Panasonic Lumix DMC-SZ9 review

Low-light shots were inevitably much worse, with a syrupy mush of colour making details look vague even when resized to fit a screen. The Intelligent Auto mode took it upon itself to drop the resolution to 7 megapixels in some low-light shots, but to little avail.

Heavy noise reduction has obliterated fine details and struggles to cope with high-contrast lines – click to enlarge

The camera switched to 7 megapixels here, but while there’s less visible grain, details have been smeared to smithereens – click to enlarge

We’re none too impressed by Intelligent Auto mode’s insistence on including digital zoom to extend the 10x optical zoom range to 20x. Details were already pretty vague without it, and with it they looked downright ugly. Intelligent Auto also includes an automatic HDR mode, taking two exposures and blending them to capture more highlight and shadow detail. However, shadows looked even messier, and with occasional weird double-exposure problems and eight seconds to process each shot, it’s more trouble that it was worth. At least it can be disabled in the menu.

Shooting into the sun has predictably made this photo too dark… – click to enlarge

The iHDR mode comes to the rescue by combining two exposures, but details are a bit of mess – click to enlarge

Double exposure problems like this were thankfully relatively rare – click to enlarge

Otherwise, performance was excellent, taking less than two seconds to switch on and shoot, and 0.8 seconds between subsequent shots. Continuous shooting was at 5fps, although it slowed to 0.9fps after just three frames. The SZ7 was better here. The ability to refocus between shots in continuous mode is a rare treat at this price.

Videos were excellent too, with sharp details, flattering colours, smooth autofocus and effective stabilisation at the long end of the zoom. The AVCHD modes are odd, though, with both the 1080-50i and 720-50p encoding taken from a 25p source, so neither actually contains 50fps video. The MP4 modes are more accurately labelled.

We love the idea of a 10x zoom and sophisticated Wi-Fi functions in a slim metal camera for under £200. The SZ9’s appeal is diminished by its sensor, though. Zoom function aside, image quality isn’t much better than the best smartphones. With lots of other similarly specified cameras on the horizon, we’d be tempted to wait to see if any can deliver better image quality.