Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 Review
It may be old, but it’s still good. Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 metal body is compact and robust feeling, and neat and uncluttered too. Some digital cameras make a point of showing off their gadgetry; this one hides it beneath the brushed metal skin. Perfect for those who want a stylish camera rather than a technological statement.
Powering up takes just two seconds, so the Panasonic’s ready to use in no time at all. The lens pops out from behind a protective metal shield – not quite as robust and practical as a sliding lens cover, but better than the flimsy interlocking leaves that some other cameras use – or lenscaps that you forget to take off, or lose.
The LCD display measures just 1.5 inches across the diagonal, but with 114,000 pixels, it’s very sharp and clear, particularly in bright outdoor lighting, where many other displays can tend to struggle. Focusing typically takes around half a second. The Panasonic and all its immediate rivals are now very close in this respect and it’s hard to split them. The zooming action’s a bit lethargic, but it’s precise too, so that it’s quite easy to get the zoom ratio you want without too much hunting backwards and forwards.
Even the optical viewfinder is good. Taken at face value, the size of the viewfinder eyepiece on the backplate looks too small to be of any real use, but that’s not the case. It’s well-positioned, too, and easy to put your eye to. The good news carries into the controls. The main mode dial on the top plate is especially good. You can use this to set all the Panasonic’s various scene modes, for a start. These include Macro, Portrait, Landscape and Night Portrait options, plus an Easy mode which supplements the normal program AE shooting mode. The dial also has a setting for Playback mode. Having all this on one dial is much better than having to hunt around on the menus.
On the back, Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 uses a good-sized four-way navigational controller which provides shortcut functions in shooting mode. You press Left to activate the self-timer, for example, which can be set to either ten seconds or two seconds. Pressing Down activates a quick review mode for checking the last shot taken – very handy. You press Right to change the flash mode, and the options here include a slow sync mode. It’s when you press Up, though, that the Panasonic reveals just how well thought out its design is. Pressing up once activates the EV compensation option, and you can now press left or right to reduce or increase the exposure. If you press Up twice instead of once, though, you get the Panasonic’s auto-bracket function. This is unexpected in what’s ostensibly a point-and-shoot camera, and an indication that the Lumix is likely to appeal to more experienced users, too.
Unfortunately, you have to delve into the menus to change the bracketing amount, but it’s not a major drawback. Overall, the Lumix F1’s control layout is very impressive indeed. And while the battery life expectancy doesn’t look particularly impressive on paper, the Panasonic’s lithium-ion cell holds up well – plus, it recharges in just 90 minutes.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 Features and quality
The Panasonic’s slick and practical. It’s also pretty well-featured. You can swap to a spot metering mode via the menus, choose Natural, Standard or Vivid colour for your shots, add audio annotations both when you take your shots and afterwards to shots already saved, and you can even resize and crop pictures on the memory card. There are even 2fps and 4fps burst modes.
The Panasonic does rely on its menus for many of its options, but they are very clear and easy to navigate. The only problem is that as you choose an item it expands to show the options available. This changes the appearance of the on-screen display and it’s quite disorientating.
Our only other complaint would be the movie mode. The resolution’s unspectacular at 320 x 240 pixels, and the frame rate is lower than that of most rival cameras, at just 10fps. But there’s certainly nothing to complain about with the still image quality. The colour balance is occasionally a little wayward, but only by small amounts you wouldn’t notice unless you had other cameras to compare it with directly, as we have.
Otherwise, shots are contrasty saturated and extremely vivid. Miniature film cameras often bring some loss of image quality due to design compromises, but digital cameras – especially Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 – seem to bring no such problems. You can buy this digital camera secure in the knowledge that you’re not sacrificing any image quality in exchange for its slimline design.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 is a very nice, very well-made digital camera. It’s compact and stylish with a great control layout.
Tagged with: audio annotations • Easy mode • Landscape • macro • Night Portrait • Portrait • zooming
Filed under: Panasonic
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