure settings for the best shot. There is also face recognition, which allows you to register up to six faces into the shooter. The next time they appear in the frame, focus and exposure priority would be given to these subjects.

Another huge advantage the FT1 has over the Mju Tough-8000 is that it uses the more common SD/SDHC media to store picture and video files instead of the xD-Picture Card or microSD card (via an adapter) which Olympus employs.

Performance

The FT1's startup time measured approximately 1.3 second while shutter lag clocked around 0.2 seconds. The burst mode wasn't too impressive, managing 2 frames per second (fps) for two pictures before chugging along at 1fps thereafter. Time-to-first shot was around 2 seconds. These test figures were only average, putting the Panasonic shooter on par with typical point-and-shoots.

Auto focusing on this rugged camera was zippy and accurate. The face detection feature was quick to lock onto subjects and track them even when they moved within the LCD frame. We also noticed that the snapper was somewhat capable of recognizing side profiles, which is similar to Fujifilm's Face Detection 3.0 technology.

The lenses in the FT1 are optically stabilized using Panasonic's Mega O.I.S technology, and we found it to work very well for us. In low lighting environment, we could shoot hand held at 1/8 second and the shot was still relatively sharp.

Image Quality

The FT1's picture quality is acceptable for a point-and-shoot in its class, but this also means that images are useable only if they were shot using ISO 400 and below.

The camera has an ISO range of 80 to 1,600, and we found shots to look best when they were taken at ISO 80. There were hardly any visible digital artifacts, even when we analyzed the picture at 100 percent on the computer. At ISO 100, very slight hint of noise started to appear, though it would be difficult for average users to spot them. It was at ISO 400 that we noticed the noise levels peaking, with the darker regions showing obvious hints of digital artifacts. However, there was little smudging of pictures, which occurred at only ISO 800 and above.

Exposure-wise, the FT1 was generally spot-on, although it exhibited the typical behavior of point-and-shoots by overexposing highlight regions. The trick around this is to manually compensate the exposure (for us it's minus two-third stops). We expected the shadow regions to lose details when we used this setting, but were proved wrong when we saw details in the darker areas of our shots.

The shooter's color reproduction and white balance were accurate in our test images, and didn't show any weird color tinge. Even images shot underwater weren't overly bluish. Then again, this depends on the water condition which you are in.

Conclusion

After spending some time with the FT1, we felt that it is a worthy competitor to Olympus' Mju-Tough lineup. Although it's only as hardy as the Tough-6000, other aspects such as the HD video-recording capability, wide angle lens and zoom range puts pressure on the Tough-8000. It also helps that the Panasonic camera uses the more common SD/SDHC media for storing files. That said, we think the company needs to work on the AVCHD Lite file format for easy file sharing.

There are other rugged cameras such as the Canon PowerShot D10 which we will review in the coming weeks. But for now, we think the FT1 is a good alternative to Olympus cameras if you're looking for a tough point-and-shoot.