Product Reviews

The Lumix LS1 isn't as sleek and small as some compacts, but that little extra bulk does makes for a solid grip - and it's still more or less pocket-sized. It has no optical viewfinder, but the LCD viewing panel at the back is big enough to show a fair amount of detail.

The Panasonic is quick to start up, with snappy focusing and only a couple of seconds' lag between each shot. It slows down a little in low light, where the auto-focus can be a bit sluggish - it has no projected light to aid the more difficult job of focusing in dim interiors.

A dial on the top of the camera offers the usual modes - movie, macro and auto ('Normal'). There's also a scene selector, which provides access to a number of presets such as 'party' and 'night landscape'. It would have been nice to have some of these presets on the dial, rather than having to scroll through menus on the LCD screen.

That said, 'Normal' picture mode rarely gets an exposure wrong. And if a shot does prove tricky, Normal mode offers additional fine-tuning you won't find on most compacts.

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You can select from four focus patterns (though there's no manual focus); and choose ISO sensitivities.

Skin tones look natural in Normal mode, and you can adjust colour balance using presets or by setting your own 'white point'.

The Panasonic offers no manual control over shutter speed or aperture - instead, there's a basic 'exposure compensator'.

Images are largely free of noise and colour fringing, especially at the lowest ISO setting of 64. More noise is evident at around ISO 200, and it gets very bad at ISO 400. Provided you don't stick to simple mode, you can prevent the camera from selecting higher ISO settings, and use the image stabiliser to keep images sharp at these lower sensitivities. At low sensitivity settings, the flash did seem a little underpowered.

Macro mode focuses at distances down to almost 4cm, and resolves impressive detail.

But perhaps the camera's most impressive trick is OIS - 'optical image stabilising'- which helps to minimise camera shake.

Battery life is reasonable - and if your batteries ran down, an economy mode helps to squeeze out a few last shots. You can also conserve power by dimming the LCD screen.

The camera comes with just 14MB of internal memory, so you'll need to budget for an SD memory card). It's worth getting some rechargeable batteries, too.

The Lumix offers decent quality with reasonable manual control. If you don't think you need its image stabilising function, you could save cash by going for FujiFilm's Finepix E500. If on the other hand, looks matter to you, you could trade in the Panasonic for the classier (and pricier) Nikon S1.