My New Camera（我的新相機）

When I opened my little laptop in the morning of my birthday, this cute paper camera welcomed me instead of my laptop keyboard. On her back, David wrote, “Good for one camera of your choosing.” The timing couldn’t have been any better! My beloved 4-year-old Fujifilm FinePix F10d had been having trouble of writing to its xD card and prohibiting me from taking any photos. (Amazon.com was out of 2GB xD cards and won’t be able to ship mine until next week.) Now all I needed to do was to find the perfect camera!

But, boy, it was a tough job! I was really torn between Panasonic Lumix MDC-ZS3 and Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR… But in the end, I went with Panasonic. I decided that I would bet on Panasonic’s low light shooting ability and go for its amazing lens (25mm – 300mm!! Oh my!). And, voilà, here it was! This was taken by my humble iPhone. Even though I had cleaned its negligible lens, it still gave me this weird hollow effect. Oh well.

So did it work as what everyone said? First, the indoor photos (to be more precise, food photos) that I worried the most, because I was not a fan of applying flash. I was so relieved when I saw the photo! I took this one with its Food mode without flash.

Panasonic Lumic ZS3 has 27 scenic modes, since it has very little manual controls (which I rarely use anyway). The one was taken without any scenic mode setting (I couldn’t remember if this was the normal setting or the Intelligent Auto setting):

And this one was with its Sunset mode:

The colors were richer when the Sunset mode was on, but it was also darker.

So far I was quite impressed by my new camera. I would test it more tomorrow and show you its powerful lens. Stay tuned!

P.S. I have to say that the photos are nowhere close to their original ones. Their original ones are just stunning!