Panasonic Lumix FX90 review

Measuring a petite 4.02 x 2.22 x 0.85 inches, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX90 will happily share a pocket with an iPhone, but its 12.1MP sensor will enable you to produce much larger images.

Like an iPhone, the Panasonic Lumix FX90 has a touchscreen. You can tap the 3-inch Smart Touch screen to focus on a particular subject and trigger the shutter once focus is achieved (or you can use the more traditional shutter button if you prefer).

Many of the Panasonic FX90's menu icons are on the small side, and you need to do a fair bit of tapping and dragging to change metering modes or find a suitable focus mode, for example.

Indeed, by the time you've finished rummaging around in the menus to tweak a setting or change to a different mode, the bird may have flown. On the plus side, when shooting in Normal mode you can customise the touchscreen's menu to place some of your favourite icons closer to hand, which speeds things up.

You also have the option of using a stylus, although this feels like a step back when you're familiar with interacting with an iPhone or similar using only a finger.

Although lacking the responsiveness of an iPhone's touchscreen, the FX90's Leica DC Vario-Summarit lens should be able to capture a better-looking picture than a smartphone's lens.

The compact camera's ability to zoom from the equivalent of a wide 24mm to a tight 120mm gives you much more compositional control than you'd get with a smartphone's digital zoom. By offering a wide f-stop of f/2.5, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX90 can produce less noisy results in low light than a typical smartphone camera. You can manually increase the ISO up to 1600 for extra light sensitivity, and still produce decent looking results.