Built of high-quality aluminium, the DMC-FP8's flat body provides an attractive design for the camera's rear surface. A cool hairline panel in the center of the camera adds an exquisite accent for a striking overall appearance. The blue LED cursor button also adds an elegant brilliance to the design each time they are pressed. Beautiful when carrying about and shooting, the DMC-FP8 is a stunning all-round camera for users who are particular about both image quality and camera design.

POWER O.I.S. is about twice as effective as MEGA O.I.S. at reducing low-frequency vibration-caused blur when pressing the shutter button or shooting with a slow shutter speed. So you can take beautiful night shots without blurring. Activating POWER O.I.S., Intelligent ISO Control, Face Detection AF/AE with Face Recognition, Intelligent Scene Selector, Intelligent Exposure and AF Tracking, the camera does all the work in the iA Mode. Face Recognition function recognizes registered persons' faces and optimizes the focus and exposure settings.

The DMC-FP8 features a 28mm wide-angle 4.6x optional zoom f/3.3-5.9 LEICA DC VARIO-ELMAR lens (35mm equivalent: 28-128mm). This lens system features the folded optics technology realized by the inclusion of a prism. It comprises 10 elements in 8 groups, with 1 ED lens and 5 aspherical lenses / 6 aspherical surfaces to achieve high optical performance while maintaining compactness. Furthermore, in 3-megapixel resolution, the Extra Optical Zoom function provides additional magnification, extending the zoom power to 9.1x (35mm equivalent: 252mm).

To realize the ultra high-speed AF, a number of re-engineering and improvements are made including the adaptation of a higher-speed actuator, the optimization of algorithms and the parallelization of software processing element. The result is ultra high speed yet accurate AF performance for users to enjoy the airy shooting that has experienced never before. Panasonic also replaced its linear program processing with parallel processing to achieve an ultra high-speed start-up of approx. 0.95 seconds.

The DMC-FP8 can record motion pictures in high-definition (1,280 x 720 pixels at 30 fps in Motion JPEG format). The pixel mixed readout method enables bright motion-picture recording even in low-light settings. It also lets you use zooming when taking motion pictures. With HD component output capability, you can enjoy watching HD motion pictures in stunning HD quality taken by your DMC-FP8 by simply connecting the camera to an HDTV via an optional component cable DMW-HDC2.