It seems like a good camera for the price. I printed out a 16x20 of one of
the photos at
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_fz10-review/gallery.shtml
to see how it held up at that size, and it was very good. There's some
chromatic aberration (color fringing) at the edges in some situations, but I
think that's to be expected of a 12x optical zoom. The good f/2.8 aperture,
manual control, and image stabilization make it a good possible upgrade for
cameras like the Olympus C2100. Most of the other long zoom cameras don't
have a stabilized lens, and that makes a difference in low light especially.
The Minolta A1 has a lesser zoom, but is stabilized, and it costs twice as
much as the FZ10.
The things I don't care for are the lack of a low light focus assist lamp,
I'd rather have seen them use less expensive compact flash memory and
standard AA batteries, and it has a lens that extends so it's a little slow
to power up compared to many others. Still, at $500-600 it really seems
like a bargain. It is apparently pretty large, so it's definitely not a
pocket camera.
