I sometimes hear from people who’ve newly acquired a digital SLR, saying they find it a hassle to continually change lenses when shooting a wide variety of subjects. Frankly, it goes with ‘SLR-territory’ (digital and film) and is the price you pay to enjoy the improved image of an interchangeable lens, reflex camera. In reality, unless you’re very demanding and continually shoot magazine quality pictures, most times you’re better off with a fixed lens digicam with an extended zoom range … like this one. Panasonic has not indulged in a longish zoom camera before, unlike Canon, Nikon and Olympus, and its first such camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35, possesses a modest 18x optical zoom that runs from 4.8-86.4mm or, in 35 SLR equivalence, 27-486mm. Say, now that’s a zoom! Its amazingly tiny CCD measures 10.9mm in the diagonal, but is still capable of capturing a 12.1 million pixel image, leading to a maximum image size of 4000