The latest super-zoom from Panasonic, the Panasonic FZ28 packs an 18x zoom lens with a wide-angle view.

Despite such an ambitious zoom range, the lens produces minimal barrel distortion (merely 0.2%) at the wide end of zoom and retains good corner-to-corner sharpness.

The camera also offers full-featured manual controls including a RAW mode and a useful Aperture Priority mode (i.e. one can set the lens aperture while the camera decides on the other parameters). Frequently, small f/8 settings are used to improve the depth of field, which is a required feature for photographing interiors to have a sharp focus everywhere.

The RAW mode is a desirable feature for photographing interiors because one can remove color cast (artificial lighting can cause superimposition of unsightly blue, orange, or even green color casts on image) by adjusting the white balance (process of removing unrealistic color casts) later during the image conversion to a more popular image format (e.g. JPG or TIFF) with the supplied software.

If one doesn’t want the hassles of RAW mode then there is color temperature display that makes it easier to set the white balance more accurately, and a color bracket function too.

Its Intelligent Exposure function brightens up blocked shadows and suppresses blown highlights to capture images that look natural. It now features an automatic backlight compensation function that activates whenever the camera detects that the light source is behind the subject. This is useful when the effect of Intelligent Exposure is not enough due to the strong backlighting through windows, etc. The overall image quality is good.