It's not completely clear from the illustrations at DP Review:

 http://www.dpreview.com/articles/panasonicfz30/page4.asp

but the LCD appears to swing down /and/ twist, so it should be fine for
waist-level and overhead work, although not from the front of the camera.

Cheers,
David

It is an unlucky position, and they have compounded the problem by only
allowing it to flip out 120 degrees. If they had allowed it to flip
down 180 degrees, the LCD would have been visible from the front at
some angles of view.

I'd say there are actually five distinct photographicc uses, only one
of which is really killed by Pana's hinging. 1) Photos above your head.
2) Photos taken with an arm stretched out to the side. 3) waist-level
shooting 4) Candid shooting without the subject realising that you
point the camera at them 5) Photos composed from in front of the
camera.

(In addition, there is the extra advantage of being able to protect
your LCD screen by turning it inwards when you don't need it - which is
most of the time, really. Also this feature is enabled by a bottom
hinging.)

1) and 2) are clearly different uses. With my swivel-body Nikon CP995,
I can easily do 1) but not 2). Why would anybody want to do 2) ? Well,
the other day I spotted an unusually big and beautiful Great Green
Bush-Cricet (Tettigonia viridissima) sitting on a pole supporting a
wooden getty. I got a nice photo of it with my FZ20, but only slightly
from behind. In order to get the perfect side wiew, I would have had to
float in the air one yard outside the getty, above the water - which
unfortunately is beyond my powers. If I would have been able to flip
out a flip-and-twist LCD, and hold the camera in my stretched out left
hand, I would have gained almost all of that extra yard needed to get
the perfect angle of wiew - I'm six foot three from fingertip to
fingertip, so I have a decent reach. I probably would have needed a
couple of exposures to be certain that I got one right, but the cricket
was sitting there basking peacefully in the sun, and obvoiusly not
bothered by my presence at the minimal focussing distance for the
FZ20's full zoom, so that wouldn't have been a problem.

Also 3) and 4) are different uses. To do 3), it is enough with an
additional fixed LCD on top of the camera (there is one such camera on
the market now, only I can't remember which one). For 4) you need at
least a swivel function such as that on the swivel-body camera such as
the CP995.

However, I have to admit that I personally have never managed to look
even half-decent in a photo that I have composed myself, so I actually
prefer to let the rest of the family take photos of me - even though I
am by far the most experienced photographer in the family.

So the incapacity of framing photos from in front would seem as a
rather expendable feature to me, personally.

But I still fully agree with you. If Panasonic actually take the
trouble to include a tilt-and-swivel LCD, why not include the proper
kind?

Jan Böhme

Sorry, should have included this in my previous post: The best reason
to wait for the FZ40 s probably that it hopefully will contain a CCD
with a better signal-to noise ratio. Now that they've fixed essentially
all the other user's complaints about the FZ20, what else is there to
fix, really?

This said, I notice that the f2.8-3.7 zoom of the FZ30 is a bit slower
than I had hoped. Apparently, it is only f2.8 below the 50 mm
equivalent focal length. Above, it directly jumps up to f3.2. Which
makes the low useful sensitivity of the FZ30 a bit more of a problem
than it was on the FZ20.

And for all of us wildlife shooting tele freaks, those three quarters
of a stop that they have robbed us of at full zoom are pretty precious.
I don't think that an FZ30 will be very suited to attach my Raynox
DCR-2020 to. Actually, considering that it a) needs to be stopped down
considerably (at least from f2.8 to f4.6) at anything like high
constrast conditions in order to even start to reduce (not avoid) CA,
and b) that it seems, at least in my hands, as if the image
stabilisation isn't as efficient with it on, I'd say it is just
borderline useful with my FZ20 as it is.

So the FZ30 would need another stop of useful ISO sensitivity just to
come on par with the FZ20 for the teleconverter crowd. In order to be
better, it would need another two useful stops.

OTOH, exactly those two useful stops is what is claimed for the new
Fuji sensor...

Jan Böhme

Well, I was far less disappointed in the swivel LCD than I was in the
image quality of the samples.  The reviewer's notes also talk about
this -- just as I had suspected, this camera is too noisy.

Darn...I was really looking forward to this camera.  From a form &
function perspective, it seems near perfect.  I can't buy a camera that
is going to deliver sub-par performance, however.  I don't buy the
argument that when printing 4x6 photos, the noise isn't an issue.  Who
can tell ahead of time which photo you might want to enlarge to 8x10?

Guess I have to keep looking :-(

-Chris

That surprised me too. But there must have been a design or engineering
reason for it, as surely Panasonic is aware of the more usual arrangement.

While the FZ30 design is slightly unfortunate in this respect, it's not in
any way a deal breaker for me. Only very rarely do I need to see the LCD
from the front, and on those occasions I have other cameras that will do
that.

The FZ30 looks very tempting.

N.