time to get rid of my darn panosic fz 15

o i stilll love her but man lookie whats comeing out it made me fall in love same great lens but 8 megapixel and mechncaly linked adjustale lens man this camera will be so aweume man i wish i was rich
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/panasonicfz30/

The FZ15 is hard to beat. It will still take good photos. I don't think there will be that much practical difference with adding a few megapixels. If you wanted to gain image quality you would have to go to a DSLR or maybe the new Sony R1, but you would spend a lot of money for very little difference.

Looks nice. I only have two real gripes about the fz-15 as it stands and the new one doesn't address either one AFAICT.

1. It's not a true SLR, so in low light you can't see things in the finder.

2. It's impossible to get a good focus in very low light (eg night sky). This is related to #1. Either the thing to focus on is so dim that it won't even show up on the screen, or you find something that will (moon, bright star, planet) but it is too bright and bleeds between pixels. That means that you can't tell if the focus is right anyway. Either way, you can't focus; it's all luck.

I just wish that, even if they can't go to a proper SLR, they would have an infinity setting for the focus. If it was accurate (no reason it can't be - others do it with the manual stop on the focus range) then the problem would evaporate when shooting stars, and even landscapes if there is no need for foreground focus.

Just my .02

Actually, after reading some reviews of the new camera, I think I might have to eat some humble pie. It appears that they have gone some way to addressing at least one of those issues I mentioned above. It seems that the EVF and the screen have higher resolutions, and that they use a 9 pixel binning from the CCD, as opposed to the 2 pixel binning of the previous model. This should allow you to see better in very low light, and may in fact help stop some of the "bleeding" that I mentioned.

The camera also has a "starry sky" picture mode, and that probably locks on to infinity (here's hoping), so that kinda solves my problems.