
It’s now the last day of May 2020, deep into coronavirus lockdown. I have to apologise for being so tardy in finishing my series on the Panasonic Lumix FZ1000. I have no excuse, but better late than never.
For anyone seeing this series for the first time, the idea of the series was to explore whether the 1″ sensor and non-interchangeable lens FZ1000 bridge camera would make a suitable primary camera for a wildlife photographic safari. Traditionally, you would use a DSLR for such a trip. But DSLRs are big and bulky when combined with a bag of lenses.
Previous articles in the series covered testing done ahead of the trip and were used to decide whether the bridge camera idea was viable. The initial tests were quite promising (you can read all about these in the earlier posts) and we decided to chance it.
My partner has now completed her safari in Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. How did it go? Is the FZ1000 a suitable alternative to a DSLR? The answer is… maybe, sort of, sometimes.
The Good
- Compact all-in-one bridge camera needs no accessories or additional lenses
- Easy to carry
- Nice to hold, solid, good grip
- Decent EVF viewfinder
- Convenient DSLR-style controls
- Great 25-400mm equivalent fast lens, useful zoom range for animals close and far away
- Image quality good- even low light, higher ISO shots better than you might expect
- Great for landscapes, portraits, travel shots, general photography
The Bad
The weaknesses of this bridge camera were not found in the expected places – it performed well, generally. Instead, the problems were specific to the safari situation and quite serious. These are not the kind of things that are obvious in “normal” use but which turned out to very frustrating in practice.
- When the lens is extended and ready to shoot, it is quite sensitive to being knocked. Once the lens is knocked against an elbow, a knee, a bag or car bodywork, the camera would freeze with an error message and require a restart before it was usable again. Unfortunately, this happened a lot out in the bush. Rutted dirt roads and off road in a packed, cramped Land Rover inevitably leads to being bounced and shaken around. We never saw this happen once back in the UK during testing. But we looked after the camera, you can’t always do that
- Camera too slow to switch on and off for the safari situation. Given how nervous my partner became about knocking the lens, keeping it switched off became the only alternative. But then it was just too slow to start up again…
- Lens too slow to zoom. It’s a wide ranging lens, takes a while to travel between the extremes of the range. It’s far more sluggish than a manual zoom. For general photography around the city, it’s fine, but on safari it proved a problem
- Buttons difficult to operate in the dark by feel – the camera has a number of controls that require the use of fiddly small buttons combined with the command wheel and this is difficult to do in the dark of pre-dawn with buttons seemingly sprinkled randomly over the body. This is true of many cameras and sometimes you just have to take the time to memorise the settings into muscle memory. But my partner found this much harder to do with the FZ1000 than with her old DSLR
Out in the bush, photo opportunities appear suddenly, without warning and very fleetingly. Animals are often fast moving in near darkness for the dawn runs. These are challenging conditions for cameras and photographers alike. Photographers need to prepared and ready to shoot instantly. Speed of thought and action is essential, the animals are rarely prepared to sit and pose, especially in the early morning dawn period. Potentially great shots were missed as a result
The Ugly (or at least, the Slightly Unfortunate)
Every time the camera was switched on, it went to a default exposure setting that was wrong (badly underexposed) and required resetting before the camera was usable. Given the problems with the lens’ susceptibility to being knocked and freezing the camera, keeping it switched off until needed was the only alternative. My partner found the time taken repeatedly resetting it, infuriating and very frustrating. It meant that while she was messing around the animals slipped away, time and time again.
This appears (with hindsight) to be a setup problem. She was using the C custom setting on the PASM dial. This remembers the settings at the point they are saved to the custom memory. It seems likely that an unfortunate setting was saved to the custom memory position that caused the camera to be in a non useful state every time it was switched on. Sitting quietly at home, that could easily have been fixed with recourse to the manual or a bit of googling. But not by my partner in the heat of a safari, she ended up having to live with this for the whole trip. Not specifically a camera flaw, more user error, but related to overall usability. In an ideal world, it would have been an obvious fix in the field, in reality, not the case, even with the attempted help of fellow travellers.










Index to FZ1000 articles
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 diary: Image quality @400mm wide open vs Fuji X-E1 (APS-C)
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 diary: Image quality @400mm wide open vs G7
- Taking the Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 for a walk in the park (Beckenham Place Park)
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 handling part 2: shooting at 300mm (equivalent) vs G7 plus 45-150mm
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 handling test
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 set up – Part 2
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 – first stab at set up
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 Day 1 – First impressions
- Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 1″ type sensor superzoom bridge camera now £428
Hi Conchscooter
Thanks for your comment. Some interesting observations. I feel it is only fair to respond to your remarks. Perhaps this will be of help to others.
Firstly, I wouldn’t call my article a “review” – if it were, I would have posted it in my reviews section. Rather, it is the final post in a series of diary-style reports on how useful we found the camera as a substitute for a DSLR on a wildlife safari. It’s a report on what happened, not an opinion piece. Make of that what you will but you won’t get the full picture without reading the whole series. If you want a review style conclusion, I can oblige. Overall, my feelings about the FZ1000 are that it is a very good general purpose camera and for many people it is all they would need. However, it has drawbacks for the particular circumstances of safari conditions that people should consider carefully.
Secondly, I feel that calling the issue with the camera remembering an inconvenient setting “absurd” (I assume you mean the criticism is absurd) is harsh and doesn’t reflect the very real difficulty the problem caused my partner. She is not a photographer, she is a painter who also uses a camera. I set the camera up for her after we spent 11 months experimenting, not a “couple of minutes”, but I didn’t accompany her – once she went out, she was on her own. We still don’t know how it happened, but it looks like the unfortunate setting got saved at some unknown point by accident. Whether this before the trip or during, we just don’t know. The point here is that it proved impossible for her, her friend and all the group of experienced photographers she went with to diagnose the issue in the field. The camera is flexible but complex and in some ways unintuitive. I can easily imagine that many inexperienced photographers would also struggle figuring out what had happened. To be fair to the camera, the same usability issues also afflict most other cameras. Manufacturers love features but they give little attention to usability, unfortunately. And to be fair to myself as the author, I was the first to hold my hand up and point out the problem was user error in my article.
The problem with lens freezing after being knocked is not a problem we experienced prior to the trip. Certainly in normal everyday use, I think it is unlikely to happen. It’s has never happened when I’ve used the camera. However, a safari is a specialised event. A dozen people squeezed into the back of ancient landrovers, packed like sardines. Driving over dirt tracks and off road. All clutching camera gear, being bounced around, jolted and shaken. The gear was being knocked about constantly. Power operated lenses are not made for that, they have sensors to detect lens obstruction and shut the camera down to protect the lens motor. In this case, the sensitivity of the sensor was too high for safari conditions. Based on her experience, I would now think twice about using a camera with a motor powered lens in rough conditions, especially where you need instant responsiveness from your camera and can’t afford to have it constantly freezing. Manual zoom is better here, I think. I think if you’d experienced the same issue, you would agree, too 🙂
I find the critique of the FZ1000 to be more a user error than camera shortcomings list. The lense is slow to zoom compared to manual zooms but it was when you and I bought it and that is the nature of a 400mm zoom. Faster than changing a lense for sure! However did you turn on zoom resume in the menu?I don’t use that feature because when I carry my FZ1000 on a neck strap turned off I can turn it on at my waist and bring the viewfinder to my eye and the camera is ready to go with the zoom atmy finger tip. Your criticism of the camera “… went to a default exposure setting that was wrong (badly underexposed) and required resetting before the camera was usable” is absurd; forgive me but the joy and irrtation of digital photography is the total customization not available to us in the film era (which i do not miss one bit). Therefore to take advantage of a camera with seven customization screens and five function buttons will take more thna a couple of minutes. The FZ1000 is every bit as customizable as any Panasonic ILC camera and but it does require the user to study and learn and understand. Or sticking to the P setting and learn to dial exposure compensation and be done. Ai cuts the zoom down too much for distance shooting. I think it is a lot to ask that dials on the camera be visible at night as though it really were a $3,000 ILC body.
The delicacy in use I have not found with mine though I struggle to envision what level of rough and tumble safari you took to cause your camera but not yourself some jumbled insides. I have taken it everywhere, indeed I have fallen on it on the trail and i am a well nourished American so imagine that; and I have used it in the rain, on the water and just about anywhere you might drag a camera or green eggs and ham.
Nobody pays me for my pictures so I take photos for myself of course and as the saying goes you pays your money and you takes your choice. $500 for an all in one with stabilization, customization, zoom and a voracious appetite for batteries in a 1.8 pound package seems a bit hard done by in this review.
Some very nice captures. Someday I’ll get the opportunity to visit. Shooting with a camera is wonderful, preserving the beauty of the other animals we share the earth with. With a gun, it just seems like senseless murder. When will people learn this? Thanks for showing how beautiful these animals are. I’m glad you are enjoying your camera.