Originally posted by MarkJerling Thank you all, and thank you specifically
@Normhead and
@BigMackCam Norm and Mike.
Your suggestions set off a discussion and with the ZS100 (TZ100 in our market) not being available and the TZ110 well over budget, the TZ90 ticked all the boxes.
Annie feels she'll never have the need to change lenses, so really a natural progression to consider an integral lens option, which I had not previously considered.
Here's the specs:
https://www.photowarehouse.co.nz/shop/shop-by-product/digital-cameras/point-...BoCnl0QAvD_BwE
Thanks again everyone for your helpful input. As I knew it would be, our Pentax crowd is good for suggesting other makes too. Pity the GR3 is so eye-wateringly expensive.
That's a fantastic choice, Mark
I have the older TZ70 - as does our fellow forum member @Dartmoor Dave; - and it's a cracking little camera.
Should you go ahead with this, and if Annie decides to shoot raw (or if you borrow the camera and do so
), you'll find that the raw files look rather soft at longer focal lengths as the maximum aperture gets smaller, due - I suspect - to diffraction. You'll also see more noise than
you're used to - even at base ISO - because of the sensor size and resolution. In fact, you'll wonder how Panasonic makes the JPEGs look so good (because they
do). Fret not... For sharpening in Lightroom, set the Masking to 90 or thereabouts (so you don't sharpen the noise), keep the Detail slider low (I actually set it to zero), bump up the Radius to somewhere between 1 and 2 (maybe start around 1.5), and set the Amount as required (around 50 works nicely for me). After that, don't be afraid to use a little luminance noise reduction, perhaps around 25. An alternative approach is to skip the sharpening in Lightroom, apply the noise reduction I suggested, export to Photoshop (I use GIMP instead) and use the Unsharpen Mask to your taste... It works very well and is actually my preference with the TZ70.
It's never going to match DSLR output for larger size reproduction, obviously - but it's capable of
good results
Last edited by BigMackCam; 01-10-2022 at 03:26 PM.