Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7

The TZ7 is a compact camera which I can take with me when I can't be bothered lugging around the SLR. It is small enough to fit into your pocket, or to hang from your belt.

The pictures come out looking good for a digital camera, as long as you aren't shooting in the dark. The flash tends to over brighten the object closest to you. The lens is good, the zoom is amazing, it goes all the way up to 12x. This also does 720p video, which look quite good on a HDTV but its a shame it doesn't do 1080p.
The great thing is that you can use the optical zoom while taking video, which is not the case with some other cameras. The noise that the lens makes when zooming isn't picked up by the microphone either so you don't have to run the videos through a filter on the PC to remove any unwanted sound.

Talking of sound, this camera comes with stereo microphones which with the microphones being so close together you would think it wouldn't work so well but you'd be pleasantly surprised, the quality of the sound is pretty good. The LCD Screen on this is a 3 incher and looks fantastic. It has adaptive brightness so it dims automatically depending on the light.

If you know what you're doing you can manually go through each of the settings to get what you want, at the moment I let the camera do all the thinking, but in order to take better pictures it would be beneficial to learn about all the different settings and what they do. If you know what you are doing you can adjust exposure compensation, white balance, bracketing, ISO, colour temperate etc.

When the camera is in automatic mode it detects what settings to use depending on what you point the camera at. If for example you are taking a picture of a plant, the camera will go into macro mode and show the icon of a flower, or if your shooting some scenery. It has modes for snow scenes, portrait pictures, beach scenes, party scenes, scenic photos etc. The camera can also detect the faces of people that are stored in the camera and will focus more on them, whilst displaying their names near them, which is a very handy feature. You would have to program the faces of your family or friends into the camera first though, but that is not too difficult.

Connectivity wise, it is very easy to get the pictures of the camera, you just plug it into your PC and the media is right their to print/view/email/copy. You do not get a carry case with the camera and only get one battery but the battery does last quite some time, i can normally get a days full shoot out of one battery, it would be an idea to get a spare battery just in case though.

Overall I would recommend the TZ7 even though it does not give you the best results when shooting in low lighting but not many digital cameras do. And the rest of the features more than make up for it. These can now be picked up for about £200, which is a bargain.