[polorlboi83]

UZ .... HELP!!!? Hey, I need to buy a cam for a present with a very high optical zoom and these are thr 2 cams im contemplating. They seem the same to me except the olympus has some special editing feature and also is 100 bucks more expensive. Could someone that knows about cameas tell me which one is better regardless of the price OR could you suggest another non SLR high zoom, high quality cam for me to buy? Thanks

[Landaree]

The three of them (Panasonic FZ18, Olympus SP-560 and Fujifilm S8000fd) are overall fairly similar, mainly because of their huge 18x, wide-angle, optically stabilized zooms and their smallish sensors. I’d say the Panasonic has slightly better optical quality, the Fujifilm a slightly better image processing, and the Olympus would be in-between. But considering that the Fujifilm doesn’t offer RAW, that the Olympus uses only its proprietary xD picture card format, and that the Panasonic’s OIS (optical stabilizer) is the best of the three (the other two being the CCD-shift variety), I’d go with the Panasonic.































[url=http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonicFZ18/http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/FujifilmS8000fd/]www.dpreview.com[/url]