Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47548 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Panasonic
• Dimensions: 3.31 pounds

Customer Reviews

Great Camera
Great compact camera. Quick and easy to use with an amazing zoom. Stabilisation works very well and over all shots look very impressive especialy for a compact. Bit bigger than the adverage digital compact these days - but it more than makes up for it in ability and features and it still manages to fit comoftably in my pocket.

A few features not really outlined in most reviews:

Takes widescreen vid + you can zoom in & out whilst filming.

Can takes panoramic shape stills.

The 28mm wide angle to 10x tellephoto really does work as well as they claim.

Looks cool in blue.

Fantastic camera, slow SDHC card with this bundle
For a pocket camera, the features and results of this camera are astonishing. And for a camera that doesn't actually have a manual mode, it sure has a surprising number of options that give you extensive control over exposure and behaviour.

My gripe is not with the camera, but with this particular bundle. Specifically, the Inov8 4-Gbyte Class 6 SDHC card supplied with this bundle is too slow for the camera. When recording video in wide-screen HD mode (one of the main reasons for buying a TZ5 over a TZ4), you've got between 5 and 50 seconds until recording stops because the card can't keep up. Very disappointing. The card can keep up with 848x480 video recording, but not 1280x720 (HD).
As there's no telling what kind of crappy SDHC card you'll get in a bundle, if you want a TZ5 then I suggest you buy the camera alone and then find the fastest SDHC card you can as a separate purchase. You'll have to do that anyway to get the most out of the camera.

2008-09-02 Just to follow up my original post and reply to comments. Yes, I can confirm that just because a card is class 6 doesn't guarantee that it will be fast enough for this camera. It only guarantees a minimum transfer speed of 6 MB/s. The TZ5 manual recommends a 10 MB/s card minimum for video. Not all class 6 cards are equal, and to make matters worse classes beyond 6 haven't officially been defined yet. Until the industry decides to update the SDHC card speed specifications and nomenclature, you'll be dependent on reviews like this to find out what works and what doesn't.
I can confirm that one card which IS fast enough for the TZ5 is the Panasonic SDHC class 6 4GB Pro High Speed card (RP-SDV04G), which has a speed rating up to 20 MB/s and gives me continuous HD video without interruption until the card fills up.

And I don't know why Amazon have changed the specifications of this bundle from a 4GB card to 2GB while keeping the same review, but the same issues apply.

Nice menus, good usability
Camera's menus work smoothly and are easy to use. There are nifty options like semi-automatic adjustment of time zones, power-saving modes plus all standard like control of white-balance, autofocus, ISO, etc.

With single click of a button you can set maximum zoom (that's useful for camera with 10× zoom), change exposure, bracketing/HDR, macro and flash settings.

Photos are good (even in low light). You can make movies in very high quality by switching to 16:9 aspect ratio.

Battery charger is external. Camera can't be charged from USB. It comes with a little box you can use to carry spare battery.

Works perfectly with iPhoto. Fits in a pocket.