Digital Photography Interface has done a review of the old favourite Panasonic Lumix FZ7 and think that its 12x zoom lens with optical image stabilization, its LCD, its powerful flash, its movie mode and continuous shooting mode are hot. However its slow start up and shut down time, its lack of focus or zoom in movie mode and its tendency to produce noisy images at high ISO are not so hot!

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 is a 6MP camera with a large 2.5 inch LCD and a F2.8-3.3, 12X optical zoom lens. The image stabilization system prevents camera shakes and blurry images and the working range of the pop up flash is 0.3 - 6.0 m at wide-angle and 0.3 - 5.4 m at telephoto (both at Auto ISO). It uses an electronic viewfinder or EVF for 100% display of the frame making shooting convenient. It a series of mode for easy and convenient shooting including Program mode, Aperture Priority mode, Shutter Priority mode, Full Manual mode, Macro mode, Movie Mode among others. There is also a new high sensitivity mode where the camera opens up the two highest ISO settings, 800 and 1600 and in the Movie Mode users have now a choice of two settings normal" 640 x 480 setting, and a widescreen (16:9) 848 x 480 setting.

The review concludes "Overall performance for this ultra-zoom camera was very good save for startup time. The FZ7 also has a noticeable performance increase when using a high-speed card. It has a nice VGA and WVGA 30 FPS movie mode and unlimited continuous shooting at 2 FPS. Brisk AF time and a 3 FPS shooting option will surely impress some action shooters."