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My FZ30 arrived on Friday afternoon, and I managed to squeeze a few hours out of my weekend to try it out.

Overall, very very happy. As the early review from dpreview said, it’s well-built (I’d already had a play with one on Tottenham Court Road), well-designed (most of the buttons, dials, switches etc are in the ‘right’ place for my hands) and, most importantly, has taken some brilliant outdoors shots so far. High-ISO is also high-noise in most cases, but as some other reviewers have said, it’s a matter of taking the time to really get to know the camera. Every hour which passes with it my photos get better and I’m more comfortable with them, and I’m actually finding that the very sharp LCD is actually rather harsh on the quality of the images – zoom in 16x and sure, there’s noise in most shadows at ISO 200, but I’m fairly certain the pictures will print excellently.

However, it should be said that on the first night of ownership photos taken sans flash, ISO 200, F2.8 at a party in a fairly well-lit room are pretty noisy.

The ease of manual control has its down-sides too – the camera does an admirable job of removing purple fringing when you ‘get it right’ – but in some of my experiments I’ve managed to acquire purple fringes which completely dominate the picture (much worse than my old Canon PS s60)… it’s all a learning process I guess – I then managed to take the exact same shots at a smaller aperture with no fringing.

The interface is slick, fast and intuitive (though it’s a bit of a laundry-list of options in the menus – not logically grouped at all) and the body feels just right, with the lens feeling particularly solid and reliable. There’s some nice damping on the manual zoom ring and the focus ring – they both feel a lot better than the manual zoom ring on the K-M A200, which has a teeth-on-edge plastic-on-plastic feeling which I found disconcerting in the shop.

More thoughts to follow, and some pictures once I get around to uploading them.

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