Almost an SLR, almost excellent.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50K has a very long name. It almost qualifies as an Express Review on its own. But that's not what I'm here to do.

The FZ50K is a point-and-shoot camera that has aspirations of being a DSLR. It has a 10 megapixel image sensor, a big zoom lens, and a body with big grips and a large screen that flips down and rotates. The two things that differentiate it from a typical digital SLR is that the lens is not removable and the viewfinder is electronic.

The camera feels good in the hand, and all controls fall easily to the fingers or thumb. The menus are fairly simple and comprehensible. From a usability standpoint, it's quite a good example of making all the complex options in a modern digital camera easy to find, access, and use.

The images are good too, but not quite at the level of an SLR. The image sensor is small and susceptible to noise issues that show up when pictures are viewed at full size. Shooting in RAW mode shows this the most, as all RAW images are accompanied by a JPEG copy of the same image. JPEG compression algorithms tend to smooth out the noise at the expense of some detail, and the JPEG images are auto-corrected for exposure and color balance (with all that automatic correction entails). The RAW images, however, are unprocessed and uncorrected, but again with that noise issue. There's a trade-off, then, and the photographer will have to make that choice.

But then, if you've made the choice to buy this camera instead of some of the less expensive DSLRs out there, you've already made quite a few tradeoffs. The lack of a removable lens and the relatively low resolution of the electronic viewfinder are significant matters, but this camera is not marketed as a full DSLR, so the buyer should already have made that decision. What's one more tradeoff?