Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Shortly before noon the postman arrived with my brand new camera. I've been giddy as a little school boy since, but the weather has been particulary cloudy and not very photogenic. I only posted one photo at 23, but more will come when the sun comes out.

I have of course been turning it on and off all day during my breaks from reading the massive manual. My impression after a day of light use and heavy experimentation is that this is a camera I'll be very happy with.

I am digging the full manual control from aperture and shutter speed (my old camera has that too) to focus and white balance (which my old camera doesn't have).

I am not digging the neck strap. It's almost impossible to adjust the length and it would quickly become annoying against the skin. I think I will be buying a new one. I am also not digging the manual, it's just as bad as all other technical manuals.

I am digging the joystick on the back. It controls the most often used settings. In P, A, S, M modes it controls aperture and shutter speed and when using manual focus you use the joystick to control focus. If you click it you can change white balance, ISO, image size and compression. Even with my large fingers it's possible to use the joystick and the viewfinder at the same time — a big plus. The user interface is really well done on this camera.

I am not digging the camera bag selection at my local photo store. In the end I bought a Lowepro Edit 100. It was the smallest bag in the store that would fit the FZ7. The bag won't fit the lens adapter and lens shade which sucks. I wish there was a bagsize between “it just fits” and “damn huge”.

I'm ambivalent about the video features. I am digging the 848x480 widescreen video at 30 frames per second, but I am not digging the fact that I can only get 4.5 minutes of that video on a 512 MB memory card. My old camera compressed to MPEG-4, but the new one uses Motion-JPEG. The video looks great, but it takes up a lot of space.