Edit: Oops ... this should have been round 6. But just consider it an extension of round 5 ... Mark II if you will ... now renamed round 5B.
Fuji Talk Forum member Buckshot asked me to shoot some snow images with custom white balance. I thought that was a great idea, so here is a super-truncated comparison. I stood at my bedroom window and shot straight down at the pool deck ... this is excellent as a test since the snow has texture and the shadow is quite deep (duh ... midday sun.)
The bushes are in shadow and we can see how they hold shadows and detail at the same time.
And the blue channel issue of the ZS3 makes itself clearly obvious ... the Fuji shows us fairly neutral shadows, while the Panny shows up prominently blue shadows. So when light gets low, the Panny turns blue. This is bad news for red items as you saw in the high ISO ladder ... nasty purples where there should be reds.
Panny
Fuji
Here we can also see the high dynamic range mode of the Fuji asserting itself with more authority. The shadows are more open and the highlights are smoother and better protected. This is why we buy EXR sensors.
I also find the Panny a little too sharpened straight from the camera, which you can see in the downsized crops. The Panny should actually be too soft, since I did not add sharpening to compensate for the downsizing interpolation. Yet we see it retaining high sharpness, indicating that it was *really* sharp out of camera.
All in all, the Fuji easily wins this round. But the Panny does not stink ... it just doesn't handle custom WB as well ... and its tone curve is a little stronger than the Fuji's, making it more difficult to process later on ...
