Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37 review

April Madden discovers features and intelligent functions for smart casual users

Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-FX37 is at the higher end of the models in its mid-priced range. Boasting a 10.1-megapixel CCD, 5x optical zoom and a wider lens than many of its contemporaries, it nudges the specifications you’d expect from compacts in its range just a little bit further than normal.

At just under £250, going the extra mile on these features has made it good value for money. A stylish point and shoot with a range of integrated and automatic features, it’s reasonably light and easy to handle and shoot with, and comes kitted out in a range of three elegant colours and textures: black, silver and chocolate brown. Panasonic is obviously marketing this camera at younger buyers than most of the family cameras this price bracket attracts, while still managing to avoid the brash and boisterous ‘yoof’ design ethic that’s so popular with Fujifilm and Olympus.

Judging by the camera’s ease of use, it’s definitely not designed for the serious photographer: many manual controls have been skimmed over in favour of smart functions like Intelligent ISO and Intelligent Exposure. There’s a cursory nod in the direction of more enthusiastic shooters, but in the main this is a camera that will hold your hand and do all of the technical things for you. We can see this ethic appealing to Panasonic’s ideal market for the FX37: most average shots, such as landscapes, interiors, people and animals, are easy to

get right with the set-and-forget Intelligent functions. This provides a quick route to good photographs for those without the time or the inclination to learn how to do it the hard way. As you’d expect from a camera designed with this in mind, there’s a good range of scene modes onboard the FX37. In the main, these are the usual suspects – Landscape, Portrait and so on. The now-ubiquitous Soft Skin mode is present, along with a few more esoteric ones. There are also two retro-styled modes aimed at reproducing the effects of old film cameras. The Pin Hole mode is a nice touch, creating an old-fashioned round glow, slightly washed-out colours and some subtle bowing in images. In comparison, the Film Grain one is, sadly, appalling – it’s far too grainy to actually achieve any aesthetic effect and its poor contrast and dark exposures are ugly and drab. This mode only shoots at three megapixels, meaning it’s barely worth attempting to rescue the results in Photoshop afterwards.

In other scene modes or in Normal mode, the FX37 occasionally shines. Colours are highly saturated and rich, with dark and midtones picked out very well. Highlights rarely suffer from overexposure or chromatic aberration, and bright lights and reflections are handled well by the Intelligent Exposure function, providing you with deep, clear images of even the most complex shots like ripples and reflections on clear water. If only the FX37 could cope with darkness the way it does with light.

There are a couple of modes for darker conditions both indoors and out, and making use of them will improve night and low-light shots. If you choose to just leave it to the Intelligent ISO and Intelligent Exposure, you’ll literally be left in the dark with blank, black images. Up close, this isn’t really an issue – low-light macro shots can come out very well with wonderful colouration. It’s over distance that the FX37 struggles, and it’s not just lighting that’s a problem for it. At its maximum optical zoom, images lose clarity and perspective somewhat and become flat and almost blurry. Turning on the digital zoom to give it a helping hand gives noisy results, with pixelation becoming more and more apparent the deeper into the shot you look, while some fringing is visible at the outer top edges of wide shots. This is a real shame because colours are still fantastically reproduced, but you end up with an impressionistic mess rather than a masterpiece.

Most of the users that Panasonic designed the FX37 for won’t really care about such problems, however. This is a camera for pictures of friends, for memories of nights out, holiday snaps and amazing events. This is obviously the reason why HD connectivity is included – not because it shoots in high-def, but because its demographic own big, shiny HDTVs.