Journal Entry for Monday, Jul 09th

Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS19 During the course of the past year, I have found that the time it takes to change lenses in the field (from a wide angle to a telephoto) has often caused me to miss some really good shots of birds and various animals. I also wanted something that I could carry around on a more regular basis that was not as bulky as my LUMIX DMC-G2 Four-thirds system. Not wanting to spend the money on another expensive camera body, I have been looking for a small footprint point and shoot camera that still offered me many of the features I’ve been used to on my G2. Well the look is finally over. I finally decided upon the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS19. Measuring only 2.32" high x 4.13" wide x 1.11" deep and weighing only 0.45 pounds, this compact digital travel camera has a 14.1 megapixel MOS sensor and comes with a powerful 20x optical/ 4x digital zoom (35mm camera equivalent: 24-480mm) LECIA Lens and a 460,000 pixel 3.0" TFT Touch Screen LCD Display. It has a super-fast autofocus, 10 frame/second continuous shooting, a great auto mode, and Full HD 1080/60p video recording. Its iA (Intelligent Auto)  is probably the best point-and-shoot mode in the business. Though it lacks RAW support, white balance bracketing, and manual focus, it provides a decent set of manual exposure controls as well as more than a dozen scene modes. Some other handy features include Intelligent Resolution which does a nice job of sharpening your photos, a new HDR mode, which really improves how high contrast photos turn out, and an in-camera panorama stitching feature. It had 72MB of internal memory and supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards.