The successor to their DMC-FX550, the new Panasonic FX580 is a supremely pocketable compact digital camera with a bevy of excellent features and a hefty price tag to match. With a 12.1-megapixel sensor, a 25mm wide-angle stabilized Leica lens, full automatic and manual shooting modes, a potentially groundbreaking face-recognition mode, and a nifty iPhone-esque touchscreen interface, this is a camera with real market cachet. It’s a pretty little thing, too. But does it take good pictures? Let’s see!
Housed in a brushed metal casing that comes in your choice of black or silver, the Panasonic Lumix FX580 is a very handsome camera. Highlights of glossy chrome are set against the brushed body, along with a matte finish on the ring surrounding the lens. The camera is extremely solidly built, as you would expect from a $400 machine, and its various doors and compartments are well protected from breakage. Nothing feels overly flimsy here. A metal tripod mount is another sign of the forethought that went into the camera’s build—it’s not something you’ll find on many compact cameras. The back of the camera is finished in a very glossy black plastic with stiffly sprung control buttons.
Next in this Panasonic Lumix FX580 review is the design and it is instantly familiar to anyone who’s used a Panasonic compact digital camera in the last year or two—or any compact digital, really. A huge 3.0-inch LCD display with a very nice resolution of 230,000 pixels dominates most of the space, with the control buttons squeezed along the extreme right-hand side. The big difference from the Panasonic norm here is that the display is a touchscreen. For this camera, Panasonic has developed a “hybrid” control mode that, for the most part, lets the user choose whether to use touchscreen controls or traditional buttons and directional pad keys, or any combination of both. It works surprisingly fluidly.
This Panasonic FX580 review is yet another frustrating release from Panasonic. As a company they’ve proven again and again that they have a lot of ideas that appeal well to a broad spectrum of digital camera buyers, but they’re crippled over and over by their slavishness to the megapixel race. In terms of it’s aesthetic design, build quality, and interface, the FX580 has few rivals, which makes it doubly disappointing that it’s underwhelming as a camera. If Panasonic can create a camera that combines the FX580?s brilliant positives with the fantastic image quality produced by some of its rivals’ top models, the competition had better watch out. Until then, it’s back to the big drawing board (where hopefully they’ll draw a bigger sensor).
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