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The lens on the TZ10 is commendable: it's a 25mm ultra wideangle LEICA DC VARIO ELMAR with 12x optical zoom.
That's a massive reach of 25 - 300mm, giving you maximum shooting versatility on a lens that doesn't even protrude especially.
A brilliant high quality lens by Leica and the image stabilisation works very well, even at the longest end of the zoom. The 25mm focal length gives a very nice wide angle of view, you won't want to go back to a standard zoom once you've used this.
GPS tagging
Second only to the formidable zoom, the other most wanted feature in the TZ10 is the built-in GPS tagging facility. Turned on (and off) easily via the menu system, this feature records the precise geographic coordinates of the location where you took each shot in the Exif data, along with the local time at which you took the shot.
When using the camera abroad it will automatically adjust to the local time for you. Furthermore, the TZ10 shows the name of the town, area and landmarks (its landmark information bank covers 500,000 points of interest in 73 different countries).
It's a great feature, likely to be a big pull for frequent travellers, which will also make organising your image library easier too.
The screen
A 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD sits on the back of the TZ10, which is extremely bright and sharp. We did have some difficulty with visibility in very bright sunlight, but this is the case with most compact cameras.
Shooting modes
Unlike its brother, the Lumix TZ8, the TZ10 features manual, shutter-priority and aperture-priority modes and therefore is likely to appeal to more serious photographers. The TZ10 also features two scene modes for some customisation of the camera setup and there's also a 'CUST' option, which lets you save up to three different configurations.
Other modes include Panasonic's Intelligent Auto Mode which does everything - optimising everything from ISO and scene setting and turning on face detection (up to 15 faces), image stabilisation and quick auto-focus. This works incredibly well and all of our test pictures taken with IA were well optimised. There are also 32 shooting modes, including soft skin, pin hole and aerial photo.
