Well I have had the Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ7 for about a week. Honestly have not had much time to play with it, but I have used it for work and took some photos inside a warehouse of a company that I am buying, so the bulk of the photos I've taken have been nothing more than snapshots.
But despite my lack of real use of this taking photos of my daughter's sports, I do have some things to say.
First, it is very light and much smaller than the digital SLRs that have removable lenses. It is also smaller than the Canon S1 series camera. If I was designing it I would have put the button on a slight forward cant instead of on the horizontal plane. I would have also added a shutter speed dial for shutter priority mode and a aperature ring for aperature priority mode . . . but in both cases I would probably be overruled by other potential customers for this camera. I really like the size and with the exception of the shutter button, the ergonomics are very good.
When it came down to the acutally purchase decision, I waffled back and forth between this and the Canon. I felt that this felt a bit better overall but liked the Canon's shutter button position better. I also liked the size of this better. Not big, but not too small. Several other brands (Nikon, Fuji, etc) don't have any flat surface to the left side of the lens so when you are looking through the viewfinder there is no flat side to rest your left hand/thumb against, I prefer the feeling of a flat side to the curved sided body. Just me I guess.
I like the extended eye cup for viewfinder use. Many cameras do not have this and force you to turn your head slighty to use the viewfinder, but even with my large nose I can use the viewfinder without twisting my head.
Here are a couple photos of the camera (obviously not shot by the camera). I set the camera on my laptop's keyboard to give you a bit of scale so you can see that this really is a fairly compact camera.
I like the burst mode, it gives you several options. One holds the focus at the same as the first photo, but others allow for constant focus even when firing shots at 2fps.
I also like the "macro" feature on the top dial, many cameras seem to force you to go through a menu to go into the macro focus mode, in photo 2 below you can actually see the camera is focused on the screen.
The rear view screen is very large, larger than most. Some might consider it a drawback that the screen is exposed, but I have several other cameras that have this feature and I prefer it. The Canon S1 has a flip out screen, which may protect the screen, but it increases bulk unnecessarily. The rear screen is also very bright which makes it useful when some others are washed out by sunlight.
BTW the camera comes with a 16mb SD card. I tossed that and replaced it with a 1Gig SD card since this will take photos up to 6MB it seems silly to even include a card that is so small it will not hold 3 images at full resolution!
One thing I will point out is that many of these compact super zoom cameras are very very good values for the money. It strikes me that the BEST camera is the one you like best. I can't honestly say that a Panasonic takes a better photo than a Nikon or a Canon or a Fuji or a Kodak. There are issues that some people may have when pushing any of these compact super zooms to their limits. Panasonic gives has some noise issues above 200 ISO settings but for most people (and I fall into that group) it should not be a practical issue.