I’ve had my new camera now for a week, but to be honest i’ve hardly used it. When i did happen to take it out with me last weekend i left the 4 gig memory card i have for it in my PC, so that meant i could only take about a dozen pics using the internal memory. I can take literally thousands with the 4gig memory card, so i’ll never run out of space…
Anyway, i’m impressed by it. I’m still discovering little features it has which are just cool… for example, it has a high speed burst mode which captures approx 2.3 images per second at 10 megapixels. It can take more at lower resolutions however… That means nothing of course without examples, so here is an example of what that means in real life…
This is just a video i found on youtube of a formula 1 car on a qualifying lap. I just put it full screen and then took pictures of my monitor with my camera 🙂 Unknown to me, the photos actually included the lap time in 10ths of a second which is great because i could work out very accurately how many photos the tz7 can take per second in burst mode 🙂
It took pictures at
- 25.6
- 25.7
- 25.8
- 26.0
- 26.1
- 26.2
- 26.4
- 26.5
- 26.6
- 26.8
- 26.9
So you can see a pattern emerge there – it can take approx 3 pics every 4/10’s of a second. That’s at a 3mb resolution, it takes less as you raise the resolution… but 3mb is more than adequate, unless you’re printing them off…
This will be a very handy feature for me combined with the 12 x optical zoom when at football matches for example… let’s say there is a penalty awarded – i’ll be able to capture the before, after and everything in between the ball sitting still and hitting the back of the net. With a traditional camera, you had to have precision timing to capture the ball hitting the net as you only had one shot at it…
Anyway, here’s some shots which demonstrate the tz7’s zoom and focus quality. There’s no way i’d intentionally get this close up to a wasp in real life, but with the tz7, i could get close up whilst moving away from the window at the same time 
And sticking with the bugs theme, here’s a daddy long legs (it’s probably not, but it looks like one) against a cloudy sky. These guys are so thin that i didn’t think the tz7 would be able to focus on it against the background, but it was… no problem.
I’ve yet to really capture any HD video that’s worthy of going up online but hopefully i’ll get some up shortly. So as reviews go, this isn’t the best but hopefully it shows you a glimpse of what the TZ7 can do and why i bought it.