Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50

Performance
When you look at a camera like the FZ50, you know it was built for performance! Thankfully, it lives up to that perception.

To begin with, the camera is highly responsive. It takes under a second to start off and close to one and a half seconds between two consecutive shots without flash. With flash on, the shot to shot times are well under two seconds. In other words, you're not going to miss an important shot just because your camera is busy readying itself.

The sharpness levels of the camera were outstanding under bright lighting conditions, with zero noticeable blurring around the edges. Even the minutest frail details are easily visible thanks to the camera's naturally high contrast levels. However, when I shot in higher ISO settings, I did notice a certain level or patchy details, which were probably caused by the noise reduction engine. But this was only noticeable when seeing the image at full size.

All colors appeared bright and saturated to the right extent. The reds, and greens showed absolutely no signs of deterioration or over saturation under sharp lighting, which speaks a lot about the camera's color processing capabilities.

As I mentioned before, manual focus works like a charm, and more often than not, you will get the right focus using this feature. The only limitation I felt was because of the 2 inch screen. A bigger screen would have made this feature a lot more comfortable.

The Lithium-Ion battery provided with the camera easily gave us around 75 shots per charge. Though most shots were taken without flash.