Compact cameras are commonly considered as something that is only good for holiday family pictures and party shots. While there are many technical reasons why Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras produce better images, quality compacts pack enough technology to capture great photographs and the attention of your audience.

A few days ago a developer asked me if we intend to replace all archaic printf-style calls within the project with modern, object-oriented string stream equivalents. I heard this sentiment many times over the years, often substantiated by the fact that buffered stream operations are faster than frequent parsing of the format string. Let's test this theory and format a simple string in a loop using both methods.

I was browsing the Lumix website and noticed that the shutter speed reported for an image of a hummingbird in flight was 1/125th of a second. Hummingbirds flap their wings at approximately 50 flaps per second, so I would expect the wings to show some motion blur at this shutter speed, which could be anywhere from 10% to 70% of the wing path. However, there was absolutely no motion blur in the picture.