Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ50 Review Discussion

[Jerry Jackson]

With this year’s release of the TZ5, Panasonic has cemented its position as “king of the compact ultrazoom class of cameras.” Other camera makers have developed impressive ultrazoom cameras, but none of the competition has succeeded in producing a compact camera with this much telephoto and wide angle reach. The TZ cameras have continued to remain at or near the top of our "Most Popular Digital Cameras" list for more than a year now.

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[usapatriot]

Good review. Although I do agree with your sentiments on the WiFi functionality of the camera. I'd be more interested in quickly transferring images wirelessly between my camera and computer (no cable or card reader fuss) rather than directly to the web. It'd probably would be a painful process if you had a lot of pics to upload and a mediocre upload speed.

Essentially though, it's just a TZ5 with a WiFi feature slapped on, in my opinion, not really worth the extra $100 over the TZ5.

[Jerry Jackson]

Essentially though, it's just a TZ5 with a WiFi feature slapped on, in my opinion, not really worth the extra $100 over the TZ5.

I see what Panasonic was trying to do with the TZ50, but in practice I don't think this implementation will be widely embraced by consumers. The idea of being able to quickly share your photos with family and friends while traveling (without needing a computer) is great.

However, the interface needs to be even easier and the upload process needs to have an option that makes it more "automatic" such as a menu option to upload all the photos on the card (or just photos that haven't been previously uploaded).

The idea here is great, but the way it's implemented I doubt most consumers would be willing to spend the extra $100 when the TZ5 is essentially the same camera without the difficult WiFi option.

[vrmgi]

Your review didn't mention anything about this camera's movie recording capabilities. The TZ5 on which this camera is based is notable for its horrible audio - there are YouTube videos posted that all attest to how bad the audio is. Specifically, the TZ5 audio seems to come standard with a background hissing white noise (which is drowned out only if the sound source is very loud), and the sound of the optical zoom working during a movie recording is also audible. I've seen on other forums where the audio is supposedly on 10KHz sampling, pretty low res audio.

Any information about whether Panasonic fixed this problem or changed anything with the audio? Are the problems I mentione still there with this camera?