Which camera is the best for the glider cockpit?

I recently bought a new digital camera Panasonic Lumix FX35 to take pictures while flying a glider.


My previous camera was Nikon Coolpix 7600. It's a 7-megapixel camera, and is capable of zooming from 38mm to 114mm (35mm film equivalent). I was satisfied with the picture quality, and also liked the fact that it uses standard AA batteries. There is no need to carry around another battery charger in my bag. This is perfect for travel, so I took lots of pictures with this camera in various places. All albums in my Picasa gallery from 2002 to May 2008 are taken by this camera.

However, once I started to take aerial pictures, I started to feel that 38mm isn't wide enough. Also, 10-megapixel cameras are now commoditized and sold under $300, so I decided to upgrade. My requirements were as follows.

1. Has 28mm or wider lens
2. Decent image quality
3. Point-and-shoot compact digital camera

I chose Lumix FX35 primarily because it has 25-100mm lens. The 25mm is one of the widest lens you can get for a compact camera. An image taken by a wide lens often suffer from the barrel distortion, but this camera does not have that issue much. A drawback of this camera I often read was the noise in the higher ISO range especially above ISO400. So, those articles tended to conclude that this camera was not for indoor shots. But when I am flying, it is most likely sunny and I have plenty of sun lights to keep the ISO low and still have a fast shutter speed, so this isn't an issue, either.

A digital SLR takes better pictures of course, but if you want to take shots outside the canopy, its size becomes a problem.

Lumix FX35 also takes High Definition quality videos of size 1280x720 at 30fps. However, I found that my old camera's 640x320 at 30fps video was good enough for shots from a glider. After all, I am going to post them on YouTube, so the original quality will be lost.

Sample shots taken by Lumix FX35 can be viewed in my Picasa gallery starting from "Williams 6/6/08".

Sample videos taken by Lumix FX35 are posted below. Also, I uploaded the original files here.







I considered a few other candidates. Nikon Coolpix S600 was the closest second, and another one was Canon PowerShot SD870 IS. The reason I didn't choose S600 even though I have been a happy user of Nikon was because it can take only 190 shots with a fully charged battery while FX35 can take 290. PowerShot SD870 IS could be a good choice, but it is an 8-megapixel camera, so it won't be much of an upgrade from my old camera.