At first glance, the LUMIX FS5 looks like the FX-35, or any of the many LUMIX compact cameras by Panasonic. The FS-series, however, is slightly lower specified than the popular FX-series, and is targeted towards ease of use and simplicity. This doesn’t make the FS5 any less of a camera though. The FS5 is a 10 megapixel compact camera that features a 30-120mm zoom lens in a form factor that fits in your pocket. Like most LUMIX cameras, the lens on the FS5 is Leica branded and also features Panasonic’s highly successful Mega OIS optical stabilization. On the back, the FS5 is equipped with a sharp 2.5-inch LCD display.
Panasonic has also launched the FS20 which features a 3-inch screen instead. For storing your photos, the FS5 accepts SD and SDHC memory cards. As a bonus, the camera also has 50MB of internal storage in case your memory card runs out. This is a handy feature as it acts as an emergency reserve when you really need to take a shot.
The new FS-series features Panasonic’s latest processing engine, the VenusIV. This new engine enables one of the most attractive features of the LUMIX FS-series – Intelligent Auto (iA). Despite being targeted as a simple point-and-shoot, the FS5 has quite a few features and settings that can be adjusted for your shot. But the iA mode does away with this by intelligently adjusting all the camera’s settings on-the-fly. While practically any camera has an ‘Auto’ mode, Panasonic’s iA mode is able to switch between the camera’s different scene modes as you move it around. Settings such as flash-mode and face-detection are all adjusted on-the-fly as the situation changes.
If you want to get a little creative, you can turn off iA and change the settings manually. Other than face-detection, you can set the FS5 to 9-zone-AF. There is also Quick-AF which constantly tries to focus the camera even before you press the shutter. The ISO levels can be set manually or you can use IntelligentISO. This feature sets the ISO level based on the amount of camera jitter as well as subject movement detected. Normal ISO range is between ISO100 to ISO1600. But there is a High-Sensitivity scene mode that can boost the ISO all the way to ISO6400, allowing you to shoot in nearly complete darkness. There are 20 scene modes available in the FS5 altogether.
At 10 megapixels, the FS5 was able of producing large images that capture a lot of details. Colors were a little more saturated than average, causing brightly colored subjects to really jump out. But the FS5 suffers the same problem as all LUMIX cameras – noise reduction. In an effort to reduce the amount of noise due to small sensor sizes, the Venus Engine runs noise reduction on the final image. But in all our test shots, the noise reduction was quite apparent, resulting is softened edges and loss of finer texture details. This gets worse with higher ISO settings, so the best shots are obtained at ISO400 and below.
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