Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50  Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 is a superzoom bridge digital camera by Panasonic. The camera is known for its high-quality optics and effective optical image stabilization system. Many professional reviews commended it for its excellent pictures at ISO 100. However, it has a reputation for excessively "smeary" noise reduction at higher ISO settings, which can be ameliorated by using the RAW capture mode. It uses proprietary lithium-ion batteries. No storage is built into the camera; an MMC, SD, or SDHC memory card is required. High-speed SD cards up to 2 GB and SDHC cards up to 32GB are supported. The camera has many SLR-like handling features — dual control wheels for aperture and shutter speed, manual focus (focus-by-wire), zoom rings and a flash hot shoe. It is among the largest non-SLR cameras, and is positioned at the high end of the bridge-camera market. Zooming while recording movies is supported since the zoom is manual. The camera also includes an "extended optical zoom" system providing greater optical zoom ability when shooting at lower resolutions, giving up to 19.3× zoom at 3MP. Essentially, this crops the center out of the image in-camera, but can be useful for metering and framing. Apertures from 2.8 to 11 are supported, though the largest apertures are not available at high zoom levels (3.7 at full zoom). Shutter speeds range from 60 s to 1/2000 s, although shutter speeds faster than 1/1000 s are not available at the widest apertures. Multiple auto-focus (AF) modes are available. The AF-macro setting is available for all camera modes. Macro photography is not outstanding (5 cm minimum focal range at 1× zoom), and the tele-macro capability on the lower-end Panasonic FZ models (the ability to focus down to 1 m at 420 mm) is not present; the FZ50 can only focus down to 2 m at 420 mm. However, the FZ50 is commonly used to record high-magnification macro images with an inexpensive conversion lens; the most commonly used lens for this purpose is the 8-diopter Raynox 250. The FZ50 has a screw mount to accept 55 mm filters, and is compatible with a wide variety of Panasonic-branded and third-party lens converters that can provide greater wide-angle, telephoto and close-up capabilities.