Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5By: Dave EtchellsPanasonic updates its 12x optically stabilized Leica lens digicam to five megapixels. <<Camera Modes & Menus :(Previous) | (Next): Video, Power, Software>> Page 11:Image Storage & InterfaceReview First Posted: 05/09/2005 |
Image Storage and Interface
The Panasonic Lumix FZ5 uses SD/MMC memory cards for image storage. A 16MB SD memory card is supplied with the camera - far too small to be of any real use, so you'll want to immediately purchase a larger capacity card to accommodate the large five-megapixel maximum resolution. Entire SD/MMC cards cannot be write-protected except by using the physical switch on the side of the card, however the DMC-FZ5's Play menu allows you to write-protect individual image files, protecting them from accidental erasure, unless the card is formatted.
Still images can be saved at one of six resolutions (2,560 x 1,920; 2,048 x 1,536; 1,600 x 1,200; 1,280 x 960; or 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-FZ5, 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 16 MB card. (Compression numbers are based on my own computations. - You can see how pointless the 16 MB card is, able to hold only six images at the camera's best JPEG size and quality setting.):
|
Resolution/Quality 16 MB Memory Card |
Fine | Normal |
|
|
| 2560 x 1920 |
Images (Avg size) |
6 2.5 MB |
12 1.3 MB |
0 16.5 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
6:1 | 12:1 | - | |
| 2048 x 1536 |
Images (Avg size) |
9 1.6 MB |
19 835 KB |
1 10.5 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
6:1 | 11:1 | - | |
| 1600 x 1200 | Images (Avg size) |
16 998 KB |
30 524 KB |
2 6.3 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
6:1 | 11:1 | - | |
| 1280 x 960 | Images (Avg size) |
24 655 KB |
44 360 KB |
3 4.1 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
6:1 | 10:1 | - | |
|
|
Images (Avg size) |
75 213 KB |
122 131 KB |
14 1.1 MB |
| Approx. Compression |
4:1 | 7:1 | - | |
The Panasonic DMC-FZ5 connects to a host computer via a USB interface. Downloading files to my Sony desktop running Windows XP (Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz), I clocked it at 804 KBytes/second, a very good rate of speed, if not quite matching the fastest models on the market. (Cameras with slow USB interfaces run as low as 300 KB/s, cameras with fast v1.1 interfaces run as high as 600 KB/s. Cameras with USB v2.0 interfaces run as fast as several megabytes/second.)
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