i used 3 canons so far, but i never liked the SxIS series, right from the 1st gen to the latest gen.. noise is an big issue for me.. and i'm not a big fans of megazoom.

Ever notice and wonder why most if not all megazooms uses tiny sensors while normal cameras and wide angle cameras have bigger sensors?
it's because they wanna keep it as a megazoom.. if they increase the sensor size on megazooms, then the effective focal length will be shorter, unless they use longer lens.
it's the same theory as DSLRs sensor crop, a full frame sensor will have a crop factor of 1X, while an APS-C sized sensors will have a crop of 1.5/1.6X.. the smaller the sensor, the higher the crop factor, and a lens will give u higher effective focal length on smaller sensors as compared to a larger sensor.

for example, a 50mm prime will be functioning as a 80mm prime on an APS-C sized DSLR(1.6X crop factor), but if u use it on a full frame sensor DSLR(1X crop factor), it will remain as a 50mm.

This post has been edited by kevin613: Jun 11 2007, 09:02 PM

i would guess panasonic dropped the F2.8 lens because of the increase in sensor size(from 1/2.5 to 1/1.8), if they were to retain the same F2.8 lens used in FZ20, it'll either have an shorter effective focal length, or if they wanna maintain the maximum effective focal length(400+ mm) and constant F2.8, then the lens will have to be extremely bulky. so instead of making the FZ30 and FZ50 too bulky, they opted to drop the F2.8 lens.