Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20By: Dave EtchellsPanasonic introduces a five-megapixel digicam with the high quality optics of a 12x Leica lens. <<Camera Modes & Menus :(Previous) | (Next): Video, Power, Software>> Page 11:Image Storage & InterfaceReview First Posted: 12/17/2004 |
Image Storage and Interface
The DMC-FZ20 uses SD/MMC memory cards for image storage. A 16MB SD memory card is supplied with the camera (far too small for a camera like this), so you'll want to immediately purchase a larger capacity card to accommodate the five-megapixel maximum resolution. Entire SD cards can be write-protected to guard against accidental reformatting, but in this mode you won't be able to save any photos to the card either. The DMC-FZ20's Play menu does allow you to write-protect individual image files though, protecting them from accidental erasure, unless the card is formatted.
Still images can be saved at one of five resolutions (2,560 x 1,920; 2,048 x 1,536; 1,600 x 1,200; 1,280 x 960; 640 x 480 pixels or "HDTV," 1,920 x 1,080 pixels), while movie images are recorded at 320 x 240 pixels. Still images also have two JPEG compression levels available: Fine and Normal, plus an uncompressed TIFF setting that records the RGB image with no compression at all.
A full complement of interface software comes with the DMC-FZ20, as does a USB cable for speedy connection to a PC or Macintosh computer.
Following are the approximate resolution / quality and compression ratios for
the furnished 16MB card. (Compression numbers are based on my own computations.):
| Resolution/Quality 16 MB Memory Card |
TIFF | Fine | Normal | |
| 2560 x 1920 | Images (Avg size) |
0 16.5 MB |
6 2.5 MB |
12 1.3 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
- | 6:1 | 12:1 | |
| 2048 x 1536 | Images (Avg size) |
1 10.5 MB |
9 1.6 MB |
19 835 KB |
| Approx. Compression |
- | 6:1 | 11:1 | |
| 1600 x 1200 | Images (Avg size) |
2 6.3 MB |
16 998 KB |
30 524 KB |
| Approx. Compression |
- | 6:1 | 10:1 | |
| 1280 x 960 | Images (Avg size) |
3 4.1 MB |
24 655 KB |
44 360 KB |
| Approx. Compression |
- | 6:1 | 10:1 | |
| |
Images (Avg size) |
14 1.1 MB |
75 213 KB |
122 131 KB |
| Approx. Compression |
- | 3:1 | 5:1 | |
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