The Lumix TZ60 / ZS40 inherits the built-in GPS receiver of its predecessor, which allows it to record location and time details for each image and store them in the standard EXIF header. These can then be cross-referenced by a built-in database of landmarks to display location information; you can of course also use the location details to plot your position on mapping software on your computer later. Okay so let’s start with establishing a connection between the camera and a smartphone or tablet. NFC or not, the first thing you’ll need to do is install the free Lumix Image app, available for iOS or Android devices. Next you’ll need to enable Wifi on your phone or tablet and if you’re intending to use NFC, you’ll also need to enable this on your phone / tablet.

Of course this ‘always-on’ approach raises concerns over battery consumption, but the TZ60 / ZS40 is intelligent enough to stop the search under a number of conditions. If positioning has not been successful for two hours after power-off, it’ll give up. Likewise if the camera’s not been switched on for three hours, it’ll stop the search. And if the battery indicator falls to one bar, it’ll automatically stop searching to prevent itself from running down. These images show 72ppi (100% on a computer screen) sections of images of a resolution chart, captured using the Leica 24-720mm (equivalent) lens set to 45mm and f/5.6. We show the section of the resolution chart where the camera starts to fail to reproduce the lines separately. The higher the number visible in these images, the better the camera’s detail resolution at the specified sensitivity setting. Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60 review – White balance and colour Other video features include snap movie, which records a short clip of between two and eight seconds in length. With snap movies you can set up a focus pull in advance tapping the screen to define the start and end focus positions, which is pretty neat. You can also add a monochrome to colour fade in our out effect, as well as a simple exposure fade. There’s are also Time Lapse and Stop Motion modes, accessed through the main menus rather than the movie options. Panasonic recommends using a UHS-I Speed Class 3 (U3) SD card for the 100Mbit 4K UHD and High Speed Video modes and a Speed Class 4 card for everything else. Note the TZ80 / ZS60 does not offer CineLike profiles for later grading, but then I can’t imagine many people wanting this capability on this type of camera. The Canon PowerShot SX700 HS is a major competitor to the Lumix TZ60 / ZS40 and on the surface the two models share a lot of similarities. Both have 30x zoom lenses (with slightly different ranges), and they both have 3 inch screens with similar resolution, neither of which is touch-sensitive, Panasonic having dropped that feature from its latest flagship travel zoom. They are almost identically sized, though the SX700 HS is a little bigger and heavier, and both come with built-in Wifi and NFC. The Lumix TZ60 / ZS40 also has a built-in GPS, though you can use your smartphone to tag images on the SX700 HS with geopositional data. It’s also worth noting that the Panasonic app is more sophisticated than the Canon one and offers better remote shooting and image transfer options.

Although there are no colour profiles available, the TZ60 does feature a wealth of filters and scene modes. In creative control mode, users can select one of 15 different filters, including sepia, cross-processing and – my favourite – dynamic monochrome. These can also be added to images post-capture using the retouch menu. Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60 review – Viewfinder, live view, LCD and video

is interesting on the TZ80 / ZS60 for several reasons, not least because it’s one of the first times we’ve tested it on a camera with a small 1/2.3in sensor. The Lumix TZ80 / ZS60 starts with a sensor resolution of 4896×3672, from which it takes what appears to be a 1:1 crop to generate a 4k UHD frame. To illustrate the difference in coverage I compared actual 4k footage I filmed with the TZ80 / ZS60 against still photos when using the same lens setting and position. In the image below, the 4k coverage is indicated by the outer edge of the red frame, resulting in a not insignificant reduction in the field of view; indeed when filming 4k video, the equivalent range is cropped from 24-720mm to 33-990mm – good news at the long-end, but you lose quite a bit of coverage at the wide-end.The remote control feature shows a live image on your phone or tablet’s screen allowing you to take a photo or start or stop a video recording. You can tap anywhere on the live image to set the AF area or directly take the shot. If the camera’s mode dial is set to Aperture or Shutter Priority, you can remotely adjust the aperture or shutter speed respectively, and in Manual you can change both. You can also choose whether to copy images in their original resolution, or in one of two smaller versions. It typically took about 6 seconds to copy an original JPEG from the camera to my iPhone 6 from a distance of about 1m; it’s not possible to copy RAW files though. If you want to capture video at the full sensor width, you’ll need to reduce the quality to 1080, although there’s obviously a vertical crop due to the different aspect ratios – 16:9 against 4:3. Here’s how the TZ80 / ZS60 crop looks for 4k video, below left, compared to 1080p video, below right.

The remote control feature is really neat, showing a live image on your phone or tablet’s screen and allowing you to take a photo or start or stop a video. You can drag a slider to zoom the motorised lens and even tap anywhere on the live image to set the focus to that area or directly take the shot – giving the TZ60 / ZS40 the touch-screen capabilities it always deserved. If the camera’s mode dial is set to Aperture or Shutter Priority, you can remotely adjust the aperture or shutter speed respectively, and in Manual you can change both. Confused? You might be, but if it makes it easier, the HX50V continues to be the flagship model for North America, while everyone else has the choice of last year’s HX50V or the updated HX60V. Either way, both are key rivals to the Lumix TZ60 / ZS40, so let’s see how the features compare. I’ll refer to the Sony now on as the HX50V / HX60V and mention any differences where relevant. Both the Panasonic and Sony provide a good range of movie choices, with a 1080p 50/60 best quality HD mode, enhanced stabilisation (particularly so with the newer HX60V) and movies with filter effects. The Panasonic also offers a couple of slow motion modes.

Panasonic Lumix TZ60 / ZS40 final verdict

Both models have 18 Megapixel resolution, 1080 video at 50p or 60p, slow motion video at up to 100fps in 720p, built-in Wifi with NFC and built-in GPS receivers with a landmark database. In its favour, the new TZ60 / ZS40 has a longer 30x / 24-720mm zoom range (vs 20x / 24-480mm), a built-in viewfinder, twin control dials, support for RAW and focus peaking. But it’s not all one-sided. The older TZ40 / ZS30 has a touch-screen allowing you to tap to reposition the AF area, and built-in mapping, albeit basic compared to what we’re used to on smartphones. It’s also smaller, lighter and around half the price. New to both the TZ80 / ZS60 and TZ100 / ZS100 is 4k Live Cropping which exploits the resolution of a 4k frame to provide a digital pan and zoom feature at 1080p resolution. You specify the start and end of the clip by tapping the screen to position a 1920×1080 sized frame. You can also set the overall time of the clip to either 40 or 20 seconds. The degree of zoom is limited to the full 4k frame at the wide end to the 1920×1080 frame at the ‘zoomed-in’ end to maintain quality. It’s a neat feature which, once again, makes innovative use of the camera’s 4k resolution to make life easier, particularly if you need a super-smooth panning shot, but don’t have a suitable tripod. You can see what the results look like in my video sample below. Despite a bright display and an anti-reflective coating, the 3in, 920,000-dot screen struggled in the extremely bright sunlight of the Mojave Desert, and it was awkward to compose images. In more subdued daylight the screen was fine, with good colours and a pleasing level of contrast. Panasonic Lumix TZ60: Build and handling Like Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-HX50, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60 uses a 30x zoom lens. The lens on the DMC-TZ60 is a Leica DC Vario-Elmar 4.3-129mm f/3.5-6.4 zoom, the equivalent of an incredible 24-720mm in 35mm format. Indeed, the zoom range of this lens goes from being wide to an extreme telephoto in just a couple of seconds. To put the capabilities to the test I fitted the TZ60 / ZS40 with a freshly formatted SanDisk 16GB UHS-1 SD card and timed various bursts. Starting with the 5fps mode and the quality set to 18 Megapixel Fine JPEG, I fired-off six frames in 1.37 seconds, corresponding to a speed of 4.4fps; after this initial burst the camera slowed to about 2.5fps. Moving up to the 10fps mode, again with 18 Megapixel Fine JPEG quality, I fired-off six shots in 0.44 seconds, corresponding to a speed of 13.6fps; after this burst the camera stopped recording until the buffer cleared.

While the TZ60’s predecessor – the TZ40 – featured a reasonable 20x optical zoom, the new model increases the zoom by some 50% and now sports a 30x optic. The lens is a Leica DC Vario-Elmar unit and covers a focal range of 24-720mm in 35mm equivalent terms. It’s clear from the views above that filming in the 1080 modes captures a wider field of view, but how does the quality compare? Below are 100% crops made from the 4k footage on the left and the 1080p footage on the right. Note that the 1080p crop on the right shows a larger area with smaller detail not just because of the lower resolution of the 1080p clip, but the wider field of view. What’s interesting about this comparison is that though the detail is larger in the 4k crop on the left, there isn’t more of it, what you can see though is more noise. So though you’re getting more pixels shooting with the TZ80 / ZS60 in 4k video mode, thanks to the noise you’re not really getting more detail or better image quality. I found that sensitivities of ISO 400 and below produce the best results, so for day-to-day shooting I chose to set the ISO to auto and limit it to ISO 400. Between ISO 1600 and the maximum extended ISO 6400, slight colour noise starts to become evident and luminance noise is very noticeable,while, the detail along high-contrast edges becomes jagged and smudgy. Continuing to search while the main camera is switched-off is just one of the aspects which makes Panasonic’s GPS implementation different from some of its rivals. Another is the cross-referencing of co-ordinates against an internal database to display a place name. This region and landmark information may sound like a novelty, but it’s great fun to see places named on-screen, not to mention being useful. Even in familiar places the camera can teach you a thing or two about local landmarks, such as the official names of churches or a sports club you weren’t aware of – and while Panasonic hasn’t provided any specifics on the depth of landmarks beyond the previous model, I certainly noticed some new names coming-up while photographing around the same areas as before.If you’d prefer the camera only searched for its position when it was switched on (to save power or avoid interference in planes), you can enable Airplane mode in a separate menu. The plus-side is knowing exactly when the GPS is operating, but the downside is taking anything up to a few minutes to re-acquire your position from cold. Meanwhile the GPS OFF option really does turn it off altogether. Like other recent Lumix models with 4k video, the TZ80 / ZS60 also supports Panasonic’s 4k Photo mode – a fun way of exploiting the fact 4k video captures an 8 Megapixel image up to 30 times a second. The TZ80 / ZS60 is equipped with software that lets you easily capture bursts of video before scrolling through the footage and extracting the perfect frame as a JPEG image, all in-camera. You could of course frame grab from video externally (and here’s the clip I filmed), but Panasonic has made it easy to perform the whole process in-camera. Above: Lumix TZ80 / ZS60 Post Focus, Aperture Priority, 1/160, f6.1, 200 ISO, -2/3EV 101.7mm (567mm equivalent) Panasonic updates its travel zoom range every year with two new models: a high-end option with all the bells and whistles, and a lower-end one with a simpler specification to come in at a lower price point. In 2014 the flagship is the TZ60 / ZS40, and the cheaper model is the TZ55 / ZS35. On the top surface the TZ60 / ZS40 has a small bulge to accommodate the viewfinder housing alongside stereo microphones, a raised but fairly stiff mode dial, generously sized shutter release with zoom collar, and two buttons, one lozenge shaped for power and the other a red record button to start filming video in any mode. Unlike the Sony HX60V and Canon SX700 HS which both have popup flashes, the Lumix TZ60 / ZS40 has its flash built-into the front surface making it available without an additional press. The Sony HX60V is the only one of the three to feature a hotshoe.