Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4 review

If that all sounds too much to think about, an intelligent scene selector will work out what sort of environment you are in, an intelligent auto mode will work out focus and exposure for you, and a digital red-eye removal system will make children and pets look less satanic.

In playback mode, images can be viewed in a thumbnail or calendar grid, and each picture magnified up to 16x. They can be cropped or resized to preset sizes.

Performance
The TZ4's automatic exposure deserves the intelligent name, exposing well in various lighting situations. Colour is natural and well-reproduced. The option to set a maximum ISO speed is very useful. There's no noise to speak of below ISO 800, so with image stabilisation on, this is a handy camera to have in darker conditions. It's worth tweaking the exposure compensation for best results, although without manual control there's some trial and error involved.

The size of the lens means there is some barrel distortion around the edges of images taken at the wide angle. There isn't any loss of focus or vignetting around the edges, with focus staying crisp overall.

Start-up time isn't particularly fast, because of the lens cycling out, but once it's started, shot-to-shot time is just over 1 second, which is pretty good. The burst mode manages a respectable 2 frames per second, but only for four shots. An unlimited burst mode is only marginally slower, so it's probably worth skipping the limited burst mode completely.

Battery life is excellent, with juice left after more than 300 test shots, including some using the flash. This sets the TZ4 in good stead with anyone looking for a powerful but portable superzoom to take on holiday.

Conclusion
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4 does a cracking job of bringing a powerful zoom and wide angle to those looking for point-and-shoot user-friendliness and portability. It's not the smallest camera in the world, but it's by no means the biggest either and benefits from a great lens. The Ricoh Caplio R7 is more compact, but we can't fault the TZ4 on anything, except perhaps the size of the screen.

Edited by Nick Hide