The Lumix TZ8 and TZ10 are a treasure trove of wonders for photographers who love to travel. Compact and lightweight, they feature versatile Leica zooms with 25-300 mm focal lengths, record HD video and have manual controls for thoughtful users.
12.1 MP 25-300 12 x 2.7″ $390, 3.0″ $480
In addition, the older TZ10 is equipped with a built-in satellite positioning system module and stores the coordinates of the places where the photos were taken in the EXIF-header the camera knows 173 countries and more than half a million landmarks .
The intelligence of the cameras has increased compared to previous generations of cameras. For example, the face detection system can now use three sample shots, increasing the accuracy of identifying people known to the camera in the frame.
The renewed proprietary Venus Engine provides high-speed performance: the shutter lag is less than 0.006 seconds and the quick focus “catches” the subject in 0.4 seconds.
With the new processor is also a new and curious technology Intelligent Resolution, through which the electronics in the processing of photos learned to separate the boundaries of objects, the areas of texture filling and more homogeneous areas with smooth tonal transitions, and then process and improve them separately, thus achieving excellent clarity and “silence” images. The same technology extends the zoom range by about 1.3 times “lossless”.
Another uncommon, but interesting peculiarity of these novelties is that both cameras are in fact equipped with sensors with a resolution of more than 14 megapixels, but only 12 megapixels are available for shooting: in this unconventional way the developers solved the problem of choosing the format of the frame you can set the aspect ratio of 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 without losing resolution.
The cameras differ from each other in display and video recording format. Both save videos at 1280×720 pixels, but TZ10 uses the advanced AVCHD Lite format and has a little more built-in video processing , while TZ8 can only save data in the regular QuickTime Motion JPEG format. TZ8 has a slightly easier display – 2.7 inches at 230k. Dots vs. 3 inches with 460k resolution. The Lumix TZ10.
How does the new face detection system in the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ8/DMC-TZ10 compact cameras using three sample shots increase accuracy? Is it primarily due to better image recognition algorithms or is there another underlying technology at play?