9. Panasonic Lumix DMC-L10 Digital SLR Camera

by Barry Gerber

Panasonic’s 10.1 megapixel Lumix DMC-L10 DSLR camera is impressive, from its horizontally and vertically rotatable 2.5” full-time Live View LCD display, to its dust reduction system, face recognition capabilities, variable image aspect ratio settings and lenses by Leica. This update of the company’s DMC-L1 DSLR brings much that is new to the table, making it a great option for holiday gifting.

Until recently, if you needed to take SLR photos in difficult locations, this meant having to buy special viewing extenders. If you wanted to take pictures at ground level without digging yourself a foxhole, you needed a right-angle viewer to bring the image up to the level of your eye. Similarly, if you had to take images while holding the camera over a crowd or other barrier, you had to use a crazy gizmo that projected the image from the camera’s viewfinder onto an LCD screen.

With its rotatable Live View LCD, the Panasonic makes these kinds of images as easy as photographing through a DSLR’s reflex viewfinder. You can see whether the image you are about to take is properly composed and focused-in full color and, most importantly, in real time. A feature that is available on virtually every amateur-level point-and-shoot digital camera has finally made it to DSLRs made by Panasonic and other manufacturers, and not a minute too soon. Panasonic has gone a step further, too, creating dual focusing and auto exposure systems, each specialized for use with either the camera’s standard reflex viewfinder or its Live View LCD.

Because a DSLR’s lenses can be removed and replaced, the image sensor and other parts of the camera can be exposed to dust that might result in reduced image quality. The DMC-L10 uses a supersonic wave dust reduction system that shakes dust off the camera’s digital sensor. Dust control solutions are showing up in a number of DSLRs and this one isn’t all that unique, but it’s nice to see it in a camera with so many other great features.

Face recognition systems first showed up in simpler point-and-shoot digital cameras, and it’s also nice to see them making their way into the DSLR world. Through digital magic, cameras with face recognition technologies find a face or faces in a scene and optimize focusing accordingly. For one face, it’s fairly easy, but with many-especially multiple faces not in the same plane-the camera must compute focus and exposure settings that render every face as sharp as possible. Face recognition works only when the DMC-L10 is used in Live View mode.

Variable image aspect ratio is another feature found in many point-and-shoot cameras, and the DMC-L10 brings this capability to DSLRs. The aspect ratio can be adjusted to 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9, the last of these being perfect for viewing your photos on an HDTV. Finally, this camera uses quality Leica lenses for sharp images.

Like almost any product, Panasonic’s DMC-L10 isn’t perfect. There have been numerous complaints about its fairly small and dim reflex viewfinder, which make it more difficult to check focus. Battery drain in Live View mode is also higher than some users would like. And, some feel the camera is a pricy compared to some of its competitors-around $1,250 at the time of this article’s publication. Still, if you’re looking for a quality DSLR with some state-of-the-art digital photography features, the Panasonic DMC-L10 is certainly worth considering.