Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX40 review

Check out our thoughts on this sleek 12 megapixel shooter

Panasonic aims to impress with the latest of their top-end ultra compacts. With a sleek exterior and impressive spec sheet, the Lumix FX40 certainly gives a very good impression. Encased within a stainless steel exterior and sprinkled with a few choice controls and dials, this slim line model is great to look at.

We love the robust, steely body, which gives the impression this is a camera for life. It comes with a 2.5 inch LCD screen that sits on the left. To the right of the screen is a fairly small d-pad as well as a vertical switch to determine between the shooting mode and playback mode. At the top of the back panel is a partly concealed mode dial, giving you the options of Auto, Intelligent Auto, Movie, Scene, Notepad and Favorites mode. Each turn of the dial is accompanied by a resolute click, giving you reassurance that this camera is built with quality in mind. Likewise, the other buttons and controls are well made and feel strong and secure.

Thankfully this camera is not just a pretty face. It also comes loaded with an array of impressive features too. Top of the list is the 25mm wide-angle lens, coupled with 5x optical zoom. These days the focus has moved away from megapixels and rightly back to good, versatile functions. The ability to shoot amazing wide vistas is one such versatile feature the FX40 has to offer. There is also a very good Intelligent Auto mode on board, which is ideal for the novice shooter. This mode picks the optimum scene mode based upon the scene in front of the lens. We were impressed with its responsiveness, as it consistently picked pleasing settings for nine out of ten images.

Novice users will also be pleased to find a variety of handy scene modes that can be picked individually. For the more advanced photographer, there is the option to manually adjust the white balance, enabling you to take some control over the creativity of your shots. This can be manipulated to your taste with ease, although in most situations the auto white balance performs well too. There is no aperture or shutter control.

Where the FX40 does slip up, is with regards to physical performance, namely speed. Powering up the camera and taking your first shot takes a painfully sluggish four seconds. Shot-to-shot is not much better at around 2.5 seconds, which means this is not the best camera for high-speed action scenes and sports. Other genres and scenes fair a good deal better thankfully, with landscapes and portraits turning out well. We did have to watch out for a spot of red-eye with portraits taken with flash, but skin tones look healthy and glowing.

Outdoor images are this camera's forte, with colours and detail looking their best. Indoor and low-light situations are quite a different story, with the camera struggling to focus in many instances.

Being at the high-end of the compact market, we expected good things when it comes to ISO performance. Unfortunately, the FX40 offers a distinctly average show in this arena. Shots are usable up to ISO 400, but anything higher renders images very noisy. This is the benchmark most modern cameras share, but it would have been nice to see the FX40 excel. Thankfully, in situations up to ISO 400, the CMOS sensor does a sterling job at preserving detail, without too much smoothing. Images remain crisp, with nice tonal quality from darks to lights.

In other areas of image quality, we were pleased to find little distortion. Despite the wide-angle capabilities there was no barrel distortion of pin cushioning to report, and purple fringing is hardly visible in high contrast scenes, which is great. We love the colours this camera produces, offering bright, but not offensive hues, which are true-to-life.

The camera performs above average when it comes to battery life, holding on for 319 shots per charge. This is below the 350 shots Panasonic states it can manage, but still very good going.

All in all, this camera does its job well and we cannot fault that. However, this is a fairly pricey camera and the features and image quality do not excel themselves in the way that we imagined they would. We love the wide-angle lens and the Intelligent Auto mode, but there are other compacts on the market that will do just a good a job for less money. What is does have is style, durability and ease-of-use which novices will welcome and it does a very decent job at being a reliable point-and-shoot.