Interior photography invariably requires a wide-angle view. Unfortunately with wider angle views comes increased barrel distortion (inward bending of straight vertical objects near the corners) because of optical design constraints. Panasonic’s partnership with Leica, the leading lens manufacturer, has produced a camera that meets these requirements. It has a 25mm (focal length equivalent to that on a 35mm film camera) ultra wide-angle Leica DC lens with minimal barrel distortion.

The camera produces images with class-leading low barrel distortion (merely 0.3%, which approaches zero as you zoom in) at the widest angle view zoom setting.

The camera also offers full-featured manual controls 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 Intelligent Exposure function automatically controls the ISO sensitivity. It increases the exposure of only the darkened areas because of backlighting (e.g sunlight coming through windows, etc.) or insufficient flash lighting to capture the scene as you see it by suppressing the extreme brightness and darkness in the picture. The overall image quality is good.