Cloudy's Pocket Manual for the FZ300

Need for this Pocket Manual

Panasonic has produced two well written Manuals for this camera: a basic Owners Manual (72 pages) and an Advanced Manual (363 pages). They are certainly exhaustive, but also verbose and, unfortunately, no concise guide is available for the advanced user. Why an experienced amateur digital-photographer has to spend a full-time week to go through these 435 pages, when a few pages would suffice for 95% of features most people are interested in, escapes me. Therefore, I decided to write my own few pages worth of directions about main features, and organise them as the “missing pocket manual”. I have used colour in the text for warnings and the like, as explained in the text itself. I will try to keep the manual updated as I get more experienced with the FZ300.

»The present version is 1.2 of August 2016.

Booklet Size and File Download

In some printers, booklet printing and scaled-down printing are independent functions that cannot be used together, and/or the two-side printing produces a mismatch if the document page and printed page are not of the same size. For this reason I have produced three versions of the manual, which you are welcome to either read onscreen or download (to your PC, laptop or smartphone):

• A4 version: Best for printing as a half-A4 (that is A5) booklet, and for large screen reading.
• A5 version: Best for printing as a half-A5 (that is A6) booklet, and for small screen reading.
• Screen:       Best for screen reading (same as A4 version with no blank pages: see below).

How to Print the Pocket Manual

To print the A5 version as an A6 booklet, feed the printer with A5 paper (available by just cutting A4 sheets into half). In the printer's settings you should specify A5 size for both the document and the paper.

The Pocket Manual has 10 useful pages. For booklet printing convenience, versions A4 and A5 include two blank pages: just print pages 1 to 12 in Booklet format, staple together, bend to produce the booklet, and finally cut away the blank middle sheet, leaving just a margin for the staples.

Contents of the Pocket Manual

• Page  1 includes the diagram further below.
• Pages 2-3 are taken from the Owner's Manual.
• Pages 4-6 and 9-10 have been written by myself, unashamedly following my own user preferences. The camera is assumed to be used mostly for pictures, much less frequently for movies. Customisation is assumed mostly for the Q.MENU (see our Customisation webpage).
• Pages 7-8 have been left blank, as explained in the previous section.
• Pages 11-12 are taken, suitably rearranged, from the Advanced Manual.

General diagram of camera controls

I have produced a chart that can be handy, and have added it to the Pocket Manual as well:

    

Recent Tutorials and Manuals

In September 2017 Graham Houghton has launched a series of tutorials that can be watched on YouTube. Click here to watch the introductory tutorial., which is full of good advice, for example on initial setup. The tutorials are a companion to the printed manual he launched in April 2017 and is available online (for example from Amazon by searching <FZ300 Manual Houghton>). Kudos to the excellent work of Mr. Houghton in producing this tutorial and a manual that is both very interesting and affordable in its black&white version (which includes the author sending you a full-color file for your PC or smartphone). Alternatively, for more than twice the price, you can get it printed in full colour, the option I prefer. Mr. Houghton has also a very interesting and professional blog for this camera.

Houghton's material is full of common sense and interesting remarks. Quite obviously I mostly agree with him: also inevitably we disagree in a few details and you will find a few different points of view in this website.