Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX1

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Panasonic DMC-FX01 review, find out how the DMC-FX01 stacks up against the competition in our real-world review with in-depth image quality comparisons.

Good things come in small packages.

The world's smallest digital camera with a 28mm lens

The original FX7 was announced in July 2004 and went on to be one of the best-selling cameras of the year thanks to its winning combination of cool styling, compact dimensions, big screen and image-stabilized Leica lens. This, the fourth incarnation (the FX7 was followed in fairly rapid succession by the FX8 and FX9), is on the face of it another minor facelift, but it does offer something still pretty unique in a camera in this class - a true wideangle zoom, covering a useful 28-102mm (3.6x) zoom range. It is, in fact, the world's smallest camera with a 28mm lens. Other changes (detailed below) include a high sensitivity mode (offering sensitivities of up to 1600) and a new 16:9 widescreen movie mode. What we haven't worked out yet is why it's the FX01, not the FX10 (I suspect a typo early in the production process that was too expensive to fix).

Some good still and video features in a pocketable body but the FX01 lacks key manual controls and an optical viewfinder.The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 is almost identical to the Leica C-Lux 1. Aside from coming in a silver body, which is similar in size and weight to previous FX models, the most obvious difference between the cameras is the finger rest on the front panel of the FX-01. Panasonic supplies a lower-capacity SD card than Leica (although in both cases more memory will be required so this difference is hardly relevant). Leica has the better software bundle.