After the triumph of Panasonic's small bridge, the FZ18, its successor has created a lot of expectation.  The new model, the FZ28 has just arrived, and it's a camera with similar styling and the same optical zoom capabilities.  But has Panasonic simply updated its flagship product, or are there more interesting developments?

Handling

The Panasonic FZ28 is still a very compact bridge which fits comfortably into a small bag or even the pocket of a large jacket without its zoom lens.  It's very light, and while it feels fairly robust, the materials are not always of the highest quality.

There has been little real change in the ergonomics, although the inclusion of a slightly larger LCD screen is welcome – it’s now 2.7 inches instead of 2.5, but the resolution of 230 000 pixels has not changed.  The screen is still as bright as was, but difficult to use in bright sunlight, even after adjusting its setting.  The good news is that an electronic viewfinder is also included; the bad news is that it commits the same faults as the LCD screen, with small, ill-defined images.

The new iA mode (‘intelligent Auto’), combines much of the manufacturer’s technical expertise in a single feature.  With this setting, the camera performs several functions at once.  It analyses the image to be photographed to choose the best scene mode (macro, landscape, portrait, etc.), turns on the optical image stabilizer and detects faces and moving subjects to improve AutoFocus performance to improve the quality of the final image.  The goal of this ‘intelligent’ mode is that all of these processes are invisible to the end user, and it does produce some very pleasing results.

You can now flip quickly between automatic, manual and semi-manual mode (modes M, A and S) using a small joystick, which is certainly very handy, but adding these features to the selection wheel would have been more useful.  This wheel has also gained two new customizable modes (C1 and C2), as you can see in this picture.  Another great addition is a slider on the back of the camera to switch quickly between taking photos and reviewing the contents of the memory card.

The installation of the new Venus Engine IV processor does not seem to make the camera any faster, and you should allow for around 2 seconds before you can take your first shot and then about 1.8 seconds in between each JPEG image you take.  Saving RAW images naturally slows things down further, and leads to a gap of around 3 seconds in between one shot and the next. 

The burst mode has not been upgraded, and still has a rapid rhythm of just over 3 frames per second on short bursts.  The AutoFocus has not moved on either, but this bridge remains very reactive even using wide angle or telescopic lens, which is a very strong point in the FZ28’s favor.



Image Quality

The addition of the new Venus Engine IV could have led to better electronic noise cancellation.  Unfortunately, however, the sensor has also moved forward and now supports a higher resolution.  The sensor is marginally larger, yes, but the density of the detectors is higher and the pixels themselves are smaller.  At full size, 'billowing' is visible from 100 ISO up.  On a 4 x 6 inch print, though, it’s invisible, and hardly present at all even on A4.

Between 200 and 400 ISO, the blurring is more noticeable, but even on a 24 inch screen or an A4 print, the results remain faithful.  Beyond that, though, noise is much more noticeable.  Surprisingly, the results achieved by this camera are not as strong as those achieved by Panasonic’s TZ5, which is rather disappointing.




The optical zoom remains impressive, with this model featuring a wide angle lens that is slightly wider and the telescopic lens a shade shorter, but these changes are hardly noticeable in the field.  The build quality of the lens is still excellent, with few imperfections, almost no vignetting and well-controlled chromatic aberration.  Image sharpness remains good even at high zoom levels, with only a small loss of quality towards the edge of images taken with the telescopic lens, but there are no critical faults.  Without a doubt, the FZ28 has the best optical zoom of any camera in its class at the moment.  In the open air, the automatic white balance performs well, but like most compacts, it struggles under artificial light.  Nevertheless, the FZ28 performs better than its predecessor.  The optical stabilization works perfectly.

With video, the biggest news is the addition of HD (1280 x 720 p).  Finally, the 18x stabilized optical zoom can be used for shooting movies and focusing is continual, if a little slow.  The quality is reasonable, although you won’t be blown away by the results.  The images bounce around too much in low light, the dynamics are limited and the sound quality fairly poor.  The size of the videos is impressive, though, especially on a HD television, but camcorders don’t need to start worrying yet.