Really goes overboard talking about this as a hefty camera, and that using the camera is like looking down the barrel of a gun.
It's described as being a very quick-to-respond camera, almost at SLR speed. One clear measure here is the minimum time to power on and shoot a picture, 1.6 seconds.
It offers both very close focusing and a macro mode. Hence the macro mode may be superfluous, however the macro mode is required to do very close focusing at the far end of the zoom range. They detected some softness and chromatic aberration at the corners when shooting at close focus while in the widest angle.
Extremely low barrel distortion.
Found the image stabilization to truly help and produce good results at three or four speed steps beyond the typical slowest shutter speed you would handhold. They cite shots at 420mm zoom at 1/30th of a second which came out fine. Impressive.
They compare it unfavorably with the Canon Powershot S3 IS, their current favorite of the ultrazooms. This Lumix doesn't quite unseat the S3.
This is the successor camera to the FZ20 and FZ30, a high end ultrazoom digital camera with 10.1 megapixels resolution and a raft of interesting features. The lens is made by the venerable Leica and is a 12x optical zoom (35-420mm equiv.). While it is not an SLR camera, the feature-set, the construction, and the overall feel is very much like an SLR.
