Panasonic FZ cameras - 2013 onwards

In 2013 a friend bought a Panasonic FZ200 and lent it to me for a few days because she wanted me to help her learn to use it. I liked it so much that I decided to buy one for myself. It was my most used camera to date. I wore one out; it had over 110,000 shutter actuations when it finally stopped working (and those were not bursts - very nearly all of them were single, separate presses of the shutter button). In 2015 I bought a second FZ200 and an FZ330 in late 2016, the FZ330 being pretty much identical to (and possibly absolutely the same as) the FZ200 in terms of its lens and sensor, but with some additional functions and customisability.

The FZ200 and FZ330 are small sensor bridge cameras with a 1/2.3" sensor, like the TZ travel cameras. They have a 12 megapixel sensor and a 24X zoom lens (25-600mm full frame equivalent) which has a maximum aperture of f/2.8 throughout its zoom  range. This constant aperture is unusual for cameras of this type, whose maximum aperture usually gets smaller as the focal length increases. For example with the travel cameras at maximum zoom the only apertures you have available are around f/6.3 to f/8. 

Useful as it is to have this constant f/2.8, it is not the same as f/2.8 on a larger camera. It is equivalent to f/8 on a micro four thirds camera and f/16 on a full frame camera. So these are not cameras for those wanting very thin depth of field. However, what the FZ200 and FZ330 have turned out to be particularly useful for is invertebrates, and for that I am looking at as much depth of field as I can get. For invertebrates I almost always use f/8 on my FZ cameras, and that is equivalent to around f/45 on a full frame camera in terms of depth of field (and loss of sharpness/detail from diffraction).

Since getting the FZ200 in 2013 I have used the FZ cameras mainly for invertebrates. Since then I have used other cameras with larger sensors for invertebrates, hoping to improve the image quality, but I couldn't convince myself that I was seeing improvements and I have kept coming back to the FZ200 and FZ330.

I have used the FZs for botanical subjects but although they have produced some quite nice results at times, I felt that I got a bit better image quality (or at least images I liked the look of better) with my larger sensor cameras. 

I rarely use my FZs for botanical subjects now, but they are still my go to kit for invertebrates, especially medium sized invertebrates using flash, mainly with a Raynox 150 close-up lens and always shot as raw. As mentioned later, other kit may be better, or at least just as good, for larger and very small invertebrates, but I don't often photograph either of those.