One of Panasonic?s increasingly impressive line-up of stylish ultra-compacts, the Lumix FX500 is a 10.1-megapixel camera featuring a 5x zoom Leica-branded lens with a 25mm wide angle and optical image stabilisation, and a threeinch LCD monitor with a touch-screen interface.

The FX500 is an expensive camera, but its £190 price buys a lot of quality and innovation. The body is mostly aluminium and the build quality is excellent. It is available in black or silver, both with a brushed finish.

As well as its touch-screen interface the FX500 has normal compact camera controls, because the touch-screen is only used for functions where it is actually useful, such as main mode selection, sliders for aperture and shutter speed, and most usefully the touch-operated AF/AE system, in which an object in the frame can be selected by touching the screen, and the camera then tracks the object adjusting focus and exposure accordingly. It’s an impressive feature and works extremely well, even in quite low light.

The FX500 has other features not normally found on point-and-shoot compacts, including aperture or shutter priority and full manual exposure. It also has Panasonic?s Intelligent Auto mode, in which all camera functions including scene mode, exposure and ISO setting are automatically controlled.

Overall performance is very fast, with continuous shooting at 1.3fps and a single shot cycle time of two seconds.

Image Quality
Image quality is also extremely good, especially the Leica lens, with a minimum of wide-angle distortion and excellent corner sharpness, although some of this may be due to distortion correction by the image processor n

Verdict

The Panasonic Lumix FX500 is a well made camera with useful features and a very good touch-screen interface. It looks great, performs well, and produces excellent pictures. It may be expensive, but it?s worth every penny.