Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7

This is an excellent camera that is very easy to use, even for those of us who have no idea what all the different functions do!

I found Simple Mode to be excellent, you literally just point and click and the camera does the rest with brilliant results. Of course after a while I found myself fiddling with the other options the camera has and after checking the manual I was pulling off some stunning shots.

After having a standard 3X optical zoom previously I found the 12X zoom fantastic, you take photos of events 100+ yards away as if you were right there.

The image quality is truly amazing and you'll find it very hard to take a poor picture with this camera, it even performs well in low light situations, so much so that I have rarely used the flash.

The camera allows you to take pictures in two formats, JPG and TIFF, at the highest settings the JPG's come in at around 3-5MB, the TIFF's 17MB. I had to buy a new SD card just to take a TIFF photo as the supplied SD card of 16MB was beyond useless. I couldn't tell the difference between the two formats, even on a high resolution PC monitor, so stuck with the smaller JPG's.

Battery life is also brilliant, the manual states around 350 pictures on one battery charge but I have managed 700+ even with video without the battery dying.

The only bad point that I have found to this camera is the video, although the picture quality itself is excellent and the resolution better than DVD it stores the movies in Apple Quicktime format. Which produces just about the largest video file sizes of any format around. Even on my 2GB SD Card I can only manage to fit about 20-25 mins of video.

I don't understand why they have chosen this format as a 2min video file comes out at a whopping 190MB, whereas the same file in DVD quality MPEG-2 is 120MB. This means that to record an hour of film, you'd need an empty 6GB SD card!

Overall, a top quality camera.