Digital cameras 101

[moserbell]

I am using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 and am getting distortion in my images.  This shows up as elongated or squashed faces!

I tried resetting everything to 'factory' settings.

I just took a picture of a square grid to quantify the problem.  Enlarging the image on my flat panel monitor ends up showing a rectangle that is off of square by around 15% to 20%.

Any suggestions?

[bdery]

Hi and welcome!

you had a good idea to start by photographing a square grid, that's what I would have suggested.

Did you attach a lens converter to your camera (for instance, a wide angle converter)? those often create distorsion. Otherwise, did the problem start happening recently? The FZ7 is not a current model, even though it's not "old".

This is normally an optical problem, caused by the lens, not the detector or the processor (although it COULD be the processor).

1-did you hit the lens, or does it look like it's misaligned?
2-can you tell if your image is still 4x3, the dimensions it should have? Are you loosing pixels because of the stretching, for instance?
3-Could it be your monitor that somehow does this? Does it show on more than one monitor, or in prints?

We'll try to narrow the problem down with your help. I would definitely contact Panasonic with this anyway, however.