Good Camera that could be Better

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good Pictures.  Fast shooting.  HD Video. Touch screen.

Cons: Proprietary cables, QT video, buttons hard to use.  

The Bottom Line: 
I would recommend this camera to anyone that felt comfortable living with the concerns I've mentioned.  It works very well.

Author's Review
As with all my reviews, I won't bother listing off all the features because you can read those anywhere.  Instead, I'll focus on the things you might not notice until you're outta the store.

This is my second digital camera.  I'm a long-time SLR user so I tend to want a camera that can shoot fast and provide manual controls.  I purchased the FX500 for the following reasons: 1) It has a very wide angle lense.  Many pocket cameras can be frustrating b/c you are constantly stepping back to get the shot; 2) It records 720 HD video and can set the aspect ratio of stills for the big screen size.  I figure I'm not likely to print pix much anymore, and I appreciate having images formated for my HD TV.

I'm quite happy with my purchase.  The camera's intelligent auto mode does a great job of figuring out what's going on in the scene and making intelligtent decisions about where the focus, apeture and light sensitivity should be set. 

TOUCH SCREEN
This camera is one of the first I've seen that includes a touch screen interface.  Actually, once you play with it a while, you realize that very few of the functions utilize the touch screen.  Mostly, it's just playback controls and touch focus.  Touch focus allows you to literally touch something appearing in the view screen and make it the center of focus.  You can even move the framing around and the camera will track where the object selected has moved as you do.    This is really a variation of the camera's facial recognition technology which works very effectively, btw.  One last thing about the screen - unlike with many digital cameras, I found this screen was a more practical working size that enabled me to preview the shot fairly well, even in bright light or looking at the screen at odd angles.  That's good b/c I find that a common source of frustration with many cameras.
 
Image Quality
I have now used this camera under a variety of circumstances and various modes.  I've found that it performs well throughout and the pictures always look great.  I just shot over 1000 pictures and not one red eye incident. 

Proprietary USB Cable
Although the camera performs very well, there are a couple of design choices that Panasonic has made that I found surprising and disappointing.  Top of the disappointment list is that the camera requires a proprietary cable to hook into a USB port.  I don't really understand why they didn't simply use a USB mini port on the camera side, but instead, they went with something of their own design which is marginally smaller than a mini USB.  As a result, you'll always need to keep track of the supplied USB cable and you won't be able to download to a friend's computer unless you've dragged the cable with you.  

Now, you might be thinking "But I'll just take the memory card out and plug it directly into the computer."  Yeah, that might work.  But to record video, you should b using the HDSC cards, and these newer cards come with a warning about using the cards in readers that don't specifically support this extended standard.  Maybe this is no problem, but maybe it means you are putting your images at risk with each reader you use.  I'm not sure yet. 

No USB Recharging
A smaller but related concern is that even when you use the proprietary cable, your camera is not charging while connected to a computer.  So not only do you have to carry a special cable around, you've also got to carry the special charger around too.  This is pretty common with similar cameras so it's hard to get worked up about it, but having to carry both around just seems like salt in the wound.

Toggle Button is Awkward
I mentioned earlier that most of the interface doesn't take advantage of the camera's touch screen.  Evidentally, the menu system is designed to span the whole product range which includes many cameras without touchscreen.  Too bad, because the toggle control that is used to navigate the menus is quite awkward.  It's very easy to click instead of toggling downward on the little joystick thingy.  This makes it particularly frustrating when you are trying to get a shot and your time is being wasted repeating keystrokes because you keep accidentally exiting the menu structure. 

QuickTime Movies
Maybe QT is the universal standard for movie cameras and I just didn't get the memo.  I found when I went to playback the movies on a windows Vista machine, they wouldn't play back in Windows Media Player, only QT Player.  This was frustrating b/c I really want to play the movies back through my xBox and if you can't play something in WMP, you generally can't play it through your xbox and on to your TV.  I've since installed some new codecs in my computer and added TVersity media server.  This is not for the faint of heart.  A camera that simply saved movies as windows media files or mpg videos would have enabled me to avoid this whole concern.

Wasting Power
There are some power-saving modes you can utilize deep in the interface.  I don't know why they are not the defaults - particularly given the big screen.  Here's my favourite design flaw: When you have the camera connected to a computer, the camera's display shows two things: a giant connected icon and the battery power remaining.  This is wonderfully ironic because the screen is just sucking the power at this point (remember, it's not charging while plugged into the computer!).  Why doesn't the screen just turn off after a few seconds?  It will run the battery dry before the screen goes off.