The little camera that can - we love it! (Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS3)

Member Name: Neenawneenaw

Product:	Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS3
Date:	04/03/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, great quality pictures, slimline, stylish and great value

Disadvantages: Minimal - can barely fault it

I bought this camera as a present for Mr Neenaw, knowing we had a big holiday to Egypt coming up, and that between us all we had were the cameras on our phones and my very old (barey 21st century!) camera, which had been a present from my dad and embarrassingly now has less megapixels than a standard phone camera! So you can tell, I'm not exactly an expert, so I was a bit nervous. While he knows no more than me about cameras, Mr Neenaw loves a gadget and I didn't want to disappoint.

So I scoured camera websites for reviews, my main criteria being: ease of use (for camera idiots!), under £100, minimum 7 megapixels and 3 x optical zoom, compact and quite cool looking! The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS3 ticked all my boxes at a price that was comparable or lower than rival brands - that were not quite as well-reviewed as it either.

First impressions - I was expecting a compact, slimline camera, but it was slimmer and dinkier than I realised and fits really easily into your pocket/tiny camera case. Shallow but important: it looks really rather cool - I got the black one with silver trima and really like the content.

Ease of use - Mr Neenaw has never got the hang of how to use his camera phone and generally refuses to read instructions. He's never had a digital camera before. He's had no problems with this one. The camera is much more intelligent than us on its auto-settings which do pretty much everything for you. Sure, there are many different manual settings, which you need to delve into the manual for, and which I'm sure will pay dividends if we get round to it. But so far they've been woefully underused (though Mr Neenaw has been spotted looking a few things up, which just shows how taken he is with it).

Picture quality - for a point and clicker, taken by beginners with little/no expertise we've been getting great results. We went totally snap-happy on our holiday in Egypt and the camera seemed to cope well with a range of conditions (bright sunlight/dark/close-ups/scenery/pyramids!). I also noticed that while you get a bit of delay on the flash, it's much better than with some friends' cameras where you seem to have to fix that grin for about 10 seconds!

Niggles - very little. Because it's so dinky, my clumsy fingers sometimes press the wrong control when flicking through photos! The range of manual options will also take quite a bit of manual-reading if we're actually going to use them.

However, overall I can't recommend this little camera highly enough. We love it!

Summary: A fantastic value, great quality and value little point-and-clicker.

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