Optical Image Stabilizer works as intended and I've taken a lot of pictures at 1/8s without any blur. Very good lens without much distortion Easy interface. People without much experience can easily use this camera. In spite of its small size it takes good pictures. Excellent movie mode. Nice LCD screen

Loss of detail and noisy at iso 400. Weak flash (common for small cameras like this). A bit expensive compared to competition but you get a very fine camera. Only few manual adjustments but I don't care that much about that in a small camera like this.

I use it as a point-and-shooter that I always carry with me. In terms of image quality it cannot compete with a DSLR but a great picture is a great picture no matter what camera took it. What it lacks in manual adjustments it makes up in portability, ease of use and having OIS! The optical image stabilization works very well. The pictures taken at iso 400 are a tad too noisy in my taste but that's about my only complain about the camera. Highly recommended! My fx9 gallery: http://www.pbase.com/natursyn/lumix_fx9 I've put a large (20 mb!) movie file here: My mother's cat

My two cents on the astonishingly small DMC-FX9 This review is not about teh hardware specs found on already a dozen sites, nore on fast focussing works on this camera, or what noise qualitites to expect at different modes and lightsituations, how the image stabiliser utilizes two powerfull modes to enable 1/2 second ultra sharp and steady exposures, why the AF assistlight is an indispensible gadget and why Panasonic put 207.000 pixel in stead of the old 117.000 pixel LCD, and also i will not mention my feelings for the exquisite liveliness of the movie mode that captures in absolute realtime a high resolution movie of the atmost moments... My full review is about the usefullness and dailylife usage of the camera There is a possibility that this camera could be smaller than your mobile phone. Be prepared to think that now you need a smaller mobile phone, such as the MOTOROLA RAZR. The camera fit's any pocket, on any costume, easily. It's as long as your point finger, as thick as your thumb and as dumb as a baby begging to been playing with. Nevertheless this "limitation" of customisablity of manual settings could become usefull in putting more thought in the scene/composition as opposed to scrolling in long menu's searching for whitebalance adjustments. The latter is fotunately translated in 15 different graphically iconized scenemodes; like portrait, nightscenes, party, baby, food, sports, etc, where whitebalancing adopts according to predefined settings. This makes it the perfect gift for any dum given mom or dad, in need to photograph uninteresting but normally highly adjustment requiring objects, such as babies for example. The graphic menu makes selection for language obsolete and in my belief fastenes selection procedures. The menu is fast, quick reacting and so is the image feed. since there is no viewfinder onboard, the LCD is important and Panasonic forsaw in this. Clear crisp, live feed assures that the fast focus is shown on the screen, such that the shutter lag is minimised. With most digital camera's, the image quality is the most important asset. Many mistakenly belief the amount of megapixel. For this latter group of stupid enthousiasts Panasonic has made this wonderful camera, boasting with 6 megapixels of image rosluition. You hopefully know that this has nothing to do with image quality, since i know a hundred qamera's with 5 megapixel resolution that perform a lot better in almost any way than the poto's captures with the FX9. But, this camera is not like most other digital camera's. it's joy combined with snapshot photography. lomography combined with high quality stabalised lens mechanics, designed by Leica (who should now be ashamed of the poor image quality produced by all other large panasonic camera's, exhibiting such enormous amount of random nois storms, that SETI project could make UFO langind signals out of almost every single captured image) As an enormous qiality freak, used to nothing less than the industry quality hardware such as Schneider Optics and FUJINON EBC coated lenses on my GX 617, with such a time consuming and expensive gear, in today's stressed workshemes i think it's a nice tool recording bits and pieces of visual inspirations for my work and pleasure. cheers Sam from Holland http://www.eftegarie.nl