Rating:

A year ago I bought my wife a Sony Cybershot W120. It cost about £90 and was exactly what she needed – a lightweight compact camera with a reliable auto mode. So I thought I’d try for the same and opted for the Panasonic Lumix FS10. Unfortunately, despite costing an extra £30 over the (now discontinued) W120 it is bettered in pretty much every aspect of image quality by it. In fairness neither camera is even close to the old V1 in this respect with its larger sensor and wider Carl Zeiss lens, but I did at least expect it to be broadly on a level with the W120 and it just isn’t.

On the up side, in many circumstances you’d probably be reasonably ok with the image quality if you didn’t have the W120 to put alongside it. And it is certainly a nicer camera to use than the W120 with more control and better menus. You can eek better pics out of it by avoiding the full auto mode (especially under incandescent light). By taking a bit more control I got decent results out of it in London recently when taking the SLR just was not practical.

However, one REALLY annoying thing, is that the flash does not tell you if it is going to fire. It’s been years since I saw a camera which didn’t. You can force it on or force it off, but if you leave it to decide for itself it doesn’t see fit to give any indication. As with other aspects of using this camera, you’ll get better results when you tell it what to do rather than let it decide for itself.