Panasonic Lumix DMC-L10 review

Features
One out of the ordinary and quite nice feature of the DMC-L10 is its automatic zoom in review mode. When the camera shows you the image you just shot, the L10 can be set to automatically zoom in 4x so you can better check for focus. The bad part about the auto-zoom-review is that it zooms in on the centre of the image, which often might not be the best part of the image to use to confirm focus.

The zoom feature in the normal playback mode lets you zoom up to 16x and move around the image to zoom in on whatever section of the image you want, so you can always check later instead as you would with any other SLR.

Though the L10 is a Four Thirds format camera, which makes it compatible with all of Olympus' Four Thirds lenses, as well as those of third-party lensmakers such as Sigma and Tamron, Panasonic decided to sell it only as a kit. The included lens has better build quality than a lot of kit lenses, but we would've liked the choice of buying body only.

As you might expect given its target audience, the L10 includes a number of scene modes. Six spots on the mode dial are dedicated to them, and each of those spots offers more than one scene mode. They're basically grouped by the type of mode with various night modes together under one spot on the dial and various portrait modes under another spot, for example.

You can also access descriptions of each mode so you can learn what the camera is doing to deal with the given situation. The descriptions also give suggestions for what you can do to best use the modes. For example, the Night Portrait mode suggests you "hold the camera firmly and the subject should keep still for at least one second".

In addition to the scene modes, Panasonic includes multiple film modes, which are meant to mimic the looks of different kind of films. Each of the film modes can be customised through contrast, sharpness, saturation and noise reduction settings.

Plus, two fully custom film modes let you create a virtual emulsion of your own. The best part about the film modes is that the camera activates live-view whenever you press the film mode button, so you can see the difference each mode makes when selecting the one you want to use.

Performance
In our tests, which were performed with the kit lens and in optical viewfinder mode instead of live-view mode, the Lumix DMC-L10 performed well, but was not outstanding. It took longer than we'd like at start up, clocking 0.8 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG, while Nikon's D40x takes 0.2 seconds and Canon's EOS 400D takes 0.3 seconds for the same task.

The camera took 0.8 seconds between subsequent JPEGs with the built-in flash turned off, and 1.1 seconds between JPEGs with the built-in flash turned on. Between raw images with the flash turned off, the camera took 0.8 seconds as well. That puts it on a par with, or a little slower than the competition in that area.

Shutter lag measured a respectable 0.5 seconds in our high-contrast test, but turned in a slightly sluggish 1.3 seconds in our low-contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. However, we found that the DMC-L10 often failed to find focus at all in very low light conditions, so while its score of 1.3 seconds doesn't seem too bad, you may find situations in which the camera can't lock focus at all, which can be frustrating since it'll likely be in a situation that will be difficult for manual focus as well.

The L10 offers two continuous shooting modes. One is 2 frames per second and one 3 frames per second. We tested the 3fps mode and it yielded an average of 3.1fps regardless of image size or quality settings. Again this puts it on par with the competition.