Final shoot out.... Pictures from Steve's:

Nikon D-70 Top
Panasonic/Leica FZ-20 Bottom

Steve obviously took these in Florida..the Nikon shot was before the hurricane and the Panasonic shot with what's left of the palm trees after it went through . One is a cloudier day than the other. But conditions are close enough for what we are doing...which is speculating anyways.

My humble opinion...if I ever did see two picutres that were about the same... these two certainly fit the bill. Too close to call.

Panasonic's site show the FZ15 and FZ20 to have ED lenses... so my choice is between them. I have a digital movie camera, so the FZ15 not having sound doesn't bother me. The flash makes no difference to me, I could get a slave flash I guess if I really needed one, I have never used flashes before all my pictures are outdoors at boat races and pokerruns. The only difference to me is 4 and 5 megapixel.... will the 4 look good printing 8x10??? I went and used bothe camera's today and can't tell the difference... by the way the burst mode on these cameras is awesome...my wife even liked it.

here are the pictures... fz15 here
the flag view is hand held at 12x zoom

Ernie

this is the FZ15... the camera's were set exactally the same... images at 1280.... and I have never used them before so these are auto..

Ernie

I'm more confused now then ever between the stores and this board shopping for cameras

Think they look good, the problem I have run into is being able to crop a subject and still maintain the quality for large prints. Just some input.

Pictures look very good in those huge buildings and shows the lens is very fast and the built in flash powerful. Adding a Sunpak 383 for a huge room like that would really light it up even more. The lens is very sharp.

The FZ-20 also has a feature of being able to save pictures uncompressed in a TIFF file. The D-70 can save in a RAW format. Now TIFF (RGB) and RAW are huge files (aprox. 25mb or so). They allow for tons of cropping before reducing to a file size for uploading or printing. the FZ-15 may only store in the compressed jpeg file mode. That is a huge difference if you do cropping.

A disadvantage of storing in TIFF on an FZ-20 is you can "only" get 60 pictures on my 1GB SD card. In the lightly compressed mode you get 400 pictures. The upside is a 60x 1GB card only costs $70.00 now.

I didn't know they went to Ed glass in the FZ-15 but I am sure you are right.

So if you need to do much cropping you have a reason to go with the FZ-20 instead of the FZ-15. That plus a redesigned ccd then are the differences I believe.

So what were you looking for again....

Panasonic includes ArcSoft software. I analyzed your pic and here is the reprint. Ever so slightly modified in lighting.

I did a crop job too...sorry for playing with your pic!

Played with them a little in photoshop. Will probably always a Canon guy.

Capo you start the best threads...sorry if I hijacked it off the planet..