Just a Flash in the Cam

We just had our fill of XO Fish Noodle soup and were heading back to the office when I spotted a new digital camera shop at Pagoda Street.

The Panasonic Lumix LC40 was going for S$830 (cheapest), which isn’t too bad for 3.9 megapixels and a Leica lens. I’ve had my eye on the higher-end Panasonic Lumix LC5 for some time, but alas the price hadn’t fallen much in a year – $1299.

I decided to renew my research on the model to see if it was really worth a few hundred bucks more. Strangely, while there was a decent site for Lumix in the UK, lumix.com didn’t exist. The Panasonic HQ’s branding department is a little screwed up I say.

Meanwhile, the Singapore Panasonic site had a useless Flash intro and was one of the most difficult sites to navigate – because their products were listed as small animated gif buttons instead of words, so I couldn’t tell where to go, and once I guessed my way to the consumer page, the links were black and not underlined, so they looked like ordinary text. Bleah!

However I found my way to their Lumix site, which BTW didn’t turn up in at least the first 50 search results for “Panasonic Lumix Singapore” using Google. I was treated to another pointless Flash intro and disclaimer, and when I selected a model, I was taken to what looked like a normal static page – only it was a huge spliced-up image, listing bare information and nothing more.

I don’t think they pay their local designers too well.

And maybe I’m better off with the independent camera review sites instead.