Camera Labs

Hi all
I've owned a FZ38 now for about 4 months.
It's a good camera and i have taken some pretty good photos with it but ive noticed a few things, whether that's driver error or just the way things are...
Burst mode for panning shots seems pretty useless when in P/A/S/M modes as the view finder goes black for what feels like forever, maybe a second?
Difficult to follow something in the dark i'm finding...
Also i've found it stay's black for longer when you get over a shutter speed of 1/320. All modes exhibit this delay but burst mode in the scenes seems slightly better...
I realise there's time needed for processing after a picture has been taken, but the delay does feel very excessive. Maybe im expecting too much for a fairly cheap camera?

I've also been having problems with a number of pics being very washed out and very dull colours. This is using the auto settings in P/S/A modes.
I brought a UV filter, ive heard cheaper ones can cause this problem because of a coating that's missing. Any truth in that one?

I have found the camera to be un-responsive randomly sometimes.
It will refuse to attempt to try and focus up with no warning / error messages. Not 100% if that's me pressing one of the lower buttons in the R/H corner by accident and not noticing in the heat of the moment.
I've changed the way i hold the camera now to see if that's the case...
Did notice that sometimes the EVF/LCD button doesn't always work, not sure what's going on there yet either.
Cheers

In the real burst modes, youre shooting with 3megapixel resolution.
That's written to the card faster than the 12mp resolution, of course.
When the camera writes photos to the card, the screen is usually black for 1 second, usually. There are cases that that doesnt happen.

For the PASM modes: You know you have to do very much things for yourself? Check the white balance, and if you want the pictures to have more ...., go to picture ajust, and set the contrast higher.

_________________
Ruben

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, Panasonic DMC-FZ28, Canon G5, Canon 350D, Canon 50D + BG-E2N
Tamron 17-50 2.8, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM,
Canon 18-55 II plus lots of Minolta MD/M42 lenses and bodies

Sounds like the 1 sec delay is normal then.
l'll have play with the other settings in the more manual modes.
Any tips with that?
Cheers

Err, tips for what exactly?

_________________
Ruben

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, Panasonic DMC-FZ28, Canon G5, Canon 350D, Canon 50D + BG-E2N
Tamron 17-50 2.8, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM,
Canon 18-55 II plus lots of Minolta MD/M42 lenses and bodies

Sorting out the washed out image.
Seems to be worse on bright sunny days, which would make sense.
It usually makes a good job of it and takes vibrant colourful images.
Its a bit hard to see what you've got off the LCD, well until im used to gauging what the result might look like on a big monitor.
l'll sit down with it again and go through all the settings, i do find the camera a bit over whelming with all those functions the've shoe horned in there...
I've been playing about with an Olympus E-300, that's a lot more easy to get your head around as it doesn't have feature overload.
Maybe its because im getting old!

Well had a play about with the contrast and saturation settings today and compared the results to a Olympus E-300 i have here as a reference.
Boosting the contrast to +1 or +2 improves things alot and the saturation @ +1 also helps.
l'll run with that for a while and see how i get on...