Panasonic DMC-F7

Stylish, compact and littering billboards in recent months, this 2megapixel DMC-F7 camera is one of the smallest we have seen - only slightly larger than your average mobile phone. But this size comes with a few disadvantages.

Our first disappointment was the zoom function - there's only a 2x optical zoom to play with. Digital zoom is available, but only at 800 x 600, and then only 2x. Aside from this, though, the F7 has all the settings you would want or need from such a camera. All the settings are laid out brilliantly in the menu, which overlays the image so you can preview your adjustments.

The LCD is bright and responsive to movement. The viewfinder is more central than on some other cameras and, as such, is well placed, as your nose won?t smudge the screen; instead you might find it pressing a few buttons and adjusting your settings.

Panasonic uses Secure Digital (SD) rather than Compact Flash (CF), which would be too large to fit inside the camera, however it has only supplied an 8MB card. While the camera's low maximum resolution does mean you can fit more pictures onto the card than you could with, say a 3megapixel camera, it still only holds 13 images, which is not nearly enough for a day out. Battery life was fine - we filled the storage card six times over before the battery showed any sign of fading.

Image quality is great for the price. The pictures we took were both clear and bright, there's rarely any need to veer from the default settings.

The F7 is compact, easy to use, reasonably priced and gives excellent pictures. It's not without its faults though, and you'll need to factor a larger storage card into the overall cost.

See also:

Sony Cybershot DSC-U10

Have fun with this tiny, easy-to-use snapper.  29 Nov 2002

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