Gadgetory

greetings Mike Pearlman here for TechnoBuffalo reporting from my office today's review is the panasonic lumix DMC gs-15 if you're wondering what I'm drinking in this mug it's not tea today it's lemon ginger echinacea juice stay tuned to find out if the CS 15 has what it takes to make a splash in the entry-level point-and-shoot market hello everyone and welcome to my review of the panasonic lumix DMC gs-15 if anyone out there has a cold echinacea is nature's remedy moving on the panasonic lumix DMC is ES 15 is the company's entry-level higher-end entry-level point-and-shoot camera so this shares a lot of features with the zs 20 but it keeps the price down this is a $280 camera well start with design the Lumix zs series is known for being very basic and plain on the outside if you took a zs camera from 2006 and told me it was a 2012 model i wouldn't think twice about it really Panasonic the only thing that they've done over the years is slimmed down the size a bit and swap a few buttons here and there but if you look at the external design we still have old-fashioned switches and dials that throw us into camera and playback mode there's a small mode dial there's a static four-way directional pad without any sort of circular control and we have a basic 3-inch 460,000 pixel display now underneath this camera houses an 895 milliamp hour battery it did not give me the best battery life and there's a wimpy built-in flash up top here but one of the great things about this ES 15 is that it has a profound 16x optical zoom reach for the skies baby the lens also has a 25 millimeter wide angle capability which means you could fit a lot more into your shots but overall the design of the zs 15 is very basic now as far as shooting features on the GS 15 most shooters who buy this camera are gonna be throwing it into intelligent auto mode and this camera has a great auto mode although the GS 15s automotives not as robust as something like the Canon Powershot SX 260 HS is it still gets the job done we have a few nifty features like intelligent handheld night shot there's also intelligent HDR this camera has face recognition and for the most part I found auto mode to be the safest mode to shoot in if you're going to venture outside of intelligent auto mode this camera has a fantastic burst shooting mode you can shoot up to 10 frames per second at full solution and there's even a 60 frames-per-second mode at reduced resolutions manual mode is fairly standard with a 15 second shutter speed ISO that goes up to 3200 and there's a super limited aperture range with this camera it only goes from F 3.3 to F 5.9 of course there are a bunch of scene modes on the GS 15 and the camera has great creative controls with things like high dynamic range low key high key shooting toy camera and retro to name a few you could also shoot video HD video in those modes as well I did run into a few speed bumps with these ES 15 when it came to shooting features first off this camera is a bit slow it's a bit slow to zoom while you're recording videos it's a bit slow to autofocus as well also the manual white balance is a terrible system on this camera rather than evaluating the scene and having the camera make internal adjustments you have to rely on a warm cool slider to get the job done I found the SX 268 just to be superior when it came to adjusting white balance also shooting features in video mode were very limited overall the Lumix DMC SES 15 offers a basic menu of shooting features and now image quality image quality with the Panasonic Lumix DMC SES 15 the zs lineup has always given me great image quality throughout the years the CS 15 is no exception especially in bright light this camera is great in bright light in both videos and stills it has a 12.1 megapixel high sensitivity most sensor which is the same technology found in the higher priced as ES 20 and FZ 150 as you'll see in my bright light samples in the full review on TechnoBuffalo comm the quality the macro quality the colors I found to be better than the canon powershot sx60 HS just by a hair however when the lights turned low so did the quality on this camera it was a lot harder with that manual white balance to get a good accurate color reading in low-light I was impressed with the high ISO performance but what good is that when your pictures all look yellow or red also exposure in video mode in low light was very low I found it lower than the Powershot SX 2 6 th s's a lot of the times what I had to do was select incandescent white balance mode and use a long shutter so can you get that quality in low light with the CS 15 yes you can but it takes a lot more to do so so what's the buffalo call with the panasonic lumix DM CZs 15 this camera is a good camera I like its bright LED image quality it's got a great optical zoom and it's got some essential shooting features that will really help a lot of shooters out there however I think you could get a better deal on last year's Canon Powershot SX 230 HS if you're not sure about the Canon either I should be getting some Sony's in pretty soon check out the full review at TechnoBuffalo calm I've got image samples and video samples I'm Mike Perlman for TechnoBuffalo drink your echinacea kids I'll see you later I'm Noah Kravitz rumor roundup round in the