The Lumix LZ10 has quite nice handling. It is well built without having the quality of the FX range however. The metal outside seems resistant and only the plastic catch seems a little fragile. There’s a nice bulge on the front of the camera that, along with the grippy covering, means you really have something to get hold of. On the top of the camera, the buttons are easy to handle and manipulate: the zoom and the shoot, a pullback for start-up and a button for the automatic zoom. Note the scroll to select shoot mode. The LZ10 is indeed one of the rare Panasonic compacts with both automatic iA and A and S priority modes and the manual M mode.



This scroll also serves to activate scene and video modes. At the back there’s quite a small, 2.5 inch, LCD screen, but with good definition (230,000 points).

It has a classic interface with a selection joypad and the famous touch Q-Menu, that allows you access to the main settings on the camera. Note however the new Exposure button that allows you to go from aperture to speed settings when the camera is in mode M. A scroll would have been useful however to make these priority modes more fluid. As it is you have to use the joypad which isn’t the most practical of solutions.
Is the LZ10 fast? The camera has a good rhythm when it comes to set up: 0.70 seconds in full daylight and 0.85 seconds for zoomx3. Saving and moving on to the next photo is also ok: 1.8 seconds when other compacts are over 2 seconds. The start-up is rather long however, a little over 2 seconds, the burst mode reasonable at 2.5 images per second.

The 10 million pixel sensor attached to the lens gives a good quality even image. The zoom is almost wide-angle (30 mm) and 5x making it relatively capable across the board. It’s a shame that the macro mode doesn’t give better performance. The processor rectifies any chromatic aberrations, and very few adjustments are needed for lens deformation.
Optical stabilization gives clear images at low aperture speeds: in our test on the Barbie, we got a shot at 1/5 of a second.
There is noise as of the lowest settings: 100 ISO. This doesn’t matter on a 4 by 6 inch or even an A4 though. Beyond that you start to see blurriness of details. The detail is pretty much okay up to 400 ISO but beyond that the chromatic aberration is clearly visible in dark areas. Without competing with the models at the top of the game, the noise management on the Lumix LZ10 is really pretty good.