Nostalgia for old technology is alive and well. Search hard enough online and you’ll find people dedicated to restoring and upgrading old iPods, resurrecting their beloved Game Boy or companies producing new ways to play cassettes. Now, thanks to Gen Z and TikTok, compact point and shoot cameras are back in a big way.

The problem is, they’re very hard to get hold of. Old Canon and Sony cameras from the mid-2000s are going for sky-high prices on eBay, and newer virally popular cameras like the Fujifilm X1000VI and Canon PowerShot G76 X Mark III are permanently on back order, impossible to get hold of.

That’s why I’ve been testing the Panasonic Lumix TZ99, a newly released £469 point and shoot camera that is that rare thing – actually available to buy.

Panasonic has made cameras for decades, and the TZ99 is a minor update to an older model that has been on sale for a few years. It has a huge 30x zoom lens, solid battery life, a touchscreen and granular manual controls that will please photographers who know what they’re doing, but its release is also clearly geared towards hopping on the compact camera popularity train.

This boom in sales is down to nostalgia, and younger generations getting fed up with their phones and the constant drag of being permanently online. Snapping photos on your phone, for many, is a way to share posts on social media. Owning a camera is meant to make you more mindful of composition, treating photography as a hobby and a memory capturer rather than simply a way to show off about your life.

But there is also an element of the latter to this trend. People are chasing the nostalgic hit of snapping away on a camera in a performative way, just like how people post YouTube videos about using a flip phone for a week.

But I don’t post much on Instagram and I don’t use TikTok. Trends aside and purely as a gadget, is this camera worth buying?

The main reason to invest in a compact camera is sensor size. Smartphones can produce stunning images with tiny sensors because companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and Vivo have worked on software processing to make the images look great. That’s why when you tap the shutter button on your phone, the resulting picture always looks pretty picture perfect – the hardware captures the image and then the software processing sexes it up and makes it look as good as possible, all automatically.

You don’t get that with a manual camera. The TZ99 has a 1/2.3-inch sensor, which is actually a little small for a compact camera. Competing pricier cameras can have larger 1-inch sensors. The bigger the sensor, the more light is let onto the lens, resulting in better image quality and detail in most instances. But compared to your phone, here you have to do the work, because there’s no image processing.

I won’t pretend I’m a professional photographer. There are a plethora of manual controls on the TZ99 but I know my lane. I used the camera with the automatic mode, just like I did with my first Canon PowerShot point and shoot back in 2004. I ditched my iPhone and snapped away, seeing life through the small screen on the back of the Panasonic. Disappointingly, the camera doesn’t have a viewfinder, which I think is a big miss.

The camera is pleasingly lightweight and small, fitting into my jeans pocket if a little tightly. It has a fixed lens that protrudes amusingly when you’re zooming in, which in the era of smartphones now draws some funny looks. Zoom at 30x is noisy and pixelated, but 5x to 10x is genuinely useful and is fully optical for better quality, unlike smartphones that tend to max out at 3x or 5x if they even have a telephoto lens. The regular iPhone 16 does not, using entirely digital zoom.

I really enjoyed having a camera without the distractions of my phone. I thought more about lighting, framing and feeling. When I take dud photos on my phone I think, oh well. When I took a bad one on the TZ99, it annoyed me and so I tried harder.

I didn’t try messing around with RAW photo files and editing in Lightroom. I am a full JPEG man, and I don’t care who knows it. Here are some of my favourite shots from the camera:

But a couple of weeks of shooting led me to an embarrassing admission. Smartphone photography has ruined my patience. I simply didn’t have the desire to sit down with the camera’s manual or watch online tutorials about how to get a better shot, a patience I’ve had with other pursuits. I’ve sat for hours recording songs at my computer with a guitar and Garageband, tinkering with levels and effects and getting the timing perfect.

With the TZ99, I took some great shots. But I also can’t escape the feeling that some of the moments would simply have looked better if shot on my phone. The Panasonic’s sensor is relatively small compared to beefier (and pricier) DSLRs, so the results are often matched by a phone’s.

Decent smartphone cameras also are great at low light shots in 2025. The TZ99 simply isn’t. Shots after dark are basically unusable, which is a tough break when you’re spending £469.

I’ve enjoyed my time with the TZ99. It made me think more about what makes a good photo, and I was embarrassed looking back at the scores of bad ones on my iPhone’s camera roll. But it also reminded me that without an eye for a good shot, point and shoot cameras still produce images like you remember from the mid- to late-2000s. That is, like they mostly belong in a bumper Facebook photo album rather than on the wall.

This camera won’t make you look like a good photographer, whereas an iPhone 16 Pro or Google Pixel 9 Pro will help you fake it till you make it with its software smarts.

If you want to jump on the compact camera trend and improve your photography skills though, you could do far worse than the Panasonic TZ99. At least it’s actually in stock.