Mr. Michiharu Uematsu (left), Manager, Advanced Planning for Panasonic Corporation and Mr. Motoki Nakahara (right), GM for Panasonic Marketing Asia Pacific.

VIEWPOINT: The HardwareMAG.com team met up with marketing and product specialists from the Overseas Marketing Team for Panasonic Corporation to have a closer look at the company’s latest range of digital cameras for the Autumn season.

Organized by Panasonic Asia Pacific, the team was able to get a hands-on session with Panasonic’s Lumix compact cameras as well as hear about the company’s Micro Four Thirds system cameras.

The hands-on session was led primarily by Mr. Dai Mukai from the Optical Marketing Team, Overseas Sales and Marketing Group from Panasonic Corporation, with additional delivery by Mr. Michiharu Uematsu, Manager, Advanced Planning, Products Planning Group from Panasonic Corporation and Mr. Motoki Nakahara, General Manager, Panasonic Marketing Asia Pacific (PMA) from Panasonic Asia Pacific.

Among the cameras shown were the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FP8, DMC-FX65, DMC-ZR1 and the DMC-FZ35. (Editor opinions: 3)

Here’s our ViewPoint video from the session.

This video comes with English captions. To change caption language, click on Translate in the bottom corner option of the video.

HWM Indonesia

HWM Indonesia: I think it’s time that Panasonic arranges more product launches in the region, especially outside Singapore.

Though the brand is well known in Singapore, it isn’t in the rest of the region, such as Indonesia.

A lot of branding exercises need to be done to bring itself on par with the competition. The Lumix line is a good opportunity.

Vijay Anand, Editor, HardwareZone.com

Vijay (HardwareZone.com): The Power O.I.S. looked really convincing and I certainly can’t wait for our personal review assessment on how it translates in our standard usage tests.

Also, this is a good example of a media presentation where the company actually takes the effort to setup the necessary equipment to highlight what new features differentiate them from their previous models and that of the competition.

I hope more companies would take note of this and not just rely on marketing slides to deliver their messages.

Paolo Manzano, Managing Editor, HWM Philippines

Paolo (HWM Philippines): Panasonic has always had an interesting line-up of cameras. It’s too bad that it takes the local subsidiary some time to release them into the market.

The ZR-1 is especially interesting as a newcomer to the Lumix line-up and the imaging world in general, with its unconventional compact body with a slightly longer zoom range. Perhaps this is a new category for compacts, extending the zoom range from the standard 3x - 5x to 8x.

The product demo is especially interesting, in particular the shaker machine. Panasonic Philippines has done all sorts of demos including crashing a steel ball on a PDP, but this is something I haven’t seen yet. Very cool and very illustrative. In this vein, Power O.I.S seems especially powerful, though one has to wonder how it affects battery life.