Before I head to Germany in July, I definitely needed to find myself a quality snap-and-shoot digital camera. While I wasn’t looking for a professional SLR, I did want to be able to take high quality pictures and learn a little bit about photography. I’ve long wanted to try my hand at photography, but unfortunately it is an expensive hobby.

After some shopping around I was led to the Panasonic DMC-FH20, and I haven’t been disappointed. This camera comes with several nice features, including the intelligent auto (iA) feature and the ability to record HD video.

Form Factor
It’s not the slimmest camera on the market, so if you’re looking for something that is going to fit in your skinny jeans you might want to look elsewhere. The button layout strikes a great balance between having an overwhelming amount of buttons and so few that navigation becomes cumbersome.

Features
I’ve had a great experience becoming familiar with this camera. The user interface is very intuitive, and provides a variety of options. The iA feature provides good shots, as do the 25 different scene settings, and boasts an 8x optical zoom. You also have the option to shoot with three different aspect ratios: 4:3, 3:2, and 16:9.

The HD video was one of the reasons I decided on this particular camera. It records in 720p, or if you’re looking to conserve some space you can use the VGA and wide screen VGA modes. Note that you cannot adjust the zoom while taking a video. Check out the video to get a better idea of the video quality.

Other Notes
The video mode restricts the maximum length of any video you record. I have an 8 gig SDHC card (it supportds SD and SDXC as well), and while recording in HD I can only record about 8 1/2 minutes consecutively. Video also creates extremely large file sizes, a 5 minute video is going to run around 800 megabytes.

Video Demonstration

Final Thoughts
So far I’m very happy with the camera, and highly recommend it. I’ll make sure to post updates with some pictures from my trip. Meanwhile, check out some photos below and my Flickr Stream.