Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX60: Special FX

It's a big day for Panasonic: today sees the unveiling of a passel of new cameras. The Lumix DMC-FX60 is the safe pair of hands of the bunch, an assuredly elegant if understated 12.1-megapixel follow-up to the FX40.

Despite being a svelte compact, the FX60 pushes the envelope of compact lenses, with a large 5x optical zoom. The Leica lens is a whopping 25mm wide angle, equivalent to a 35mm camera. This means your pictures will be wider, so you can fit in more of those sweeping vistas -- or if we're more realistic, you'll just have to work harder to crop the creepy chap from accounts out of the edge of those dreadful group shots from work dos.

Like the FP8, FZ38 and ZX1 also announced today, the FX60 features power OIS to deal with camera shake and keep your pictures blur-free. Face recognition not only recognises faces you've programmed into the camera, but will label the screen with up to three names. Clever.

There's the usual plethora of scene modes, including two different baby modes. A creditable 2.3 frames per second at 12.1-megapixel full resolution in burst mode impressed us, and we're also keen to get our hands on the flash burst mode, which fires continuous blasts of flash. We'll be putting all these features through their paces in a full review before you can say "clever compact".

Click continue to see more of this svelte snapper.

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