Like many on this forum, I am a cult follower of the Oly c2100 uzi (3 1/2 years and 17,000 images). When it started being temperamental and showing signs of age, I looked around for an upgrade and followed the opinion of many uzi followers to buy an fz30. I knew that I would not have the luxury of hand held infrared images but thought I would see whether the fz30 was usable at all.
First thing I tried was the night scenery mode. This didn't do much.
After much mucking around I think these settings will work to give a reasonable image.
Hoya R72 filter
Set both noise reduction and sharpness to high, contrast and saturation to standard. The noise and sharpness setting do seem a bit odd don't they !!
iso 400 to give as high a shutter speed as possible.
Work in colour not black and white. I aimed to make an image that looked overexposed in preview. Postprocessing in photoshop showed that most of the noise was in the blue channel, which was then not used when producing a black and white image. By using an overexposed image both the red and green channels could be used. Normally i split the channels and used the one i liked best.Usually the image only needed a little unsharp mask (settings 25, 50 0) and some levels work.
If i have worked out how to post an image this is the result of a
1 sec f2.8 iso 400 image.
Best wishes
Eric
PS I really love the fz30 so far. Even the digital zoom looks good. Totally shocked to see details on a building site from 2 1/2 km away !!
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eric0/forums/4web01.jpg