Lumix DMC-FZ4

[thina]

It has very good color and saturation, though a tendency toward warm color casts. Auto white balance had a hard time with incandescent lighting, but manual white balance did very well. It was a competent enough camera, but missed the mark slightly in a number of areas, particularly when compared with the solid performance of the FZ5. Image noise was higher than I'd like, resolution was a bit on the low side relative to other four-megapixel digital cameras we've tested, and I didn't feel that its color rendition was quite as good as that of the FZ5. Those issues aside though, I was very surprised and pleased with how fast the FZ4 was: It has some of the fastest full-autofocus shutter lag numbers I've yet seen in a consumer digicam (quite a bit better than the already impressive figures from the FZ5), and the shot to shot cycle times were flat-out amazing.