best Panasonic travel zooms

Second, unlike my Canon, a zoomed picture is clear enough that you can zoom in on the already zoomed image by a factor of 8 or so and still be crisp.

Takes very nice and clear pictures in low light and without flash, the overall quality of the pictures is a great as with the SZ-7, and I discovered that this SZ-10 version has a touch screen to take pictures, zoom, go through the pictures taken, etc..

The list is impressive: it has a new compact 12x zoom image-stabilised Leica lens with a maximum aperture of f/3.3-f/4.9 and a focal length range equivalent to 25-300mm, an impressively sharp 3.0-inch 460,000 dot wide-view LCD monitor, a dual-processor Venus Engine HD, and most significantly is has 1280 x 720 pixel HD video recording with stereo sound and full optical zoom capability.

But as I have so far not seen any setting on the ZS7 that would give me raw GPS hours/minutes/seconds coordinates, I still don't see the GPS feature as being at all useful, even with the GPS picture-tagging feature.

I can't complain much because it costs only about $250 and it does provide a lot of value: snappy shooting, good picture quality, good zoom, ok video and ultra portability.

With a 14MP image, I can always crop a little in software to zoom in tighter and still maintain good quality.

The Motion JPEG files become very large very quickly, there's no dedicated Movie button, Intelligent Auto mode for movies, stereo sound or HDMI port, and the zoom is still slower than for still images.

So I was expecting the touchscreen to work like a modern touchscreen on a phone or ipod or something like that.