Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
  Great Camera January 6, 2009
I love this camera. I have used several different digital cameras before and had many blurry pictures. This camera takes very crisp pictures with ease. Easy to use, I like the controls and the touch screen. Having both makes it easier to use.
 Good repair service January 4, 2009
I bought this camera with an 8GB memory card for a trip to Spain. It took great pictures for me while I was there and I was very pleased with it. A couple months later, however, the camera started taking pictures with lines of distortion in them, kind of like I was looking through blinds.
I wrote a note to include with the camera and quickly shipped it off to the repair center, I had found the address on Panasonic's web site somewhere. Less than two weeks later my camera was back on my doorstep good as new.
The camera has been working very well for me ever since. A trip to France and a trip to Costa Rica tested that out with great results.
Very Good Camera November 19, 2008
The best Lumix that I had.
Good: easy and portable for its capabily.
Bad: zoom do not work in movie mode.
 Poor image quality October 15, 2008
The FX500 was intended to replace a Canon TX1 but even in well lit scenes, the TX1 still produces higher quality images - I returned the FX500.
Great camera, too much noise September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this camera due to its compact size, its wide angle lens, its long maximum exposure (60 seconds, I'm an astronomer and amateur astrophotographer), its manual controls, targeted tracking autofocus, and 'intelligent ISO mode'.
I nearly returned this camera because the images seemed to have blurry edges and like they were covered in dirt. Eventually I realized the pictures were NOT blurry (see #2 below), and if I was careful with my exposure and noise reduction settings I could make the noise look like film grain.
Combined with a mini travel tripod, I've managed to get some pretty nice night scenery (60 seconds, "full" manual controls) and nice portraits. That 25mm is great for scenery. (Incidentally, the "Scenery" scene mode fixes the focus at infinity, which is great for taking pictures of the Moon. Unfortunately, you can't control shutter speed or aperture, but see #7)
If the noise still bothers you, resizing the pictures to 7 megapixels or less (which can be done in-camera) should basically remove the problem.
Some random notes:
1.) The on-screen review can apparently zoom in farther (16x) than 100%; your photos are sharper than they appear on screen.
2.) I've seen some noticeable distortion at the corners of images taken at the full wide-angle.
3.) Contrary to the manual, switching to 7 and 5 and 3 megapixel modes is NOT just cropping out the center; they're merely scaled down versions of the full frame just like you'd expect. On the other hand, digital zoom WILL crop out the center.
4.) The Intelligent ISO mode actually works. It seems to be like tweaking the gamma in an image editor.
5.) Targeted autofocus does NOT work well. More often than not it can't seem to lock on the object I touched. On the other hand, once locked it tracks the object well.
6.) The Mega OIS image stabilization works wonders, but in low light it's usually not enough to make up for the longer exposures you'll need to see anything.
7.) You can set the desired exposure compensation for the 'Scenery' mode (and possibly others) by going to Aperture or Shutter mode, setting the exposure compensation, and switching back.
8.) The USB connector is microUSB, not miniUSB.
9.) It works with Linux out of the box! When you plug it in to a computer, it will ask you to select (via the joystick thingy) between MTP and PC connection, which seems to be a standard USB Mass Storage mode.
10.) I actually got pretty close to what Panasonic quotes for battery life.
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