Lumix ZS1 - Excellent Point and Shoot Camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent picture quality, fit and finish, price for performance.

Cons: Proprietary mini-USB connector.  Why Panasonic?  Low light performance.

The Bottom Line: 
Excellent little camera for those looking for a simple point and shoot!

Author's Review
Summary:

Overall this is a great point and shoot camera!
This is a great little camera if you plan on taking the bulk of your shots in well lit areas.  The zoom level is great and the clarity of the photos is quite impressive.
Where this camera falls a little short is in shooting in dark environments.  Recognizing that this camera has a fairly standard buillt-in flash that shouldn't be a surpise, but is a consideration.

Appearance and Size:

This is a great looking little camera.  The black body (which I got) looks really sharp.  It sits well in your hand when you hold it and the controls are easy to reach.
I bought a relatively small case to protect it, but it would easily fit in your pocket without causing any problems.

Viewfinder:

This camera does not have a standard viewfinder.  Instead you need to set your shots while looking at the LCD screen.  Fairly standard feature these days.  The LCD is quite bright and does a good job of helping you frame shots.

Picture Quality:

The zoom on this camera is one of its stellar points.  It is quite impressive.  It also has the ability to shoot relatively close up.  Quite impressive.  Allows you to get a little more info the frame when you shoot indoors.  Panasonic markets this point quite heavily and there seems to be some merit to it.  Pictures are sharp and clear.
The face recognition feature is interesting, although I am not sure what benefit it really brings, besides the standard autofocus settings (which this camera has several choices of).
The offsetting feature though is what I feel is its relatively poor indoor performance in low light.  I am rather disappointed in this area. I had an older Canon Powershot S45 (which this replaced) which had much better low light sensitivity.

Battery Life:

Outstanding.  I have got over 150 shots on a single charge of the installed battery.  With and without flash.  Recharging is relatively quick.  The charger itself is nice and compact, with folding prongs.  It works nicely for travel.

Movie Quality:

Not bad.  I haven't experimented too much with this, but it appears to be reasonably good.  Downloading to my computer has been problem free and the results are about what I would expect from a camera (vs a full-blown camcorder).  We aren't really there yet in terms of having a combination camcorder / camera that fits both missions perfectly.

Controls:

Relatively simple to use and understand.  The menus are fairly typical of modern cameras and should not offer any surprises to those that have used a digital camera before.

Speed:

I installed an 8GB SD card when I bought this.  I made sure it was a class 6 for speed (although this camera probably doesn't require it) and the time to shoot from pressing the button is very good.  Lots of space on this card due to the fact that the camera doesnt record in RAW format.  Every picture is a JPG format, so its already compressed.  Even on the ultra high settings you only use 3-4 MB for a photo, giving you lots of space on todays cheap SD cards.