I deal now since a few years with digital photography. I started about 3 years ago with the Voigtlander Virtus W7-compact camera. Great model, as I thought at the time. With increasing interest in photography then I found out that they are not yet quite as great as previously thought: much noise, even at ISO 100 and in daylight, terrible video quality and a very poor battery performance were out of proportion to the 250 Euro which I paid back then. So had to be something new. I have long back and forth about whether it should be a DSLR or Bridge. Finally, I then decided to use the FZ28, because I did not want to change lenses and light weight high regard, as I often have the camera in the mountains here, where every gram counts. I have the camera now for about 7 months and quite a few photo sessions behind me. There are worlds between the Voigtlander and this camera! Great picture quality, very many settings, HD video, good battery life, relatively low noise levels (up to ISO 800 good pictures, in my opinion) and not forgetting of course the powerful zoom and image stabilization. The only real drawbacks are the built-in flash, the scanned people (particularly faces) can look like wax faces (possibly a mistake on my camera?) Makes and really lousy microphone, which summarizes the really good video function unusable (probably fixed now with the successor FZ38 ). But all in all a very complete package, which I can only recommend.
