Holy Frick it does HD

The Panasonic camera that The Girl opted for arrived a couple of days ago. After a short stint of “charing the batteries” we began to play. The size is pretty nice, it’s not really too much bigger than her old crappy SD1000 that died just before mine died. Ahem. Anyway.

It’s the Panasonic Lumix model DM-TZ5. 10x optical zoom (as opposed to crappy, image-mashing digital zooms), Image Stabilization, a Leica lens… it’s got all the goodies it seems, so I wondered: could it suffice instead of another DSLR? So I’ve been playing around to experiment. Today I took the puppies out for a walk (What about Hunter, you ask? More later, but quickly, he’s getting better). The Girl left her camera here and along it went.

How does it stack up? Well with a 300mm equivalent lens, it’s got a good zoom to it. The pictures are of pretty good quality. There’s a little bit of softness when you look at the pictures 1:1 full-size, but at sizes you’re likely to look at them at, they’re pretty good. I’d have to say that it’s about 90% of what I want to make of my pictures.

But get this: Not only does it do still pictures pretty well, it also manages to do a rather charming job with video. It shoots 720p – that’s high-frickin’ Def, folks – at 30 frames per second. How awesome is that? The quality is so superior to the videos we had been taking with our previous cameras that looking back at them now is almost disgusting. What’s really cool is after having trained ourselves during the last year and a half with the Canons that you cannot zoom in while you’re shooting a video, it turns out, you can with the Panasonic, which is freaking cool. The only downside is that of course, the file sizes are quite a bit bigger.

But as always, it’s that last 5-10% that really gets me thinking. Do I really need a DSLR? I know I’ve had this argument before on these pages, but I’ve missed so many shots of recent – of Bald Eagles in the distance, other random wildlife pics – that I got to thinking that I needed a good zoom, and I needed a good DSLR. But with the arrival of the DMC-TZ5, I’ve found myself reliving the argument: do I need a DLSR? Do I need to carry around the bulk of a DSLR to get ‘decent’ images of far-off stuff?

Look, I know it’s always a trade-off. It’s just that the way I see it, the only really downside to the DSLR setup is its size; I’d have to carry a large body & large lens.

But the upsides? Well, that last 5-10%. And the manual adjustability that you can’t really get on a point & shoot. For instance, today I got this shot of two mallard ducks that sprang from the brush as I walked by:

click for a larger version

With the Panasonic, I pulled it up, hit the zoom button and waited, then held the shutter button down and waited as it tried to focus, and then got the shot. You can kind of tell it’s two birds. It’s not good. It’s not clear. Because the auto exposure fo the camera is trying to figure out what do to with the aperture & shutter speed to get a good image. It doesn’t know that we’re out in the wildness (sort of) and that we should probably set up to give priority to the shutter speed. It guesses. It guesses wrong in this case.

With a DSLR, I can set the mode to Shutter Priority. This means that in the above situation, subbing a DSLR for the super-zoom Point & Shoot, the ducks fly up, I raise the camera, ratchet the shutter speed up to stop-motion the action and let the camera modify the aperture as necessary to get proper exposure… I might have gotten the shot. In full, stop-motion, two-mallards-fleeing-post-haste beauty. Maybe.

Or maybe it was still out of focus. Or – and this is the one that really applies to me, I think – maybe the camera was so big I decided not to take it out on the walk with me. In which case, the situation would have gone like so: the ducks fly up, I reach for my ass, and scratch it as I curse myself for having not brought a camera with me to even capture the shot at all.

And I wonder – is the control (and extra 7x zoom or so due to the 1.6x crop factor of the DSLRs I’m shopping for) really worth the added costs, both literal & figurative? I mean cost-wise, we’re talking $700 for the camera, $1500 or so for lenses, as opposed to $250-350 for a camera like hers. Is that last 5-10% worth an extra $2,000? And then the size factor. Do I want to have to carry around – nay, lug around – a large-bodied camera with a large-bodied lens? Is it worth the extra $2,000 & the trouble of transporting/manipulating a DSLR to get that last 5-10% out of my shots that do nothing but sit on my Hard Drive?

Maybe. But, eh, Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and order this and be done with it.