Our first sample image was taken on a very bright day with the FZ18 zoomed-out to wide angle and set to 100 ISO. As such this represents perfect conditions. The crops are reasonably detailed, although pixel peepers will notice texturing through noise which is a concern at 100 ISO. We are however pleased to note there’s no visible fringing in this shot, despite the high contrast of the boat deck. The FZ18’s optics keep fringing under check.

Landscape: 3.59MB, Program, 1/400, f7.1, ISO 200, 4.6-82.8mm at 43mm (equivalent to 262mm)

The FZ18 can focus quickly and had no problems locking onto the subject even when zoomed-in to 262mm.

The crops reveal texturing from noise again, although it’s not significantly worse than at 100 ISO.

As you’d hope this has thrown the background out of focus, and if you want more, just stand back and zoom-in further.

Again noise is quite visible in the crops from this 200 ISO sample, but there’s still lots of detail.

Many super-zooms can become quite soft and exhibit bad fringing when full zoomed-in, but impressively the FZ18 suffers from neither.

The crops show some softness, but mostly due to noise. Those bright white boats are fringe-free though and the stabilisation made the composition easy.

It’s possible to almost touch your subject with the FZ18 and still keep it in focus, and this allows for some dramatic macro shots.

We increased the sensitivity to 400 ISO here and noise is certainly visible, but again it’s not a big drop from earlier samples.

Like the previous sample, noise is quite visible in the crops viewed at 100%, but there’s still a respectable amount of detail present.

There’s also quite a large depth of field with the lens zoomed-out even with the aperture wide open.

Our second high-sensitivity indoor shot was taken at 800 ISO. There’s an inevitable increase in noise and smearing through noise reduction, but as the crops show, there’s still some detail remaining.

We’ve certainly seen worse, but no-one would pretend the FZ18 is a camera for people who like to examine images at 100%. And shooting at 800 ISO is best reserved for smaller prints.

The good news is the stabilisation helped keep the photo sharp at slower exposures.

Noise isn’t only visible in the 100% crops, but even in the main reduced image. 1600 ISO really is for emergency use only, and even then we’d encourage trying to use 800 ISO or below.

Once again while the FZ18 has many good qualities including an excellent lens, its sensor is not suitable for the pixel peepers among us.