Panasonic FZ-100: Very User Friendly Compared To Canon

by Oscar Gill
(Dearfield, Colorado)

Right, so I kind of jumped on the Panasonic FZ-100 digital camera as soon as it came out (for $450 on Amazon. I believe it’s slightly cheaper now). My roommate has the fz-35, and this camera is supposed to be it’s replacement in Pansonic’s camera line.

I decided on the Panasonic FZ-100 digital camera, because it had very good video features. This is important to me. I work as an editor for an online college tv station, and I’m interested in video production. I’ve also played around with my roommates camera before I bought mine, and I found it easy to use.

It’s user interface is very intuitive and much better than Canon’s. (I’ve never liked Canon’s user interface.) All that being said, here’s the bad part. You absolutely need proper lighting to get good footage from this camera.

White balancing and colors on the Panasonic FZ-100 are generally good, (In fact auto white balancing is phenomenal for a camera in this range) but the footage just becomes too noisy and grainy in low light.

I wanted to shoot a night scene from an apartment fire escape, and we needed to have full lighting to get any usable footage. I’ve shot with cameras that aren’t as finicky with lighting, and they perform much better in low light. All in all, the FZ-100 camera is probably best for well-lit outdoor shots, especially since it has a whopping 24x zoom.

One other thing, the flip-out LCD display seems to be slightly loose after only a month, but I did use it extensively.