Panasonic Lumix has today announced a batch of new compact and superzoom camera models today. I was able to spend a couple of days in sunny Lisbon, Portugal, earlier in the month using two of the new models, perhaps the pick of the crop; the DMC-FZ38 bridge camera, and the DMC-ZX1 compact with 8x zoom and AVCHD Lite HD video recording.

In this article, we'll preview the FZ38. You can see our ZX1 preview in the previous article. Both articles offer a captioned pictorial tour of the camera in question, plus a gallery of 30+ sample images taken with the respective cameras. We have been asked by Panasonic to restrict the size of the sample images to 640x480 (VGA) because the cameras we used were pre-production units. I personally feel that this was an unnecessary precaution on the part of Panasonic as the pictures look very good in full resolution, and printed to A2, but you will just have to trust me on that!

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Click on a thumbnail below to see a larger captioned version of the picture...

Click on a thumbnail below to see a larger captioned version of the picture.

Please note that Panasonic requested we only published these samples resized to 640x480 as image quality from the pre-production sample cameras we had was not final.