We used the built-in lenses at their widest and longest focal lengths with the apertures wide open. The crops are taken from the upper left corner of the chart and presented here at 100%.

The FZ50’s lens exhibits a little coloured fringing, but noticeably less at wide angle than the Canon 400D / XTi’s kit lens, or the Fujifilm S9500 / S9000 superzoom.

To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix FZ50’s macro performance we photographed a custom chart using it and a number of rival models with their bundled lenses.

Each camera was positioned at a distance and set to a focal length which delivered the maximum possible reproduction.

The dark lines are 10mm apart and the result is not cropped. Smaller areas are preferred in this test. The image left was taken with the Panasonic Lumix FZ50 in its Macro mode.

At its closest focusing distance, the FZ50 captured an area measuring 60x42mm, although to achieve this it was extremely close to the subject and casting a slight shadow as seen above.

This is roughly equivalent to the macro result from Canon 400D / XTi’s kit lens, although since the latter was taken from a longer distance when zoomed-in, it’s almost free of distortion. And despite persuading our FZ50 to focus slightly closer than our FZ30, its big rival the Fujifilm S9500 / S9000 still beats it – although again at the cost of considerable geometric distortion.