Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7

Photo by Jens Mortensen

$400  •  panasonic.com

7 out of 10

 

Panasonic's GPS-Enabled Snapper Is a Fantastic Urban Tour Guide

The GPS-enabled Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 is a great camera to bring with you on the road. No it won't lead you to safety if you're lost in the Himalayas — it might not even get you home from a trip the mall — but it will geotag your shots so you can digitally place them on a map in programs such as Apple's iPhoto 09 or Aperture 3.
Not only does the Panasonic ZS7's GPS embed latitude and longitude coordinates into your photos, it will display the image's city, state and country details right on the 3-inch LCD along with nearby points of interest from a library of more than 500,000 landmarks. We took this pocket-friendly camera on a five-borough photo tour of New York City and were jazzed by what it found, including an art gallery we weren't even aware of in one of our neighborhood shots in upper Manhattan. Red Stripe–sipping, moped-touting hipsters aren't this "in-the-know."
But the 12.1-MP ZS7 sometimes felt a step behind what we were shooting, carrying over info and coordinates from a previous photo op. For instance, even though we were practically standing on top of the massive George Washington Bridge, the camera insisted we were still at the art gallery which was a mile behind us. Later, when we took some night shots of the East River from Queens, the ZS7 said we were at a park in the middle of Brooklyn we had passed half an hour before. D'oh!
Despite its occasionally absent-minded site-seeing skills, the ZS7 had the best image quality of all the GPS cameras we tested. Photos we shot in Staten Island of Fort Wadsworth at sunset were beautiful, with sharp detail and bold but natural-looking color. It was also the fastest to use overall, with blazing autofocus speed and no shutter lag.
WIRED Embeds location details in HD videos too. Landmarks library spans 73 countries. Long 300-shot battery life prevents GPS drain.
TIRED Occasionally misidentified landmarks. Make sure camera resets GPS coordinates, or you'll get info from your last trip. Have to dig through menus to turn GPS on.

• Style: GPS-Enabled
• Manufacturer: Panasonic
• Price: $400

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS42

If you're looking for a budget camera, it can get rather confusing with the sheer number of options out there. Problem is, most cheap cameras come with the drawbacks of any cheap product - i.e. cheap quality. You usually end up sacrificing on performance in certain areas for others; so it can get rather tedious to weigh out each and every option in order to figure out what suits your needs the most. If you're looking for an all-rounder though, we might have found you a match.




Build Quality

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS42 is a sleek looking camera that weighs a mere 132-grams, and measures just 98 x 55 x 22 mm. It's small enough to make it fit in your pocket comfortably, but at the same time, big enough so that it can be gripped comfortably while taking shots. The body's made up of matte finish plastic parts, with a nice balance between gray and black parts. Apart from Black, the camera's also available in Silver and Pink.





Button placement's good too, with the power toggle switch and shutter button on top, which has the zoom toggle ring circled around it. The facing side of the camera has a preview/shooting mode toggle, along with a handful of the basic buttons, all of which have a low profile that enhances portability, and ensures that they don't get pressed accidentally. At 2.5", the camera's LCD screen's slightly smaller than most others (that have 2.7" or 3" screens), but its pixel count is standard at 230,000, so it gave us nothing to complain about.

Where both aesthetics and sturdiness are concerned, the FS42 doesn't falter one bit. Other than a slightly light weight, the camera doesn't feel look or feel the way you'd expect a camera that doesn't dent your pocket, to appear.