Digital compact cameras with more than 14 Megapixels are well and truly here.

After the Nikon Coolpix S710 and the Canon Ixus 980 IS, the Lumix FX-150 is Panasonic's foray into the world of very high-resolution compacts. 

The great pixel war continues, then, but does this compact make good use of its overblown sensor?

Handling

Panasonic hasn't changed the design of its compacts for several years now and this latest is very much one of the family.

It isn't going to win any prizes for innovation, sure, but if ain't broke, don't fix it as they say …

The familiar Q.Menu button is there as a shortcut to the most frequently-used features, along with a four-way directional control, and a simple slider to flip between playback mode and taking photos.

More interestingly, there's an E-Zoom button which allows you to maximally deploy the zoom in a single press.

Given that the interface has these dedicated buttons, it's disappointing that you can't really customize them by mapping them on to the functions you use the most.

While we're always glad to see a manual mode on a compact, the one on the FX150 is pretty limited, with just two aperture settings, 'open' (f/2.8) and 'closed' (f/9).

You can't have it anywhere in between, and there's nothing on the LCD screen to tell you which of the two settings you're using.

As we mentioned, Panasonic hasn't radically altered the hardware for this compact, so it record similar timings to earlier models: switching it on takes just under two seconds, which isn't exactly speedy, but the autofocus is acceptably fast in good light conditions.

You can only shoot bursts of four images at a time, and these are captured at the rate of 2.5 frames per second.


Image Quality

The FX150 did little to debunk our skepticism about the benefits of packing in so many pixels on the sensor of a digital compact.

Whether you're looking at your photos onscreen or printing them out on A4 paper, the promised improvement in quality is hard to discern.

So many pixels means that digital compacts like this really need to be handle 'noise' in the images they capture, and, in general, the FX150 has got what it takes, even at 1600 ISO.

Even if it hasn't much changed the look and feel of its compacts, it seems that Panasonic has worked hard to reduce blurriness, which is less of a problem here than it was on, say, the FX37.


he top quality lens and the Venus Engine IV image processing chip work wonders together, and we saw little or no chromatic aberration or purple fringing on the shots we took; distortion was held in check too.

We were equally pleased with the flash and the macro mode which works at up to 5 cm, although white balancing is a little too warm under halogen lamps.

Optical stabilization works well, even for handheld shots at 1/8 s.

Shooting video in HD is another point in the FX150’s favor, even if you still can't use optical zoom in video mode.

As is almost traditional with Panasonic compacts, video quality is excellent in good light conditions but rapidly worsens as soon as light levels begin to drop.