Here's a selection of photos from the Panasonic FZ28 -- an 18x 'superzoom' camera with a range from 27 mm at the wide end to 486 mm at the long end (in 35 mm equivalence). I also have a Canon DSLR with a variety of lenses but, like a lot of photographers, I find there are times when carrying a lot of gear is not desirable, so having a single, lightweight 'all-purpose' camera is a real benefit.

The photos are primarily rural scenes, although there are a few urban shots and indoor photos as well. Hopefully this will give a sense of what to expect from the Panasonic FZ28 camera. The winter scenes are all from rural Pennsylvania, while the SW desert photos are from the area around Las Cruces, NM. All photos were taken between December 2008 and March 2009.

Concerning image quality and the issue of noise: all the Panasonic FZ28 photos in this gallery were edited in Photoshop. I do find that there is noticeable noise in jpegs when viewed at 100% on screen at the default settings, even at low iso. The situation is improved if you set contrast and sharpness to -2 and also minimize noise reduction because it seems to create what I think is referred to as 'noise reduction artifacts'. I then use Photoshop to up contrast and sharpness as needed.

Ultimately, I found that the real solution is to take advantage of the raw option. This seems to minimize noise and artifacts and I find it quite acceptable, even up to iso 400 if the image is not underexposed. Using raw I find that the images look reasonably clean at 100% on screen. If necessary, I use Adobe camera raw to reduce noise in the images, such as shadow areas, and this seems to work well.

The downside of raw, of course, is that file sizes are larger and the shot-to-shot speed of the camera operation is slower -- there is a pause of a couple of seconds from one shot to when you are able to take the next shot. So this means that the FZ28 is not a camera for shooting fast action -- but then this is true for virtually all non-DSLR cameras anyways (I have not experimented with the burst mode option so I don't know how that operates when shooting raw).