Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSuperlative viewfinder makes this an A+ camera: insanely good image stabilization (see handheld photo of moon)
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2015
PROS
== By far the most important thing that makes me like this camera is the viewfinder, with a large and bright display that provides WYSYWIG when in automatic mode (i.e. what you see is what you get). It is a gianl improvement over LCD monitors, both flip-out and on the back of the camera, for several reasons:
First and foremost, I can see with significantly greater clarity through the viewfinder than on an LCD monitor. And... very very crucial .... photography is all about seeing.
Second, I find that when I use the viewfinder, the camera is easier to control, because when it is pressed up against my face, my fingers are much closer to the camera than when I am using an LCD monitor. Unlike with an LCD monitor, my fingers are in a constant orientation with respect to the camera, which helps me to better access the controls without having to look at them.
Third, I find it easier and faster to navigate menus and to change settings like F-stop and ISO and shutter speed when the camera is pressed against my face.
Fourth, very very important, it's easier to take photos outdoors with your eye pressed against the viewfinder excluding extraneous light than it is with an LCD monitor, especially under bright sun..
Before closing my comments about the viewfinder versus the flip out LCD monitor, I should note that the flip out on the FZ1000 is nice and flexible -- and remains very useful under certain circumstances -- if you want to shoot from low down in a situation where you don't want to bend, or high up if you are in a crowd or need to see over some other obstacle. But most of the time these days I find myself shooting from the viewfinder, because I can see so much better..
== Excellent performance in indoor photography
I originally got this cam because I wanted to take pictures indoors under normal levels of artificial light with ultra rapid focus and exposure control. By "normal levels of artificial light" I mean no light coming in from windows, no special artificial lighting, and no flash. Just the amount of light you would get in a normally lit windowless office or in a living room at night time or in a furniture showroom.
This cam is very good at doing this when it is in automatic mode, yielding amazingly good hand held pix in poor light, at incredibly low shutter speeds like a quarter of a second, without a tripod, because of superlatively strong image stabilization, and this happens even at substantial zooms like 200mm. Any camera without image stabilization would be showing huge amounts of blur and shake. And I should add that color balance in low artificial light is good, when in automatic mode.
With candid pictures of people under normal living room lighting at night time, the FZ1000 usually does surprisingly well in automatic mode. I was enormously surprised to find that with exposure of one quarter second, most pictures of most people come out quite well, because with most people, there is much less movement than I expected to find - except when the person is speaking or eating.
As might be expected, under low light the FZ1000 in automatic mode does not do well in capturing rapidly moving people or other objects. But setting a high shutter speed and a high ISO value this camera copes quite well. It's true that high ISO's make photos more grainy, but in pictures of people it's the expression that counts, IMHO.
In this regard, shooting in low light, the FZ1000 and FZ200 are about equivalent.
== Crisp controls that are not mushy or muddy.
== The camera is the result of a collaboration between Leica and Panasonic, and has nearly identical hardware to a Leica V-Lux Type 114 that costs a lot more, though the software is different.
== High capacity zoom lens immensely improve the ability to take good pictures, because one can often get closeups of subjects that would be hard or impossible to get close to, and because one has much more flexibility in determining what to include and what to exclude from the picture. On the FZ1000 the 400mm optical zoom magnifies images to eight times a normal 50mm lens and with digital zoom to 1600mm you can get 32 times normal magnification. Picture quality is excellent up to 400, and in my opinion remains quite good at 800mm when there's plenty of light.
== Fast focusing and fast determination of exposure settings and almost zero shutter lag, which allows the capturing of fleeting events.
== In my opinion feels solid and well built.
== Allows me to display live images on a Panasonic Viera TV set via HDMI cable. I don't know whether it will do this on other TVs. This is really helpful for portraits where you want the subject to be able to see their image on a TV screen so that they can adjust their expression.
CONS
== This camera is a bit of a power hog. If you want to shoot a lot of footage Take several spare batteries with you . I think it gets worse when image stabilization is switched on.
== In SCN mode there are far too many presets that differ only by tiny amounts. And one very valuable preset that was in the FZ200 has been deleted, namely the "Through glass" preset, that improved images taken through glass windows.
CONCLUSIONS
This camera is very flexible and takes excellent pictures in automatic mode in a huge variety of situations. Some folks sneer about "point and shoot" automation, but I really like a well designed automatic mode because it allows me to concentrate on the content of the picture rather than worrying about settings, and lets me grab shots that I would otherwise miss. I think that about 9 times out of 10, automatic mode on this camera does a better job than I would do if I spent time fiddling in manual mode.
P.S. I attach a hand held photo of the moon taken with maximum extended zoom of 3200 mm, leaning against a car for the hand held shot. This shot demonstrates the incredibly good image stabilization offered by the FZ1000. This image has had no postprocessing and is not cropped. To achieve maximum zoom, I set Program mode, electronic zoom enabled, picture size of 5MB (and not the 20MB option).
