Speed of Autofocus

I've never used the Nikon so "your mileage may vary".  I have, however, used the FZ150 for about a year now and taken it on trips to Europe and the Rocky Mountains and West Coast of Canada.  I added on a 1.7X teleconverter to the FZ150 which gives me a 35 mm equivalent "reach" of 1020 mm.  I rely on using "glass" rather than digital zoom which I have turned OFF.  The one issue I have with using the teleconverter is the vignetting that takes place at anything under about 16X zoom... in that range you really don't need to be using the t.c. anyway.

I am planning on also taking the FZ150 (with the old FZ28 as backup) on a 4 week Safari tour next summer: I've seen some shots taken on Safari with the FZ and I don't think I'll have a problem.  It gets increasingly difficult to hold steady without using a tripod at that zoom level anyway even with the exemplary O.I.S. of the Panasonic.  (And I LOVE the 5.5 f/s autofocus burst mode for wildlife pictures).

I prefer Panasonic over this Nikon (This may be reason for me of buying it). In my personal opinion Panasonic has better (WAY MUCH BETTER) autofocus + Macroscopic visibility. Yes it has 24x zoom but it extends to 32x intelligent zoom (iZoom). However there is not so big difference between 32x and 42x Zoom.. Leica's lens does it's work very well. I have some of macroscopic photos which are taken from less than 1cm distance and they look pretty well.. Once I've put finger on Lens and it took fingerprint from  the glass of Lens. This looks very awesome. There are so much stuff to talk about these cameras but now I'm not able to do that because this will take hours of discussion..