To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix TZ1's noise levels we photographed the standard Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker with it and a number of rival models at each of their ISO settings.

The crops are taken from the original images and presented here at 100%. To compare typical noise in skies and dark shadows the crops were taken from patches 3 and 24 respectively.

Up to 200 ISO, the TZ1's crops here appear very clean, and noise levels remain modest at 400 ISO and above.

Viewed in isolation, this would be an impressive result for the Lumix TZ1, but it's easy for overly-aggressive noise reduction systems to give the impression of low noise in this test. As such, it's crucial to also compare real-life outdoor results taken at different ISO settings. We've provided these on the following page, where you'll see the TZ1 is best used only at its lowest sensitivities.

The High Sensitivity mode in particular should only be used in situations where you have no other choice, as it results in considerable loss of detail from noise reduction and reduced resolution as seen on both the following page and our earlier Features section.

Note: we have compared 100% crops from each camera here measuring 136x136 pixels. Since each camera listed from left to right has steadily higher resolutions though, the crops pictured represent smaller areas of their total images. As such, the artefacts seen below from the cameras to the right would appear smaller than those from the left if each image were printed the same size.

The biggest difference would be between the 5 Megapixel images of the Panasonic Lumix TZ1 and the 9 megapixel Fujifilm S9500 / S9000, although as you'll see from the 100% crops taken from outdoor images on the next page, the difference isn't as significant as you might expect.