Panasonic FX33

You may at first struggle to see why the Panasonic is the most expensive camera here. But it’s when you start to use it that you see what’s different.

The build quality and finish, for a start, is a cut above, even down to the feel and the operation of the controls. The Mode dial overhanging the back of the camera is easier to turn with your thumb and has much crisper ‘clicks’. The LCD’s resolution is higher and the colours and display quality are excellent. It’s a really well-designed camera to use.

Not everything is quite so clear-cut. The ‘intelligent auto’ mode is a little odd, in that it analyses the scene in front of the camera and automatically selects the best scene mode. Do we really need this? And if it works, why do we also get a standard green Auto mode and Manual scene mode

selection too?

 The flash seemed a bit weak indoors. It was okay for wide-angle shots, but if we zoomed in across a room the pictures came out underexposed. One other gripe is that while the self-timer, EV compensation and flash mode can be accessed using the directional buttons, you have to use the menus to change the white balance and ISO – adjustments that are just as common.

The Panasonic produces the best all-round picture quality, though, as you might expect from the camera that costs the most. It does this largely through consistency rather than any blinding superiority. Pictures are sharp right across the frame, the definition and noise levels are are very good and the exposure, white balance and colour rendition can hardly be faulted. The Panasonic seems particularly good at coping with the strong yellow/orange cast of artificial lighting.

To be fair, the average user would have to look pretty hard to spot the difference between this camera’s pictures and the others. But more demanding photographers, and especially those upgrading from an older camera, will be very keen to make sure their money has been well-spent – so the first thing they’ll do is examine their shots at 100 per cent magnification on the computer screen. But the Panasonic can produce better pictures in other ways, too. The wide-angle zoom enables you to shoot sweeping landscapes more effectively and to get good shots in narrow city streets or cramped interiors. And the optical image stabilisation can produce pin-sharp shots at shutter speeds where you’d normally expect them to be ruined by shake.

This is a really neat, understated camera that does a great job without fuss. The gadgetry of the Casio and the Kodak might be great for showing off down at the pub, but the Panasonic is the one that really does the business.