Mike Scott
Senior Member
Today I put the TZ1 through it's paces at my nephew's birthday party (2 yrs. old)....I have mixed feelings.
A little background. I've been shooting digital since 2000 with the Canon D30, in 2001 I bought the Canon G2 for a point and shoot and used full auto quite often. In 2004 I bought the 10D, and last year the 5D. I shoot about a dozen weddings per year as well as macro and product stills.
My wife and I also combine for about 5000 - 7000 snaps per year. Mostly of our kids and dogs.
Back to the TZ1.....
First the good. The TZ1 was great outdoors. The exposure was surprisingly good (very few blown highlights). The colors were nice, a bit saturated which is how I like them from a P&S. The shutter lag was hardly noticable (this was the main reason for wanting to upgrade....err, move over from the G2).
Now the bad. Indoors with flash was a nightmare. My wife was the first to try it out. After about 10 shots her response was "What the heck is wrong with this thing"? She handed it to me and I reviewed the images. Everyone of them had motion blur and ghosting. I pressed display to check the settings and noticed the camera chose ISO 100, f/2.8, and shutter speeds between 1/8 and 1/30. There is no way to stop the action of a toddler at these settings.
I tried all of the scene modes to see if they could help....nope. Next I tried the various flash settings, again no help. Finally I was able to get the camera to choose a shutter speed of 1/50 by manually selecting an ISO speed of 400. So what this means to me is that in order to use this camera, I (or my wife) will need to remember to switch to ISO 400 indoors. This defeats the purpose of a P&S.
Why would Panasonic write an algorithm which will cause bad indoor flash results in many situations (100% of the time with a toddler). The G2 would always choose 1/60 when flash was activated in auto mode. It almost seems as though they never field tested it or maybe they did, but just with stationary subjects.
If you look at my posting history you'll see that I'm not a troll. I really want to use this camera. I also realize that there may be something fundamental that I'm missing that will solve this problem.
A couple observations:
1) the IQ of the G2 was better than the TZ1 at all ISOs. Less "smearing" of pixels. Not really noticable in 4x6 prints.
2) It seemed that the Image stabilizer could not keep-up in burst mode. The first image was nicely focused, but the next would be blurry.
3) For some reason my wife kept hitting the arrow keys on the back and unintentionally activating various functions. I'm not sure why that is or if it matters to anyone, but it happened repeatedly and never happened with other cameras.
4) I tried playing with the different Scene modes in various setting and couldn't tell a difference. The camera was choosing the same settings regardless of mode. There seemed to be a very high preference toward f/2.8.
I hope that this info. was useful to someone. Now I'm off to read the manual again.
Mike
A little background. I've been shooting digital since 2000 with the Canon D30, in 2001 I bought the Canon G2 for a point and shoot and used full auto quite often. In 2004 I bought the 10D, and last year the 5D. I shoot about a dozen weddings per year as well as macro and product stills.
My wife and I also combine for about 5000 - 7000 snaps per year. Mostly of our kids and dogs.
Back to the TZ1.....
First the good. The TZ1 was great outdoors. The exposure was surprisingly good (very few blown highlights). The colors were nice, a bit saturated which is how I like them from a P&S. The shutter lag was hardly noticable (this was the main reason for wanting to upgrade....err, move over from the G2).
Now the bad. Indoors with flash was a nightmare. My wife was the first to try it out. After about 10 shots her response was "What the heck is wrong with this thing"? She handed it to me and I reviewed the images. Everyone of them had motion blur and ghosting. I pressed display to check the settings and noticed the camera chose ISO 100, f/2.8, and shutter speeds between 1/8 and 1/30. There is no way to stop the action of a toddler at these settings.
I tried all of the scene modes to see if they could help....nope. Next I tried the various flash settings, again no help. Finally I was able to get the camera to choose a shutter speed of 1/50 by manually selecting an ISO speed of 400. So what this means to me is that in order to use this camera, I (or my wife) will need to remember to switch to ISO 400 indoors. This defeats the purpose of a P&S.
Why would Panasonic write an algorithm which will cause bad indoor flash results in many situations (100% of the time with a toddler). The G2 would always choose 1/60 when flash was activated in auto mode. It almost seems as though they never field tested it or maybe they did, but just with stationary subjects.
If you look at my posting history you'll see that I'm not a troll. I really want to use this camera. I also realize that there may be something fundamental that I'm missing that will solve this problem.
A couple observations:
1) the IQ of the G2 was better than the TZ1 at all ISOs. Less "smearing" of pixels. Not really noticable in 4x6 prints.
2) It seemed that the Image stabilizer could not keep-up in burst mode. The first image was nicely focused, but the next would be blurry.
3) For some reason my wife kept hitting the arrow keys on the back and unintentionally activating various functions. I'm not sure why that is or if it matters to anyone, but it happened repeatedly and never happened with other cameras.
4) I tried playing with the different Scene modes in various setting and couldn't tell a difference. The camera was choosing the same settings regardless of mode. There seemed to be a very high preference toward f/2.8.
I hope that this info. was useful to someone. Now I'm off to read the manual again.
Mike
