Product Description

25mm Wide-angle 12x Optical Zoom LEICA DC Lens with HD Movie Recording in AVCHD Lite and iA (Intelligent Auto) Mode The TZ series packs a LEICA DC VARIO-ELMAR lens with 12x optical zoom into a compact body. This versatile photographic tool lets you shoot everything from sweeping vistas at the 25mm wide-angle setting to dynamic 300mm telephoto shots. And the lens system's exquisite rendering ability lets you capture even the subtle nuances of the sights and scenes in your travels. DMC-TZ7- Key Features: Resolution (Pixels) 3.648 x 2.736 Sensor Chip (inch) 1 / 2,33 Chip Resolution (million pixels) 10,1 Internal Memory (MB) 40 StorageSD / SD HC; MMC Optical Zoom (x-times)12 Digital Zoom (x-times) 4 Stabilizer Optical Optical viewfinder No Focal Length 25-300 Apertures 3,3 / 4,9 Video Recording Yes Video Max Resolution (Pixel) 1.280 x 720 Dimensions (W x H x D mm) 10.33 x 5.96 x 3.28 Weight (g) 206

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2879 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Panasonic
• Model: Lumix TZ7 Red
• Released on: 2009-06-24
• Dimensions: 2.20 pounds

Features

• 10 Megapixels CCD imager (1/2.5")
• 12x Optical Zoom LEICA DC Lens: from 25mm Ultra Wide-angle to 300mm telephoto)
• Wide-viewing angel 3-inch High-resolution Intelligent LCD
• iA (Intelligent Auto) Mode with AF Tracking
• 40MB internal memory and expansion slot for SD/SDHC memory card
• Record movie in both 16:9 and 4:3 format with mono audio
• Mega OIS (Optical Image Stablisation)

Manufacturer's Description
TZ7 records HD movies (1280 x 720-pixels) in AVCHD Lite, which lets you shoot beautiful HD video with almost twice the recording time compared to the conventional Motion JPEG. Optical zoom can be used when shooting motion images. TZ7 is also the world's first compact camera to feature Dolby® Digital Stereo Creator, which records dynamic, true-to-life audio that brings out the power of the HD video. The wind cut function minimises distracting sound from the background during audio recording.TZ7 is also the world's first compact camera to feature Dolby® Digital Stereo Creator, which records dynamic, true-to-life audio that brings out the power of the HD video. The wind cut function minimises distracting sound from the background during audio recording.

Intelligent Auto Mode Features
Depending on the Panasonic Lumix model, iA mode uses up to six bundled technologies working perfectly together to provide the best possible shooting results every time.

Face Recognition
Face Recognition registers your favourite friends and family members and will optimize the focus and exposure on your favourite persons. You also have the ability to playback photos by person, and add date, name, age along with adding descriptions to your photos.

AF Tracking
AF Tracking then follows the selected subject throughout the frame, keeping them in focus – an excellent way to follow children, pets and other moving objects!

Intelligent Exposure
No more under or over exposed shots! Intelligent Exposure corrects the parts of the image that are too dark or too bright, so images come out as naturally as you see them.

Mega OIS
Gyrosensors detect hand-shake and the Optical Image Stabiliser lens shifts to compensate, helping prevent hand-shake blur. This system is completely optical – it does not affect the CCD or image processing – so you get sharp, clear images without deterioration. Choose from two modes: Mode 1 remains ON at all times for continuous compensation. Mode 2 starts working as soon as the shutter is released to achieve a greater effect.

Intelligent ISO Control
With Intelligent ISO Control, your Lumix camera can adjust the ISO sensitivity if the subject moves as the shot is taken thereby preventing blurriness of the photo.

Intelligent Scene Selector
The Intelligent Scene Selector automatically selects whichever of five scene modes - Macro, Portrait, Scenery, Night Portrait, and Night Scenery – best suits your shooting situation.

Lumix Digital Still Cameras take a WIDE view
Although the difference between 35mm and 25mm equivalent lenses may not sound like a lot, the 25mm wide angle lens can capture a subject or scene with more than a two times wider frame from the same perspective as a conventional 35mm camera can achieve. This extra range is especially useful when you are indoors where you can be restricted in your movements by walls, corners, or furniture trying to take a photo of the family or friends, or when you want to capture a much wider landscape.

12x Optical Zoom
Since distant objects do not conveniently come to you, Panasonic has equipped its digital still cameras with a high Optical Zoom. For example, the modern Lumix TZ Series features a 12x Optical Zoom Leica DC lens (equivalent to 25-300mm on a conventional 35mm film camera) and enables you to zoom in or out magnifying distant subjects with ease.

Extra Optical Zoom
Many cameras complement their optical zoom ratio with digital zoom, where a portion of an image is ‘blown-up’ digitally to give the effect of a higher zoom. However, images taken with digital zoom become highly pixilated as they are merely digitally processed images rather than images delivered by a true optical zoom.

Aware of this factor, Panasonic has now introduced ‘Extra Optical Zoom’ to its Lumix camera line-up. Extra Optical Zoom cleverly enables you to extend the optical zoom ratio with less image-quality deterioration compared to digital zoom. This function provides additional magnification, extending the zoom power by using the centre part of the CCD; compared with conventional digital zoom functions that directly enlarge the image data, it provides better image quality.

Be easily connected with Lumix
Showing your photos and movies has never been as easy as with the new line of Panasonic Lumix cameras. All Lumix models record wide-screen, 16:9, Full HD images. These images are breathtaking when displayed on an HDTV, like a Panasonic Viera, which manages about four times the data of a standard definition TV. With a Lumix digital still camera, you can enjoy a whole new style of HDTV viewing with family and friends, bringing your pictures and movies to life on an impressive large Viera flat screen Full HD TV. Slideshows and home movie viewings are sure to impress everyone via HDMI and SD card technologies, which offer a quick and convenient means of connecting a Lumix camera with other compatible Panasonic devices.

Easy HDMI connection
HDMI allows you to connect a Lumix camera to a Full HD flat screen TV, like a Panasonic Viera TV, to display your photos and videos in full vibrant detail. Viera Link gives you access and control of a Lumix camera, customising the playback of your photos and movie clips, in HD stereo sound.

Connect without cables
SD Memory Cards offer the simplest way to experience HD photos and movie clips. Simply take the SD Memory Card out of the Lumix camera and slip it into the TV SD card slot of a Viera TV, and you are ready to view bright, vivid images that perfectly fit the 16:9 screen of a Panasonic flat screen HDTV, for example. SD Memory Cards provide you with an easy and flexible way to transfer your images so you can spend more time enjoying your recorded memories than dealing with cables and connection devices.

Venus Engine IV Image Processor
Venus Engine IV is the latest advanced multi-task image-processing engine processor for LUMIX cameras. They provide significantly increased performance of the camera while consuming less power than the previous Venus Engine. Venus IV suppresses noise without lowering resolution, to produce beautiful images. This engine also features low energy consumption despite its high performance.

Quick Reaction and Start Up Time - faster than the blink of an eye
Improvements to Venus Engine IV and various camera components have led to a considerable reduction in shutter release time lags down to a super-short 0.005 seconds and continuous shooting speeds up to 8 frames per second.

High Sensitivity Mode
When using the High Sensitivity mode, you can capture clear images even in dim lighting, as the built-in flash reaches as far as 24 meters. The Venus Engine IV lets you set the maximum sensitivity in seven steps from ISO 80 to ISO 3200 for 10.1 megapixels full-resolution shooting. In addition to providing active shots blur-free with indoor lighting, you get great photos in nearly total darkness.

Venus Engine IV
The Venus Engine IV gives even higher-quality images through using even more advanced signal processing. This new engine also offers a number of other improvements, including more accurate detection, better correction and Intelligent ISO Control functions. This new engine supports today's new camera and imaging technologies, and works with the large, 1/1.72-inch high-resolution CCD. It responds quickly and saves power even at full 14.7 megapixels resolution, providing an image rich in colour and depth.

Venus IV further raises image quality by refining the signal processing process through adding two more circuits. These circuits effectively reduce only the low-frequency noise which turns out to be noticeable as chromatic noise, because resolution decreases if the high-frequency noise is reduced as well.

Enhanced Subject-Motion Detection Circuitry
In Lumix models equipped with the Venus Engine IV, the motion detection in the Intelligent ISO Control function has been further enhanced to suppress motion blur even more effectively, so you still get sharp and clear photos of your family on the move, even in dim indoor light.

Box Contains

Customer Reviews

Panasonic Lumix TZ7
Pretty much everything I'd read about this little gem is correct. Great pictures, very impressive video and an intuitive menu system that makes the camera an absolute joy to use. Some reviewers criticise the mode selector knob but mine clicks into place and holds it's setting.

I would like to have seen fittings for a neckstrap and spare batteries are a bit pricey. You will need a high spec computer to edit AVCHD but there are some useful bits of software like "FreeAVCHDConverter" from Koyote Soft that can turn your files into something more useable on a lesser PC.

Like any camera you need to spend time learning when to switch away from auto mode and tweak the settings to turn a good picture into a great one but the TZ7 is all many people will need for both stills and movies. Superb!!!

This camera is blonde-proof !!!
I bought this camera for my wife and after a short time experimenting with it myself I have renamed the IA function "blonde" mode. She insisted on having a RED one (I'm sure the look of the camera is more important than its performance......Hmmm, maybe that's why she married me??) but despite the colour it's fantastic beyond belief. I am a top drawer cynic and sceptic with many years experience at reading reviews and technical specs. Reading all the independent reviews you will soon see that this camera is top of it's league (for a robust high quality travel camera). It's not microscopically small but it is certainly compact. The huge extending lens and the aluminium bodyshell give a pleasant stable feeling as you curl your fingers around the raised body shape at the end of the camera.

I thought long and hard about buying this camera because I had already bought a couple of high quality point-and-shoot cameras for my dear wife over the past 6 years. Despite this, 95% of her efforts are blurred, specks in the distance or washed-out red-eyed fuzzy people that bear no resemblance to anyone I know. I'm sure she squeezes the camera and not the button to get these effects. We are soon off to New Zealand for a great holiday. I shall be using a compact HD video camera but I need my wife to collect good quality stills to supplement my footage (this TZ7 also has the ability to take HD video clips as well, so it's also my plan B should the camcorder fail/run out of battery etc). After just 15 minutes of testing the TZ7, I handed it to my wife and challenged her to ever take another bad/blurred picture.

I'm almost embarrassed to tell what my proof testing involved because my very non-scientific testing would make any keen/professional photographer's eyes pop out. All the following tests were done in IA mode with straight-out-of-the-box settings (max resolution pictures). In test one I set the zoom to maximum and in a fairly light (indirect sunlight) room I took a picture of some ornaments on table 20feet away whilst at the same time shaking the camera up and down vigorously as if I were roller skating over cobbles. Test two was taking pictures of a vase of flowers on the window sill against a strong sunny outside background (my dear wife has no concept of backlight). Test three involved taking fully zoomed pictures of wind blown trees (50 or 60 yards away) through double glazing at an angle 45 degrees to the glass and 3 feet away from it. Test five involved taking a picture of a brightly coloured oil painting that was on a light wall. 50% of it was in direct sunlight and the remainder in shadow. The final test was to draw the curtains by degrees (5 increments) and take head to waist pictures of my wife as the room got dimmer and dimmer. The result from each abuse was excellent crisp pictures that I would not discard. The auto flash combined with all the other intelligent features to give faithful colours until the room was 90% dark when a slight colour drain was evident and a bit of red eye occurred. Both these minor issues would be easily fixable in any post processing software.

I am not a camera reviewer so I have no have no experience of other 2009 "intelligent" cameras. There may be a few others out there that would pass my "blonde" tests. All I can say is that I have graduated through photography via the Bakelite Brownie, SLRs and non-SLR digital cameras before settling on videography as my serious hobby but I did research a lot before I made this TZ7 choice. It was expensive and I had no concept from the reviews that I was buying a true point-and-shoot camera that also captures what the eye sees. It was worth every penny. This is the first camera I have encountered that truly deals with all these issues and produces perfectly in-focus well balanced (and true colour) pictures. Stray away from the IA setting and you will need to understand the basic principles of photography. There's huge flexibility for artistic creativity with virtually every feature manually adjustable. I've told my wife that if she turns it away from IA mode it will drain the battery incredibly quickly and probably burn it's way out the bottom of her expensive handbag!!! She will never know otherwise because she'll never read the manual.

Final note. Three days on and I have been forcing my wife to take all sorts of random pictures in different conditions including from inside our car ay 70mph. We have a few magnificently vivid in-focus people and animals without heads but if I give her the benefit of doubt and assume that's what she intended then her score is 128 good shots out of 128. RESULT!!!!!!

Lumix TZ7
Excellent all round camera.
Very easy to use especially if you use the full auto feature. For the pro there are a good number of settings to choose from.
The video is good but not as good as the HD video on a camcorder (I have a Sanyo HD1000) but the compromise is worth it as you never take two around with you.
It is the also the only HD video camera that allows zoom when in video mode. If it doesnt do this videoing is very limited.