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Panasonic Lumix is solid choice for digital camera

By Kevin Washington
The Baltimore Sun

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If you've got the money to purchase a 3- or 4-megapixel digital camera, you'll be so much more pleased with the output than if you buy a 2-megapixel offering. In that vein, it's hard not to consider Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FZ10, a 4-megapixel camera ($599) and solid choice for entering the realm of digital photography.

The FZ10 shoots a variety of still images of up to 2,304 x 1,728 pixels as well as digital video in Motion JPEG or QuickTime formats — 30 frames per second or 10 fps with audio — and will capture up to 10 seconds of audio for notes on still images.

It's impressive that the Leica lens looks nothing like the tiny lenses on nonzoom digitals. The zoom is awesome and stable in motion. You get a 12X zoom that ranges from 35-mm to 420-mm in a 35-mm equivalent lens. And it has a constant F2.8 aperture, so you can shoot in some lower-light situations.

A pop-up flash is convenient, but you'll probably prefer to use an external flash if you have one available.

In the box was a 16-megabyte secure digital card, which didn't hold many pictures. You'll want to get more secure digital or multimedia cards if you plan to shoot more than a few photographs before downloading them to a computer via a Universal Serial Bus cable.

My only complaint was that this is another camera with a proprietary lithium ion battery. (I prefer regular or rechargeable AA and AAA batteries.) The lithium takes about 90 minutes to charge up for 120 minutes of use if you don't turn on the LCD screen.

I never found myself running out of juice while shooting. Moreover, an AC adapter can be used with the camera when the juice begins to fade.

Toshiba Satellite A45-S250

Toshiba ($1,650)

www.shoptoshiba.com

You can burn DVDs, hunt for wireless hot spots and view your computer display on a TV screen with Toshiba's new Satellite A45-S250 notebook.

In addition to its DVD burner, wireless connectivity and TV-out port, the notebook also sports a 2.8-gigahertz Intel Mobile Pentium 4 processor, 512 megabytes of memory, a 15-inch display and an Ethernet port for broadband connections. It costs about $1,650.

Don't want to spend that much? Toshiba sells a similar computer, the Satellite A45-S150, for $1,400. This model features a slightly less powerful 2.4-gigahertz processor and a combination DVD reader/CD burner instead of a DVD burner.

The least expensive model, the Satellite A45-S120, costs $1,050 and includes a 2.6-gigahertz Intel Celeron processor, a combination DVD reader/CD burner, 256 megabytes of memory and a 40-gigabyte hard drive.

— Deborah Porterfield

Gannett News Service

BounceBack Professional

CMS Products ($100)

www.cmsproducts.com

The aptly named "BounceBack Professional" software can help you recover key data following a computer meltdown caused by a virus, hard-drive failure or other problem.

With the program, you can back up internal and external drives, swap an external backup drive for a failed internal one, restore individual files and folders from a backup drive, and maintain multiple versions of files.

The title from CMS Products costs about $100 and includes 30 days of free technical support.

— Deborah Porterfield

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company