The Panasonic Lumix TZ20 is billed as great for traveling, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not the slimmest compact camera in town, but it brings a long 16X optical zoom which can be further extended to 21x via Panasonic’s intelligent Zoom system. A wide 24mm lens comes in handy for landscape shots, and I080i video recording lets you record your precious memories as well as in 14MP still photographs. To round it up, a built-in GPS receiver also tags location information to your photographs, so you can remember where exactly you took each photo long after the fact.
While the TZ20 is chunky for a compact, it’s still a compact which you can comfortably carry. No great surprises in its design; it follows the design of most recent Panasonic compacts, with controls comfortably laid out and easy to use. Of particular favorite is the staple Quick Menu, which gives you an overlay of settings that you can quickly adjust.
The TZ20 offers some advanced functionality with Shutter and Aperture priority modes, as well as full Manual. But the difficulty involved in tweaking the settings via the Exposure button and the d-pad has us preferring the ease of use with the excellent iA (intelligent Auto) mode. (The TZ20 is limited to an aperture range of f/3.3-5.9, which doesn’t inspire much aperture tweaking anyway.)
Auto-focus is exceptionally fast and accurate, and the TZ20 offers an impressive 16х optical zoom, making this compact lens the equivalent of a 24-384mm lens in 35mm measurements. That 16х can be further pushed to 21x (digital) with Intelligent Zoom. Despite the claims for a better quality digital crop, a crop is a crop. While we found the TZ20′s normal resolution to be a decent1400X1400LPH on our resolution chart all the way to 16x optical zoom, resolution drops to 1000X1000LPH at 21x. ISO performance is average, with clean results up to IS0400, apparent noise at IS0800 and IS01600 is best avoided.
But one thing that’s impressive is that at the furthest zooms it’s obvious that there’s some serious image stabilization going on. That’s essential, because the further you zoom the more sensitive the camera becomes to the smallest hand shake and the larger your chances of blur. Thanks to the optical stabilization built into the TZ20 (what Panasonic calls Power Optical image Stabilizer) we found that most of our zoom shots turned out steady and sharp.
Images also come tagged with their latitudes and longitudes, if you’re lucky. The service doesn’t always work, but a lot of times the GPS module managed to lock onto the positioning satellites in the sky, and deliver an accurate description of where we are. The camera then displays a read-out of your location when a lock is achieved. There’s an impressive database of over one million landmarks stored in the TZ20, so you don’t just get co-ordinates but actually names of places.
The TZ20 also comes with a touch-screen, which is complementary and not compulsory; it offers some of the same easy features as Panasonic’s G-series, with useful features like touch to focus. A 3D mode lets you capture images in mpo format, but it’s tricky and takes a little skill.
We find theTZ20 a competent camera; the wide and long lens will deal with most situations, and coupled with the intelligent AF and good image stabilization theTZ20 will be a handy all-in-one compact camera for most.
