Panasonic FZ2500 Field Test

Panasonic FZ2500 Field Test

High-zoom camera is a great blend of performance and features

by Jeremy Gray | Posted 12/15/2016

The Panasonic FZ2500 is an all-in-one enthusiast zoom camera that offers a 20x optical zoom and a 20.1-megapixel 1-inch type sensor. While the still imaging features are strong, the FZ2500 also offers a lot for videographers, including 4K video recording and a smooth, camcorder-inspired zooming lens. Compared to its predecessor, the FZ1000, the FZ2500 makes several key improvements to the camera body, lens and overall performance. How good is this camera? Read on to find out.

• 20.1-megapixel 1-inch type CMOS sensor
• 20x zoom 24-480mm equivalent f/2.8-4.5 lens
• 125-12800 native ISO range
• DSLR-style camera body with tilt/swivel touchscreen
• Full-resolution image capture at up to 12 frames per second
• Can capture lower-resolution images up to 30fps
• 4K video recording
• 4K Photo
• Built-in Wi-Fi
• $1,200 price

FZ2500 body is comfortable with excellent touchscreen display

Given its high-zoom capabilities, it's unsurprising that the FZ2500 is a large camera. It has a DSLR-style camera body, measuring about 5.4 x 4.0 x 5.3 inches (138 x 102 x 135 millimeters) and weighing in at 34.1 ounces (966 grams) with battery and memory card. The body has a good, deep contoured grip that helps the FZ2500 feel nice in my hands.

Buttons are in convenient locations, including both control dials. The focal length control around the shutter release works well, but doesn't offer precise control. However, you can use the main control ring around the lens to control focal length as well, and that offers very fine control, allowing you to change the focal length by only a few millimeters at a time across the entire focal length range. By default, using the top two function buttons on the side of the lens allows you to move the focal length up and down by single millimeter increments.

Redesigned internal-zooming lens keeps camera steady and balanced

Speaking of the lens, as soon as you power the camera on, the lens becomes fully extended. No matter the focal length, the physical length of the lens remains the same. I like this a lot as it keeps the body very balanced. In addition to the larger, main zoom ring on the lens, there's a second, narrower ring toward the end of the lens. The narrower ring controls focus, while in manual focus mode, but will serve to adjust aperture otherwise. The lens also has three programmable function buttons on the side, which is excellent. Next to the function buttons is a switch for the neutral density filter, set to auto, 1/64, 1/16, 1/4 and off.

Taking a quick look at the top deck of the camera, the button and control layout is well organized and overall, resembles other modern Panasonic cameras. There's a drive mode dial to the left of the viewfinder and to the right is a mode dial, the two command dials, function button, shutter release and movie record button. The FZ2500 also includes a built-in flash, which offers an auto ISO range of 0.3 to 13.2 meters at wide focal lengths and 1.0 to 7.9 meters at telephoto.

Moving to the rear of the camera, we come to one of the FZ2500's best features, its excellent articulating touchscreen display. The 3-inch rear display has 1,040,000 dots and can tilt and swivel. While the articulating mechanism is like that of its predecessor, the FZ1000, the FZ2500's touchscreen functionality is new. The articulation works very well as does the touchscreen itself. Besides the excellent display, there isn't much of note on the rear of the FZ2500. It has plenty of buttons, including a useful autofocus mode switch.

The FZ2500's electronic viewfinder has a bit more magnification than the FZ1000's did, 0.74x compared to 0.70x (35mm equivalent), but has the same resolution, 2.36 million dots. The 0.39-inch XGA OLED viewfinder works very well, as does its eye sensor, and offers a sharp image. However, I would prefer more depth to the rubber cup around the viewfinder as it can be hard to keep all ambient light.

Overall, the FZ2500 has a great body design with ample controls and features. While I would certainly welcome weather-sealing on the camera body, I have no major issues with it otherwise. Its buttons are responsive, the display is great, its ports (particularly the memory card slot on the side) are easily accessible even when mounted to a tripod, and it's comfortable to hold and use.

Panasonic FZ2500's built-in 20x optical zoom lens offers good performance

Compared to its predecessor, the FZ2500's built-in lens is much improved. The FZ2500 has a 20x optical zoom lens compared to the 16x zoom lens of the FZ1000, for starters, but it also has an improved optical formula and a new aperture design.

With a 35mm equivalent focal length range of 24-480mm and an aperture range of f/2.8-4.5, the FZ2500 offers a lot of reach for the price. With this greater zoom range, the FZ2500 does weigh 12% more than the FZ1000, but that's a worthy trade-off for the clear majority of photographers. Across the entire focal length range, I found the FZ2500 to offer impressive performance.

Its good optical performance is likely due in part to its new optical design. The FZ2500 has one more element than the FZ1000 and includes a new ultra-high refractive index. It also includes an additional aspherical lens, although total aspherical surfaces remain unchanged at eight. In total, the lens has 16 elements in 11 groups.

Aperture: New mechanism leads to good bokeh, but be careful not to stop down too much

The new aperture mechanism features a 9-bladed diaphragm, compared to the 7-bladed one found in the FZ1000. The lens can create some very nice bokeh considering the sensor size; I was impressed. Out of focus areas are smooth and not distracting, especially when shooting at the telephoto end of the lens. You won't be able to create a super soft background as easily as you could with a larger sensor camera and same equivalent focal length, all else equal, but it still offers users very pleasing images in a wide variety of situations.

Regarding aperture, you will want to avoid stopping down much with the FZ2500 as diffraction rears its ugly head quickly. I found diffraction to become most noticeable around f/8.0 and then continues to degrade at f/11. When shooting wide open at 24mm, the lens is a bit soft but stopping down to f/4.0 improves sharpness considerably. On the other hand, at the telephoto end of the lens, it performs well wide open and gets slightly softer as you stop down. Generally, the lens is best between f/4-5.6 throughout its entire focal length range.

When shooting with the lens stopped down, there is a diffraction compensation option that applies to JPEG files, and it works quite well. It sharpens the images without introducing artifact issues. I recommend having it set to 'Auto' and letting the camera work its magic as it sees fit, particularly if you intend to use JPEG files.

Built-in neutral density filter works well

If you want to reduce your shutter speed, say for shooting video or creating stills with motion blur, rather than stopping down, you can utilize the FZ2500's built-in neutral density filter, another new feature compared to its predecessor. There are two built-in ND filters which offer varying strengths of 1/4 (3 stops), 1/16 (4 stops) and 1/64 (6 stops). The ND filter is controlled via a switch on the side of the lens barrel.

Macro capabilities are good, although corner softness is excessive

The FZ2500 can focus impressively close at wide-angle, as close as 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) when using the macro focus mode. The normal focus range is 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) to infinity.

Light falloff is handled well across the focal length range

Vignetting control across the lens's focal length and aperture ranges is handled nicely by the camera's processing for both JPEG, as well as RAW files, which do receive in-camera corrections. There was more falloff at 24mm than 480mm, but in neither case is the situation particularly bad.

Edges are soft at both extremes, but particularly at 24mm

At both extremes of the lens, there is some edge softness that doesn't go away by stopping down. What does improve when stopping down is chromatic aberration around fine details at the edge, although that occurs across the entire aperture range, especially at 24mm. For whatever reason, the left edge of the frame at 24mm was softer than the right edge, but that situation reversed at the telephoto end of the lens, with the right edge instead being slightly softer. This might be an issue with sample variation, and this exact behavior might not be present on other FZ2500 units.

Overall: The 20x zoom lens provides very good performance considering its versatility

All in all, the built-in lens is very impressive both for its versatility and its performance. While it displays some optical weakness, particularly at the wide end of the lens, it is still a great performer overall given its focal length range and this class of camera.

20.1MP sensor helps the FZ2500 capture sharp, detailed images

The Panasonic FZ2500 uses a 20.1-megapixel 1-inch-type CMOS sensor with a native ISO range of 125 to 12,800, which can be extended down to ISO 80 and up to ISO 25,600. This same sensor was used in the FZ1000 and is found in many cameras and offers very good performance for the sensor size.

The FZ2500 produces sharp, vibrant JPEGs at default settings, and its RAW files are versatile, albeit dull and soft straight from the camera, as is par for the course with RAW files. Importantly, if you don't want to fiddle with camera settings, you'll be able to get nice images with the FZ2500 right out of the box. With that said, default sharpening is perhaps a bit excessive to my eye, but that isn't unusual for default JPEG settings and is easy to adjust in the camera.

ISO performance: Both RAW and JPEG images fare well at higher ISO settings

When considering RAW images, I already mentioned that they're soft across the board, but they also perform quite well at higher ISOs and are amenable to fine-tuned noise reduction processing. Through ISO 1600, RAW images don't show all that much noise and maintain good sharpness. Noise distribution is smooth and easy to reduce using post-processing. However, at ISO 3200, noise is harder to deal with. Nonetheless, there is still decent detail (although fine detail will be lost after reducing that noise) and colors are generally accurate. At ISO 6400, 12800 and the extended setting of 25600, colors become washed out and there are a lot of hot pixels that appear in images. Noise is not as evenly distributed and there is banding. Further, dynamic range is severely limited as highlights become heavily banded and black areas become a charcoal gray.

Looking at JPEG images, they are very sharp at ISO 125, 200 and 400. At ISO 800, sharpness decreases a bit, and you lose some of the very fine detail due to the camera's noise reduction. At ISO 1600, not only is there a further loss of fine detail, but the noise reduction introduces artifacts around soft edges, giving them a blocky appearance. Colors are slightly washed out at ISO 3200, but there is still some decent detail. ISO 6400 is usable at small sizes, but the artifacts and overall fuzziness limits their usability for large prints or viewing. ISO 12800 and ISO 25600 are useless in my opinion due to their severe lack of saturation and detail.

Overall: Image quality is very good

I am generally very pleased with the image quality performance of the Panasonic FZ2500. JPEG images are sharp, vibrant and look good across an impressive range of ISO settings, given the camera's sensor size.

Panasonic FZ2500 user experience: Very good across the board

User experience is certainly subjective, but in my opinion, the FZ2500 is very user-friendly and enjoyable to shoot with. One of the biggest reasons for this is the wealth of physical controls on the camera and the impressively useful touchscreen display. Additionally, the camera offers good performance across the board with no major shortcomings.

Touchscreen work very well, and menus are decently organized

A good menu system is critical for minimizing frustrations when using a camera and fortunately Panasonic's is mostly good. Settings are in their expected sub-menus, although I would prefer even further separation of menu items because you sometimes must scroll through as many as ten pages of items. On the positive side, the menus work well with touch and traditional button controls. Further, there is a separate menu just for movie settings, which is nice.

Another good usability feature of the FZ2500 is its "Q. Menu," accessed via the Fn5 button above the top right corner of the rear display. Within the Q. Menu, you can adjust, via touch or physical controls: picture style, flash, movie recording quality, picture size, image quality, focus drive mode, focus area mode, metering, aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, ISO and white balance.

Autofocus: Reliable, accurate and fast

The Panasonic FZ2500 uses a contrast detect autofocus system but adds Panasonic's Depth from Defocus (DFD) technology, which boosts speed and performance. You can read more about DFD technology here. The FZ2500's 49-point AF system proved to work very well in the field. When considering single shot autofocus and stationary objects, autofocus is very quick and accurate, especially at shorter focal lengths. When shooting at the telephoto end of the lens, focus speeds are slightly slower, which is typical behavior for a camera in this class, but I was still impressed with how quick the focus remained, even when shooting at 480mm. Further, in low light, the FZ2500's AF performance remained quick.

AF performance remains mostly positive when considering moving subjects, although the FZ2500 can become sluggish when continually focusing at the telephoto end. The camera has a slight tendency to hunt and have focus come in and out very quickly, which can create a slight wobbling effect through the viewfinder or on the display -- which is characteristic of contrast-detect AF systems -- but it otherwise doesn't negatively impact shooting performance for photos.

I was impressed with the subject tracking autofocus mode, which lets you tap on the subject on the display and the camera will automatically follow it around. In my experience, the FZ2500 could successfully lock onto the subject even after it exited and then re-entered the frame again. It can't maintain a great lock with a fast subject, but it is nonetheless capable of shooting many moving subjects.

Of the FZ2500's various AF point configurations, I enjoyed the custom multi AF mode. It allows you to select from three pre-made AF areas: horizontal pattern, vertical pattern and central pattern, all of which you can move around the frame. The real magic is in the three custom area slots. You can tap any of the 49 AF area rectangles on the display, and the camera will then use those as its autofocus area. Say that you know you will want to shoot a subject that will always be placed in the rightmost third of the frame, you can select only those AF areas. Or perhaps you're shooting a subject with a distinct shape, like an 'X,' you can make that shape as well. It's a neat feature, albeit one that many users might not need.

The best part about autofocusing with the FZ2500, besides its reliable and quick performance, is its touchscreen. Being able to look through the viewfinder and then tap on the display where you want the camera to focus when using the 1-point AF mode is excellent. Rather than needing to move the point around using a directional pad, you can simply tap your subject on the display. This is something that neither the FZ1000 offered nor the FZ2500's steepest competition, the Sony RX10 series.

Metering: Consistent results with both exposure and white balance

The fact that I don't have much to say about the FZ2500's metering performance is very much a good thing. It offers intelligent multiple, center-weighted and spot metering modes, and they all work well. It is worth noting that the spot metering mode is tied to the autofocus area, meaning it is adjustable depending on where you place the AF point, which I find is an excellent feature. Exposure compensation is available via the Fn4 button on the top of the camera or through the Q. Menu, but I rarely needed to use it. The exception to that is when shooting scenes with snow, but that is normal behavior for shooting that type of subject. White balance metering was similarly impressive, and the camera didn't give me any issues in its auto white balance mode.

Plenty of shooting modes, including panorama shooting

In addition to the standard assortment of shooting modes -- P, A, S and M -- the FZ2500 also offers a handful of special shooting modes such as panorama, scene modes and creative filters. There is not a lot to say about the creative modes, but there are a lot of filters and effects for users to choose from, which can, in some cases, vastly change the appearance of your images.

Performance: Fast capture and good buffer depth

The Panasonic FZ2500 offers good performance across the board with very few exceptions. Addressing the shutter first, the FZ2500 has a mechanical shutter and an electronic shutter. The mechanical shutter offers shutter speeds ranging from 60 seconds to 1/4000s, although there are some limits to this. For example, at f/2.8, the maximum mechanical shutter speed is 1/2000s. It isn't until f/4.5 that you can shoot at 1/4000s using the mechanical shutter. Regarding the electronic shutter, the slowest shutter speed available when using it is a full second. Shutter speed limits also affect the maximum flash sync speeds. At f/2.8-4.0, the max flash sync speed is 1/2000s because of the mechanical shutter constraints. At f/4.5 and higher, you can shoot with flash at up to 1/4000s. Further, you cannot use the flash with the electronic shutter. The FZ2500 includes a hot shoe as well.

Regarding continuous shooting speeds, I tested the FZ2500 with a Sony 32GB SDHC card, which we tested to have write speeds around 45 MB/s with occasional drops to 30 MB/s. The FZ2500 is not UHS-II compatible, by the way. When shooting RAW + JPEG frames, I could capture 32 frames in 12 frames per second mode. The buffer, while exhibiting good depth, did take around 35 seconds to clear. When shooting JPEG 'Fine'-quality images, the speeds were similar, but the buffer depth is essentially infinite; it's limited by battery life and memory card storage. If you want to use continuous autofocus and live view, the camera is limited to continuous shooting at 7fps, which is still quite fast. Overall, performance is quite good. The camera is fast, even when shooting RAW images, and buffer depth is good, particularly when shooting JPEG images.

Wireless: No more NFC, but Wi-Fi works well

Wireless features are the only area where the FZ2500 comes up short against its predecessor, but not in any particularly critical way. The FZ2500 includes built-in Wi-Fi, but not NFC, a feature the FZ1000 had. Nonetheless, the wireless functionality remains the same overall.

Using Panasonic's Image App on my iOS device, I could easily connect my phone to the camera. I had to turn on Wireless functionality on the camera itself, connect to the ad-hoc network generated by the camera through iOS's Settings and then open the application itself. When in the app, you can view and transfer images, remotely operate the camera, view a photo collage, geotag images and more.

Regarding remote operation, it works very well and offers a lot of functionality. You can change settings such as image quality, white balance, ISO, focus mode, drive mode, metering and more, as well as other exposure settings like aperture and shutter speed, depending on your shooting mode. You can also change settings on the camera itself on the fly as well, although sometimes the app takes a long time to refresh and allow you to continue remotely operating the camera after changing a setting on the camera. The live view on my phone looked good, and the connection was stable and reliable.

4K-capable FZ2500 is an excellent video camera

The Panasonic FZ2500 shares many video features with the Panasonic GH4, which means that the FZ2500 is an excellent multimedia camera with many videographer-friendly features. In addition to the built-in neutral density filters, the FZ2500 also includes a large variety of features aimed at videographers: A headphone jack, 30fps 4K UHD video recording, a new DCI 4K recording option, 10-bit 4:2:2 output via HDMI (compared to 8-bit) simultaneous 8-bit internal and external recording, unlimited video recording duration (practically limited by battery life and storage space), 100Mbps IPB and 200MBps All-I capture, MOV file format option, photo style adjustments (including Cinelike), luminance level adjustments, output color bars and audio test tone, slow motion and high speed video, rack zoom and dolly zoom. Further, if you disconnect the HDMI port, a video recording won't pause. This is a very long list of video features, especially for an all-in-one enthusiast zoom camera.

Speaking of the zoom, when recording 4K video, the built-in lens offers 35mm equivalent focal lengths of 36-720mm due to the crop factor. When recording Full HD video, you get the full width of the frame, but the top and bottom is cut off for the 16:9 aspect ratio, giving an equivalent focal length of 25-500mm. You can see a comparison of the image area below.

I was particularly impressed with how smooth zooming is with the FZ2500. Panasonic has engineered the lens to be as smooth as possible by incorporating an inner-zooming design borrowed from their pro camcorders that uses rails and cams rather than just cams. The center of gravity is steadier and more balance as a result, too. The design pays large dividends as the zoom is very smooth, and the image barely shifts when zooming. It's quite impressive, especially given the amount of zoom range offered in the camera.

Moving on to the video quality itself, it's quite good. 4K UHD video is sharp and detailed, even at higher ISOs. The ISO limit is 6400 when recording video, but I think that the entire range is mostly usable. Granted, video does get softer and noisier at the higher ISOs, but it isn't bad.

Image stabilization works quite well and allows for smooth, stable panning and handheld video recording. Unlike the recent Panasonic G85, which had an issue with image stabilization and video recording (which has since been addressed via a firmware update), the FZ2500 works as expected.

One aspect of the camera's performance which does not work particularly well is its autofocus at telephoto focal lengths. Even in decent light, I found that the FZ2500 was quite slow to focus when zoomed in, sometimes failing to lock on to a subject at all. After acquiring focus, it still had a slight tendency to hunt. Autofocus performance was great when shooting at the wide end of the lens, but I was surprised, given how well autofocus worked at all focal lengths when shooting stills, that the camera struggled when recording video.

When recording Full HD video, the FZ2500 offers a variety of neat creative video features. You can record using slow/quick (allows switching between slow or quick motion during recording), dolly zoom (allows the angle of view to change during recording and playback is at 2x speed), 4K live cropping (Full HD video frame that pans and zooms inside a 4K frame) and variable frame rate recording. There are a few restrictions, which can be viewed in the user manual, but basically you need to record in AVCHD, MP4(LPCM) or MOV file format with FHD recording quality at 30p or lower to be able to use these features, otherwise they are grayed out in the menu.

The FZ2500 records video in MOV, MP4 and AVCHD formats and offers HD video out via HDMI. Additional ports include microphone and headphone jacks. It is a full-featured and very capable video camera. If you're looking for an affordable all-in-one camera with great zoom capabilities to record 4K video, the FZ2500 looks to fit the bill.

4K Photo: Fast JPEG shooting at 8 megapixels and fun features

In addition to an excellent suite of 4K video features, the FZ2500 includes a variety of 4K Photo modes just like a number of recent Panasonic models. Here, you can capture 8-megapixel JPEG images at up to 30fps. In addition to the impressive burst capabilities, 4K Photo also offers Post Focus, which allows you to shoot a burst of images at different focal distances and then select the desired focus point after shooting. Similarly, you can also focus stack a series of images to create a final composite with a greater depth of field than you could achieve with a single frame.

What I like:

• Comfortable camera body with a good grip
• Excellent tilt/swivel touchscreen display
• Good autofocus performance overall, especially during stills recording
• Fast continuous shooting performance
• Huge array of video features and very good video performance overall

What I dislike:

• Camera body is a little bulky
• Continuous autofocus can be sluggish at times

If you're looking for the ultimate all-in-one zoom camera, the Panasonic FZ2500 is it. Its 24-480mm equivalent lens proves to be a capable optic, and it is paired with a good 20.1-megapixel sensor. The camera body is highlighted by its excellent touchscreen display, good electronic viewfinder and a large amount of physical controls . In addition to its very good stills imaging features, the FZ2500 includes a lot of video performance, especially for the price. This hits on the general theme of the FZ2500, value. The Panasonic FZ2500 is an excellent mix of performance and usability. In a category where cameras often include lots of compromises, the FZ2500 makes very little.