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Much to my excitement, my first subscribed issue of Digital Camera Magazine dropped onto my mat yesterday, complete with the review I’ve been waiting for. They award the FZ30 91% (the same as the older 5 mpix FZ20) contrasting with ‘only’ 88% for the new Fuji 9500, which they describe as very sluggish and hard to use.

As I usually agree with dcm’s verdicts on cameras this is the final piece of vindication I was looking for – this camera is great! The review isn’t online yet, but here’s their review of the broadly similar FZ20: http://www.dcmag.co.uk/news/article.asp?SP=&v=1&UAN=527. The Fz30 is a lot nicer to look at (the proportions are better) and it feels better in your hands… the button layout in particular is a bit odd on the Fz20, particularly the buttons above the screen… quite how you’re meant to support that huge lens and the body AND operate the buttons is beyond me. Happily the Fz30 fixes all of those issues, with only the AE lock being slightly out of reach.

Top tip – ISO400 may sound like a good idea in low light, but ISO 100 with +2EV is much less work once you get it back onto your PC! The noise at high ISO is such that I wonder why the higher ISOs were included – it really is like having an “add random noise” function in the menus. I’ve been using niceimage (there’s a free demo version which does everything I need!) which is remarkably good at identifying the camera’s noise profile and removing it; sadly I took around 300 photos at a work event with about half of them at ISO400… it’s taken a while to rescue them. It should be said though that 300 photos, 75% with flash over the course of around 3 or 4 hours used about 2/3 of the juice in the battery – fairly amazing performance.

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