Almost exactly a year after the introduction of the camera, Panasonic's popular compact super-zoom camera, comes its replacement; the Lumix DMC-FZ8. Where the FZ7 was a fairly major upgrade to the camera that came before it (the FZ5), the FZ8 is, perhaps inevitably, more evolutionary. The body design and operation is almost identical - no bad thing, given the huge improvements made over the FZ5 - and the only really big news is the inclusion of Raw shooting and a much better electronic viewfinder.

More controversially the new model squeezes even more pixels onto a 1/2.5-inch sensor, and uses the...