Rating: 
Summary: Entry level excellence
Review: This camera offers extreme ease of use for those new to digital photography. The instruction manual is very well written and the camera, while small, has a feel of quality. The picture quality is very good up to and including 8 x 10. The only area of improvement here would be the included 8 megabyte SD card. This is unacceptable in a 3.2 megapixel camera. My advice would be to get at least 1 128 meg SD card and give the 8 meg card to someone still using a 1 megapixel camera.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely amazing camera
Review: This camerae is fabulous. The photos are clear and crisp. The settings enable you to tweak almost anything you want. There are special photo modes. Including a 'heart' mode which is basically point and shoot friendly. The quality is outstanding and the price is comparably less than the cannon A60, but without sacrificing quality standards. Plus this camera takes 2 AA NiMH at a time and not four like other cameras, a huge plus. This way you can carry extra batteries much easier. A battery charger is a must so plan to buy one. With usb 2.0 you'll have your pics on the computer in a flash. Don't be discouraged by all the special settings. Just make sure you have the photo on enlarge quality and not internet, so that it looks good. All resolutions come out nicely. The movie mode is in quicktime format and the movies come out surprisingly clear and the audio is great esp for such a small mic, it picks up everything. I can't say anything bad about this camera but...The only cons are, make sure you hold the camera on your subject(s) for at least 2 seconds or the pic will come out blurred. Bad lighting makes for some digital noise (grainy). And make sure you purchase at least a 128mb SD card. This camera has been discontinued due to it's lighter remake, LC50. Go buy one and take awesome photos :-)
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely amazing camera
Review: This camerae is fabulous. The photos are clear and crisp. The settings enable you to tweak almost anything you want. There are special photo modes. Including a 'heart' mode which is basically point and shoot friendly. The quality is outstanding and the price is comparably less than the cannon A60, but without sacrificing quality standards. Plus this camera takes 2 AA NiMH at a time and not four like other cameras, a huge plus. This way you can carry extra batteries much easier. A battery charger is a must so plan to buy one. With usb 2.0 you'll have your pics on the computer in a flash. Don't be discouraged by all the special settings. Just make sure you have the photo on enlarge quality and not internet, so that it looks good. All resolutions come out nicely. The movie mode is in quicktime format and the movies come out surprisingly clear and the audio is great esp for such a small mic, it picks up everything. I can't say anything bad about this camera but... The only cons are, make sure you hold the camera on your subject(s) for at least 2 seconds or the pic will come out blurred. Bad lighting makes for some digital noise (grainy). And make sure you purchase at least a 128mb SD card. This camera has been discontinued due to it's lighter remake, LC50. Go buy one and take awesome photos :-)
Rating:
Summary: Five stars - and let's clear up the confusion!!
Review: This is the fourth digital camera I have bought, and I love it! Before I talk about why, let me answer an earlier question from "customer in Atlanta", who asks "does the camera print the date on the photo?". The answer is that almost all digital cameras, including this one, comply with the DPOF (Digital Print Order Form) standard. This means that they all record the date, time, aperture, shutter speed and a whole host of other information for every photo. You don't have to do anything, they do all this by themselves. As to whether you can print the date on your photo, well, that depends on your printing software, not on your camera. Therefore, with the right software, almost every digital camera will print the date on the photo. The software that comes with this camera DOES allow you to print the date on the photo. The camera itself is superb. The lens is from Leica, the best lensmaker in the world since 1925, and you can tell by the pictures. They are as sharp as a tack, with good color saturation and contrast, and will print to 11" x 14" size with no problem at all. I got this camera for my wife, who was a little intimidated by the SLR film cameras that we have, and by the Olympus C730 digicam that we have. She wanted something that would be point-and-shoot easy, but produce good sharp photos. This camera fits the bill perfectly. It handles well, is very light, and is just the right size in my view. There are smaller digicams (the Canon Elph and the Pentax) but they are TOO small in my opinion, and that makes them hard to hold steady and keep your fingers out of their way. (By handles well, I mean fits well in the hand, feels good, feels balanced, and you can easily keep your fingers away from the flash, light sensor, and lens). By the way, if you read the editorial tech specs on Amazon for this camera, they talk about the "MEGA optical image stabiliser". This is a mistake, this camera does NOT have MEGA. MEGA is on Panasonic cameras with a 12x zoom, whereas this camera has a 3x zoom. The good news is that you don't need MEGA with a 3x, only with a 12x. (Long zooms such as 12x suffer from severe camera shake when fully extended). We run our Lumix on rechargeable NiMh batteries. They are very long lasting, and work out to be a fraction of the price of any other batteries. Make sure to get NiMh's with more than 1800 mAh. Ritz Camera have a great 4-pack of "Sunpak" NiMh's at 2000 mAh for only ten bucks - half the price of Radio Shack or anyone else. Speaking of price, check the Panasonic camera web page for the MSRP of this camera - you will find that neither Amazon nor anyone else is discounting the price. They don't have to in my view - this camera is better than others I've seen at $400. And my wife's opinion? She loves, and I mean loves, this camera. She is now excited about photography (to my delight) and takes pics just about every day. I can easily see the Lumix becoming our main camera because of its easy portability and use, and its great results. If you plan to get a 3.2 megapixel camera like this, you should also budget for a 128Mb memory card. The 16Mb card that comes with it holds only 10 or 20 pictures (depending on the compression you choose) at 2048 x 1536. If you are looking for a good point and shoot automatic camera, you will not regret buying this one.
Rating:
Summary: Leica lens
Review: This little baby is equiped with Leica Lens!!!
Easy to use, cheap SD card,AA bateries..
Rating: 
Summary: Grainy, grainy, grainy...
Review: When I first saw that this camera came with a Leica lens, I was most pleased. However, to my dismay, the picture quality wasn't what it promised to be. When using the largest picture resolution (lower res. seems to be more sharp), most(90 percent or so) of my pics came out grainy--even when the camera was adjusted to ISO 50. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the focus was soft. The pics also seemed rather "mosaic" in form. My old digital cam did this some of the time, but, this one did it often; very often. I can't quite describe it other than if you took a sharp picture, went in with Adobe and made it look a little more impressionistic/pointilistic (is that a word?) Anyhow, when you do view your pics on your program, you can't really see the noise (by the way, the manual says the "mosaic" noise is normal) until you view the pic at its full size. But, why buy any digital camera if you can't use its largest resolution and not get sharp pics? Anyhow, that seemed to be the largest dissapointment. Oh yeah, if you soom out to its max, be prepared for a very blurry image. I did do some comparison shots. It seems the grainy effect is in correlation to the color mode you pic. If you use "natural," the graininess associated to the color (some colors are very grainy...like brown and gray shadows), the graininess is less; "standard" is a little more grainy, while "vivid" is rather grainy. I also printed out one of my grainy pics and sadly, the grainy color make-up also came out in the print. On its plus side...it's fast (if you have an SD card). It's light, the overal picture color is nice. It's got some cool effects--cool(makes your pics more blue), warm (makes your pics more red), black and white. It takes only 2 AA batteries and has a real nice power economy mode. The LCD screen can have its brightness adjusted, too...good for those sunny days. The MOV recording is fun...has sound (it's only mono)...still nice and it doesn't use too much memory (320X240 res). And physically, the camera fits in one hand and can be operated with that one hand. So, if you don't mind too much about having grainy pics, it's a fun camera.
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