Panasonic's new superzoom, the DMC-FZ28


I swear to god, why don’t they give their products remotely identifiable names? Why not the Panasonic Lightning Bolt or the Panasonic Cougarshot 1000? No, it’s always jumbles of letters and numbers meaningless to anyone outside of their engineering department. But I digress. Name aside, this looks like a pretty capable camera, although apart from the significantly larger zoom and better burst FPS, it doesn’t appear to differ much from the compacts I just posted. Here are its vital statistics:

10.1 megapixels on the superior CCD, a 2.7-inch LCD, 27mm Leica lens with 18x optical zoom (nice!), 12FPS stills in burst mode, and as usual, face detection, tracking autofocus (I’d never use it), and various scene modes and post effects for those of you who do your editing in-camera (damn your eyes). Unless you really need that 18x zoom, I’d say the more compact cameras are the better buy here unless you really want to make people think you’re using a DSLR.

More info here if you’re nerdy like that.