Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500: Sweet like chocolate

These PR images sadly don't give us much in the way of scale, but we reckon the Panasonic FX500 looks pocketable. That there lens is a double whammy of transparent optical device goodness: it's a 5x zoom, so good for looking at things just that little bit further away, and even better, it's a 25mm wide angle focal length.

The average compact packs the equivalent of 35mm or 38mm, as compared to a 35mm camera, which in chocolate terms is a Kit Kat. Some compacts, such as the Ricoh R7 and R8 and the Casio EX-Z100 are 28mm, which is like a Kit Kat Chunky. So at 25mm, the FX500 -- and the lower-spec FX35 -- are like solid-chocolate lucky Kit Kats.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about glass -- that's what proper people what do photography call lenses -- may be concerned that such wide angles produce distortion. Very wide angle lenses produce the famous fisheye effect, in fact. Fortunately, Panasonic's usual collaborator Leica has put an unevenly thick concave meniscus extra-high refractive index aspherical (EA) lens on to the FX500 to keep distortion to a minimum. Yeah, we said it.

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