For general handling of the camera we were able to comfortably snake three fingers of our right hand around the handgrip. Our forefinger hovered above the shutter release button and thumb came to rest on the slightly raised leather effect pad, with DSLR-style command dial at the back. This dial enabled us to scroll faster through black text on white background menu options than alternatively tabbing from one to the next using the cross keys at the back.
Newcomers may be daunted by the fact that the ten pence piece sized shooting mode dial on the top plate features a busy 14 choices. These include the usual creative quartet of program, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual options plus various scene modes and custom settings. That said, highlighted in red the most obvious choice is intelligent Auto (iA), the Panasonic’s point and shoot setting whereby it can be left up to the camera to ‘recognise’ common scenes and subjects and select the most appropriate one. We’ve always found this a good fall back for when we’d rather be concentrating on following a subject than swapping settings on the fly. The dial has a reassuringly stiff feel to it (reassuring in that it’s tricky to accidentally jog it from one setting to another when fetching it in or out of a bag), and lines up with each setting with a definite click.
If the camera’s default colour settings aren’t doing it for you, then this, being a Lumix camera, has a creative control option on the dial, here indicated by a graphic of an artist’s palette. ‘Expressive’ is always our favourite option by way of providing a short cut to boosting the colour intensity of a subject, without making it appear unnatural in an alternative pop art mode sort of way. The other creative settings accessed here include the increasingly ubiquitous miniature effect, film grain, corner shading pin-hole, high dynamic range, retro and high key.
In addition to these, should the user be shooting in an alternative mode, such as program, with a press of the menu button we still get access to Panasonic’s ‘photo style’ settings, which again offer the ability for the user to tweak the look of pictures in camera. The choice in this setting is between vivid, natural, monochrome, scenery, portrait, custom or standard settings. Within each option there is the chance to individually tweak contrast, sharpness, colour saturation and noise reduction via plus or minus on-screen sliders, so those who love getting hands-on can do just that.
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