Panasonic DMC FX9 review

It's hard to pinpoint exactly why the FX9 makes those who see it coo with excitement.

It's partly down to the sumptuous matt black finish and partly the bright 2.5" screen, which makes photos look rich and beautiful. The camera is extremely compact, too - it's barely taller than the height of its screen. A couple of design flourishes on the front and back ensure that it's comfortable enough to operate with one hand.

The other thing that makes this camera ideal for impromptu snappers is its optical image stabilisation. Panasonic's Mega OIS dramatically improves the sharpness of pictures taken in low light, at telephoto zoom settings or at times when you have only one hand free. We found that it frequently made the difference saving pictures that would otherwise have been too blurry.

In use, the FX9 oozes quality, with a fast auto-focus and a two-second interval between shots, which increases to four seconds with the flash enabled. A burst mode captures shots indefinitely at 1.1fps, or a succession of six at 2fps, all at the top 6-mexapixel resolution. With such a quick camera, you'll never have to miss another fast-moving shot again.

However, pressing the Menu button reveals that this is very much an instant rather than an enthusiast's camera. It provides white balance, ISO speed and auto-focus options, and even a choice of 4:3 (PC desktop), 3:2 (35mm film) and 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratios, but none of the manual control options serious photographers would expect. For the point-and-click photographer it'll do the job, but if you're looking to get serious about your photography you'll soon hit its limits.

Auto bracketing is available, which takes shots up to +/-1 stops either side of the camera's automatic exposure calibration to give you a wider dynamic range and a choice of images. It didn't always work as we expected, though, and the supposedly overexposed picture often looked exactly the same as the normal one. At least the scene modes provide a way of achieving long exposure times for low-light photography without the flash: Night Scenery mode ranges from to eight seconds and Starry Night offers a choice of 15-, 30- or 60-second exposures. However, in these modes other settings, such as white balance presets, are unavailable so you'll have to make these adjustments in your photo editing application once you have imported the image into your PC.

Image quality was always decent but rarely exceptional. Outdoor shots tended to be a little undersaturated, which made skin tones in particular appear slightly dreary. It handled high-contrast scenes well, brightly exposing the foreground without bleaching out the sky. The camera performed best when using its flash, which illuminated subjects up to three metres away. However, at this and further distances flash photography suffered from a painted effect that appeared to be the result of over-zealous noise reduction. Indoor photography without the flash was often underexposed and suffered from the same painted effect, except when we used the Night Scenery mode to achieve a long exposure.

Despite our complaints, it's fair to say that the FX9's pictures were usually up to scratch, which, for a camera at this price, means they were excellent. However, the camera itself is likely to receive more admiring glances than the pictures it takes. We still can't help but to warm to it, but those who are looking for a camera that doubles as a fashion accessory are better off with Casio's EX-S500.