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The point-and-shoot camera is back and Panasonic is fully here for it

If you thought the trusted point-and-shoot digital camera had been totally wiped out by higher end phone snappers, you reckoned without the millennials who are, by all accounts, flocking back to the format.

Unfortunately, the major manufacturers had pretty much admitted defeat to Apple, Samsung, Sony and company, and haven’t exactly been flooding the market with dedicated affordable digital cameras lately.

Enter Panasonic’s classic Lumix series and the new ZS99, which is here to provide those enthusiasts with a distraction-free shooting experience.

“Compact and feature-packed, the LUMIX ZS99 travel zoom camera is perfect for capturing life’s adventures,” Panasonic said today.

It looks (and shoots) like a classic and reliable Panasonic point-and-shoot in all senses of the word, with the addition of a particularly modern feature – a virtual video recording mode that’s designed for future updates to social media. That’s accompanied by a new Send button in the body of the camera that enables easy transfer of the content to a companion smartphone for sharing. Beyond that slight modernisation, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a classic Lumix from a few years back.

There’s that long 30x optical zoom from the Leica DC Vario Elmar lens, with a 24-720mm focal range. Image size maxes out at 20.3-megapixels, while you can also grab HD video at 120 frames per second. If you want to push the resolution to 4K you’ll have to contend with the frame rate dropping to 30fps. There’s 5-axis optical image stabilisation too.

As for the touchscreen include a tilt-able 1,840 dot display for ensuring you always have the best shooting angle. Further modernisations include the Bluetooth 5.0 standard, an upgrade to USB-C for charging, and Wi-Fi 2.4GHz.

Panasonic plans to release the Lumix ZS90 (the successor to the 2016 ZS80) in February for $499.99 in the US and £469.99 in the UK.

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