Piotr Wojakowski
New member
I had the camera for two days to play with. For me, the main attraction was 60x zoom range combined with 4K resolution of movies. Until few days ago, when Panasonic introduced FZ80, this was the only camera to combine these two parameters, giving an opportunity to get fullHD video (from 4K) with 2880mm focal length. Before I had a chance to get my hands on it, I was even considering it as a small rival to Panasonic FZ1000, which I plan to buy - of course not in image quality category, but zoom range. I'm a zoom fan... what can I say 
First a few words about things I liked. It's very compact and light. The build quality is fine and the handgrip gives you a good feeling of security, when holding the camera. The menu was pretty easy to learn, and after a few longer moments I had no problem finding certain functions . The zoom range is really huge and it's fun to play with. That's it for the pros.
Now the cons. First I had problem finding, where to change ISO settings. The only way to do that was to get into menu and find ISO submenu. No dedicated button. Thankfully I finally managed to link this parameter to Function button. Problem solved.
Second thing, that made me mad, was an inability to charge the battery with charger. There is no charger! The only option is to charge the whole camera through USB cable.
In Poland there is winter right now, so there are no birds to watch - only crows from time to time. I'm not a bird fan, so I decided to focus on distant jet planes, sun and moon. As I had this camera only for 2 days, I had only one chance to film the sunrise. I woke up in the morning, set the camera, set the tripod, zoomed to the maximum and directed the lens on to the right spot. At this focal length it is a very certain spot and things like sunrise or moon set are happening pretty fast. So when the moment came, and I saw the tip of sun coming out, I was pretty excited. I looked at the LCD screen as the sun was going up. The battery icon indicated almost half of the battery charged, so I was not worried about it. Sadly, after a moment the camera said "battery exhausted" and turned off. There was no sign of such thing coming. In DSLRs there is at least a blinking battery icon, giving you a hint, that you should replace or charge it. In Nikon B700 they decided to leave it as a surprise for user.
The bitrate for 4K movie is around 60mbit, which - in my opinion - is not enough to code such resolution properly. Watching recorded material on 4K TV, I saw lot of detail being lost due to compression. Panasonic's 100mbit movies look much better.
4K movie mode has different zoom range than fullHD mode. 4K starts wider and ends wider, while fullHD is narrower at both ends. Something like:
fullHD - 28mm - 1440mm
4K - 24mm - 1235mm
This means, that while filming you don't have 60x zoom range but rather around 50x. In reality not a big difference, but can be frustrating for some
Autofocus works fine, but when it's lost, it's lost forever. The mechanism is not even trying to refocus. It goes till the end of its range and stays there.
In manual focus mode, peaking is a nice function. But it makes no sense if the camera refocuses what you've already set, when pressing shutter button. It happened to me a few times. I had to stop recording, refocus manually again and start record. This time with no problem.
Another disappointing thing was the inability to influence exposure while filming. When you press record button - in manual mode - ISO suddenly switches to AUTO, and there is no way to change it. There is only an option to lock the exposure with AE-L button.
I found it awkward that shutter speed is depended on... focal length. At full zoom the maximum shutter speed drops from 1/4000s to 1/2000s.
Next cool "phenomenon" is what I call a keyhole effect. When the optical VR is on, and you're filming on full zoom, the whole image is somehow flickering or sparkling. You can see it in the sample movie in the scene with planes being filmed handheld. It looks like if I was filming through a key hole, trying to get best view. The effect is probably due to lens vignetting and VR moving across the frame.
In photo category:
VR is causing some problems while framing with digital zoom turned on. With the digital zoom set to maximum, it is pretty hard to get the frame you see on the LCD. I did a couple of shots before the camera really captured what was visible on the screen. All other images were shifted to the left, right, top, bottom or somewhere between.
The camera gives an option to shoot RAW. I was able to recover quite a bit from dark parts in ACR. However turning lens profiles off shows real image the lens is drawing. Shooting in JPG only, you won't see it.
JPG straight from the camera.
RAW image converted in Adobe Camera Raw - Highlights -100 Shadows +100
Last thing to mention is depth of field issue. The sensor in this camera is tiny. The real focal length of its lens is 4.3mm-258mm. The brightness is f3.3 to f6.5. With such parameters one can assume that, while focusing on an distant object - when fully zoomed - let's set 1km away, everything further should be in focus as well. That's not true. I found, that focusing manually on objects as distant as 2km away, still leaves further objects out of focus. And while relaying on autofocus, you can end up with many images badly focused. In my case almost 60% of images with AF were miss-focused. There was always some tiny bit of something on the way, the camera focused on, leaving my main target blurred.
Oh, by the way... the green glow in the top part of the sun in the last scene is called Green rim
First a few words about things I liked. It's very compact and light. The build quality is fine and the handgrip gives you a good feeling of security, when holding the camera. The menu was pretty easy to learn, and after a few longer moments I had no problem finding certain functions . The zoom range is really huge and it's fun to play with. That's it for the pros.
Now the cons. First I had problem finding, where to change ISO settings. The only way to do that was to get into menu and find ISO submenu. No dedicated button. Thankfully I finally managed to link this parameter to Function button. Problem solved.
Second thing, that made me mad, was an inability to charge the battery with charger. There is no charger! The only option is to charge the whole camera through USB cable.
In Poland there is winter right now, so there are no birds to watch - only crows from time to time. I'm not a bird fan, so I decided to focus on distant jet planes, sun and moon. As I had this camera only for 2 days, I had only one chance to film the sunrise. I woke up in the morning, set the camera, set the tripod, zoomed to the maximum and directed the lens on to the right spot. At this focal length it is a very certain spot and things like sunrise or moon set are happening pretty fast. So when the moment came, and I saw the tip of sun coming out, I was pretty excited. I looked at the LCD screen as the sun was going up. The battery icon indicated almost half of the battery charged, so I was not worried about it. Sadly, after a moment the camera said "battery exhausted" and turned off. There was no sign of such thing coming. In DSLRs there is at least a blinking battery icon, giving you a hint, that you should replace or charge it. In Nikon B700 they decided to leave it as a surprise for user.
The bitrate for 4K movie is around 60mbit, which - in my opinion - is not enough to code such resolution properly. Watching recorded material on 4K TV, I saw lot of detail being lost due to compression. Panasonic's 100mbit movies look much better.
4K movie mode has different zoom range than fullHD mode. 4K starts wider and ends wider, while fullHD is narrower at both ends. Something like:
fullHD - 28mm - 1440mm
4K - 24mm - 1235mm
This means, that while filming you don't have 60x zoom range but rather around 50x. In reality not a big difference, but can be frustrating for some
Autofocus works fine, but when it's lost, it's lost forever. The mechanism is not even trying to refocus. It goes till the end of its range and stays there.
In manual focus mode, peaking is a nice function. But it makes no sense if the camera refocuses what you've already set, when pressing shutter button. It happened to me a few times. I had to stop recording, refocus manually again and start record. This time with no problem.
Another disappointing thing was the inability to influence exposure while filming. When you press record button - in manual mode - ISO suddenly switches to AUTO, and there is no way to change it. There is only an option to lock the exposure with AE-L button.
I found it awkward that shutter speed is depended on... focal length. At full zoom the maximum shutter speed drops from 1/4000s to 1/2000s.
Next cool "phenomenon" is what I call a keyhole effect. When the optical VR is on, and you're filming on full zoom, the whole image is somehow flickering or sparkling. You can see it in the sample movie in the scene with planes being filmed handheld. It looks like if I was filming through a key hole, trying to get best view. The effect is probably due to lens vignetting and VR moving across the frame.
In photo category:
VR is causing some problems while framing with digital zoom turned on. With the digital zoom set to maximum, it is pretty hard to get the frame you see on the LCD. I did a couple of shots before the camera really captured what was visible on the screen. All other images were shifted to the left, right, top, bottom or somewhere between.
The camera gives an option to shoot RAW. I was able to recover quite a bit from dark parts in ACR. However turning lens profiles off shows real image the lens is drawing. Shooting in JPG only, you won't see it.
JPG straight from the camera.
RAW image converted in Adobe Camera Raw - Highlights -100 Shadows +100
Last thing to mention is depth of field issue. The sensor in this camera is tiny. The real focal length of its lens is 4.3mm-258mm. The brightness is f3.3 to f6.5. With such parameters one can assume that, while focusing on an distant object - when fully zoomed - let's set 1km away, everything further should be in focus as well. That's not true. I found, that focusing manually on objects as distant as 2km away, still leaves further objects out of focus. And while relaying on autofocus, you can end up with many images badly focused. In my case almost 60% of images with AF were miss-focused. There was always some tiny bit of something on the way, the camera focused on, leaving my main target blurred.
Oh, by the way... the green glow in the top part of the sun in the last scene is called Green rim
