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The camera fared well during lab testing. I didn’t find much noise in the daylight shots, but high ISO settings indroduced some colored noise. Pictures had pretty good color, with just a touch of purple fringing. My flash pictures displayed nice illumination with lots of detail in the highlights. The NV10 averaged 1,900 lines of resolution, which is excellent for a 10MP camera. There was no pincushion distortion to speak of, and just a touch of the usual barrel distortion.

The FZ50 isn’t a masterpiece, though, which is why, although it’s an EC, it rated four stars rather than five. Aside from being really big and pricey ($649.95 list), it has a few shortcomings. With so many cameras shipping with large 2.5-inch and 3-inch LCDs these days, Panasonic’s 2-inch LCD looks tiny to me. I would have liked to see some onboard help as well, similar to what Olympus provides on its point-and-shoot cameras.

Still, the S6000fd is not perfect. It falls just shy of an Editors’ Choice camera. For starters, there’s no onboard optical image stabilization, which I think holds it back in low-light situations. Images in low light had a bit more colored noise than I like to see. I was also disappointed that the camera didn’t have a hot shoe to add an external flash, a feature found on the FinePix S9000.