Charlie Sorrel
Panasonic's New Lumix Camera Packs WiFi And Free T-Mobile Access
Another day, another compact camera announcement. This time it's Panasonic, which is faithfully following the industry-wide tradition of releasing new models with tiny, almost unknowable feature differences. The DMC-TZ50 is not much more than a TZ5 with added WiFi. The twist is that the camera comes with access to T-Mobile's Hotspots, which means there's about […]
Another day, another compact camera announcement. This time it's Panasonic, which is faithfully following the industry-wide tradition of releasing new models with tiny, almost unknowable feature differences. The DMC-TZ50 is not much more than a TZ5 with added WiFi.
The twist is that the camera comes with access to T-Mobile's Hotspots, which means there's about to be a whole lotta pictures of coffee shops up on the web. The service sends direct to Google's Picasa photo service, although we'd have preferred Flickr.
One year of T-Mobile service is included in the price, and that year begins the first time you access the network to upload (the offer expires on August 31st 2009). It's also possible to browse your online library direct from the camera, a neat antidote for those people who never upload their pictures to a computer and always use the camera itself for slideshows.
The TZ50 includes everything else you'd expect in a 2008 digicam: face detection, auto ISO shift and automatic scene selection (the camera guesses what you are snapping and sets the exposure mode for you). The $450 cam has a 9.1MP sensor, a 28mm (135 equivalent) lens, a 10x optical zoom and records video in HD.
The TZ50 shows us where the industry is heading. The megapixel war is all but played out, and manufacturers need new gimmicks. These are the Gadget Lab predictions for camera trends in the next year:
WiFi. You'll start to see it everywhere, if it's not incorporated in the hardware then perhaps cameras will ship bundled with an Eye-Fi SD card.
GPS. Somebody like Eye-Fi will work out how to put faux-GPS, or WiFi access point triangulation, onto a memory card and then GPS will explode. Currently, connecting to satallite signals is slow and costly in terms of battery drain.
High ISO. Nikon's D3 and D300 SLRs both have stunning low light performance. Expect this to trickle down.
No Shutter Lag. This is a wish more than a prediction. Almost all compact digital cameras are hopeless in this regard, and the delay between pressing the button and snapping the picture makes action and portrait photography almost impossible.
Did I miss anything? What do you see creeping into the mainstream this year?
Press release [Panasonic]
Topicscameras