The camera  is 3.8 inches wide by 2.1 inches high by 1 inch thick and weighs 6.2 ounces with battery and SD/SDHC card–definitely small enough for a pants pocket, though just sliding under our thickness criterion for an ultracompact. On top sits a power switch, shutter release surrounded by a zoom ring, and a button for Panasonic’s Extra Optical Zoom feature. A single press of the E.Zoom button fully extends the wide-angle 3.6x f2.8-5.6 28-100mm lens. Press it again and it increases the optical zoom power to 7.7x, but drops the resolution to 3 megapixels. A third press brings the lens all the way back. The quick-zoom aspect of this button is nice, but the “extra optical zoom” is digital trickery.

Equipped with a 28mm wide-angle lens, the* FX150 lets users capture images of expansive scenery just as they appear to the naked eye. The wide-angle lens allows the user to capture a much wider scene into one shot – something not possible with most ordinary cameras. And when shooting in tight or crowded indoor spaces, the wide-angle lens fits more people in the photo. The 14.7 megapixels – the most offered in a compact camera – ensure that photos are crisp, clear and sharply detailed even when enlarged. This high resolution also means you can crop unwanted parts of an image and enlarge the rest, creating a beautifully composed photo that retains outstanding detail.

Basic settings include being able to tweak contrast, sharpness, saturation, and the amount of noise reduction; shooting in black and white, sepia, or with cool or warm temperatures; and setting the sensitivity up to ISO 1,600 (this can also be locked so it never shoots above a particular ISO). But then you get things like normal exposure bracketing as well as color bracketing that will take shots in standard and black and white, standard and sepia, or standard, black and white, and sepia. And mixed in with the scene modes are things like Multi-Exposure mode that superimposes up to three consecutively shot images together and lets you view them onscreen as you shoot so you can compose the final result, and Starry Sky that reduces shutter speed to 15, 30, or 60 seconds. You also get the option to capture JPEG, raw, or raw plus a low-resolution JPEG photos.