Panasonic released Lumix TZ30, an Advanced Point and Shoot camera in the previous year. The camera is very handy and sports 20x optical zoom which works pretty good. I am using this camera since 4 months now and I have found this camera to be average.
I don't have much experience with cameras and I previously had Olympus which got some battery problems and so I bought this after reading different reviews. Let's get straight to the review now.
Also, I would like to say that I am no photographer or expert, I am into photography since months back and I am just expressing what I felt with the Camera in different conditions. I bought this camera for starting with photography in which I am still not active in, I just use it on occasions or making the photos for posts on Zinx.
Specifications
The camera comes with high sensitivity MOS sensor and 14.1 MP with 20x Optical Zoom and 40x Intelligent Zoom. The camera has 3 inch screen which is good. The camera have touchscreen so you can use your touch to navigate in some parts, but navigating with buttons is always better.
The camera captures full HD video recording and the video recording quality is very good.
The camera has built-in GPS, so your photos can be tagged with the locations too. There is a mic too for recording audio though the voice output is somewhat low.
Performance
The performance of the camera is fine, browsing photos is smooth and it doesn't takes much time to boot up to the camera after we press the Power On button. There are not any lags but the camera hangs occasionally without any reason.
The screen is responsive and the touch works good, but you would not want to compare it with smartphones. The touch works good while in the camera mode for focussing, but in playback mode, you need to press the screen pretty hard while swiping for viewing photos.
Interface
The camera interface is simple just as other cameras have. You get yellow-white colour scheme. There are different modes for capturing different scenes, and all of these modes have different indicators on the screen.
There is a battery indicator at the top right and indicator for the Flash, Stabilisation mode, the resolution, and the number of photos you can capture on the top left part. You can configure the settings with a single press, which shows up all the settings of current mode and it is easy to use interface for average user.
Even if you haven't used any camera before, once you use this camera for sometime, you will be able to use it easily afterwards.
Photography
The camera has a lot of modes for different environments as mentioned above, and there's also a iAuto Mode which automatically detects the environment and adjusts the quality to the best. The iAuto works pretty well in most conditions.
Apart from the Auto Mode, the camera has Program AE, Aperture-Priority, Shutter-speed, Manual Exposure, Creative Control, 3D and Scene Modes alongwith two modes for custom settings. You can set up your settings on Custom 1 and Custom 2 modes.
Coming to the photos quality, the camera works well in natural lighting and there is sharpness in photos. You get very detailed and crispy photos in the daylight. Though the low-light photo quality isn't nice at all and I am very disappointed with it which made me think that I should have bought Micro Four third Lens camera.
The photos which are captured in natural low lighting lacks details and if you use flash, the photos get over-exposed. Maybe there is something can be done to overcome this as I am not a photographer.
You can checkout Lumix TZ30 photos on Flickr, there are less users who use this camera but it is good in daylight or moderate light photography.
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