Overview:
Although the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is a point and shoot camera it has some features allowing you to adjust the settings. However, the camera does such a good job in most conditions in auto mode that most users are unlikely to make use of them. The camera has a face detection system which can ‚remember’ some faces and focuses on those fast. There are more nice features packed on Panasonic Lumix ZS3 but to learn about those you will have to read about it below.

Panasonic Lumix ZS3 pros:
+ Very good photo quality
+ Optical image stabilization
+ Packs a 12X zoom, 25 – 300 mm lens into a small, well-built package
+ Good battery life
+ Great 3-inch LCD display with excellent resolution and visibility
+ Very little barrel distortion

Panasonic Lumix ZS3 cons:
- No optical viewfinder
- Can’t adjust white balance in scene modes
- The camera could have more manual controls

The design:
Panasonic Lumix ZS3 measures 103 x 60 x 33 mm and weighs 219 grams. The camera features 3” LCD screen, 12x optical zoom lens and a lens cover. The camera is made of high quality materials and handles very well. The buttons and controls are well placed and responsive. The front of the camera is dominated by the 12x zoom Leica lens, whereas the back features mainly the 3” LCD screen. The screen works in 460,000 resolution and is almost perfect: is has great direct sunlight legibility and bight colors. The left side of the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is completely bare, whereas the right side houses I/O ports and a mini-HDMI port. The bottom of Panasonic Lumix ZS3 houses the tripod mount and battery/ memory card compartment.

Performance:
Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is quite snappy. Not only does in allow you to take photos with only pushing one button without setting anything up, but it does it quite efficiently. The camera correctly sets a scene mode, ISO and white balance so you do no need to worry about those. If you are making photos in good lighting conditions it usually takes the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 about 1.5 seconds to get ready to take the next shot. With flash it takes only about 2.5 seconds which is still a very nice score. When you browse photos you can delete one, a group, or all of them which is handy and makes organizing photographs fast.
The camera has a few autofocus modes and so you can choose from 11 point, 1 point, face detection (up to 15 faces) and AF tracking. You also get two burst modes, but here the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 slightly disappoints. The faster one allows you to take only three photos with 2.2 fps.

Image quality:
The images taken with the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 are sharp, with relatively little noise and plenty of detail. The colors are rendered very well, but the photos seem sometimes a bit undersaturated. Only at higher ISO the noise levels get more disturbing but that’s quite usual when you take large photos. The overall image quality is very good.
The Panasonic Lumix ZS3 can also record movies with the maximum resolution of 1280 x 720 and you can choose from two different codecs: AVCHD lite, or the Motion JPEG. The former takes less space and will allow you to record up to 30 minutes of video on a 4GB memory card, whereas the latter only 8 minutes. However, the AVCHD lite is much more difficult to edit. In video mode the camera also does a very good job as it detects the scene mode, lightens the shadows and detects faces.

Menus / ease of use:
The menu system in Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is nothing new so if you have ever used a Panasonic you will have no troubles with it. Especially that the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is a point and shoot camera which takes care of most of the settings and does not allow you to change them. The entire menu structure is easy and looks very well on the large, high resolution screen. All in all, the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 is a good choice for amateur photographers especially since it is available in such a reasonable price.
Selected Panasonic Lumix ZS3 features and specifications: