In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

I can read my Panasonic TZ6's SD card via USB on my XP PC w/out any extra software.

That's interesting - I'll have to hook up my Panasonics again to a laptop that's recently had a clean re-install of XP Home sp3 32bit and see if they are recognised as a removable drive. They do have some internal memory, i.e. without a memory card inserted, and if a few JPEG's can be transferred from internal memory that could be really useful

Yes, the internal memory is viewable when the SD card is absent.

But can you utilize the still camera as a webcam without a driver, i.e. live view on the pc monitor, can't remember whether I had to install software to do that or not - probably had to?

Just discovered something: deep in the sub-menus of my Panasonics is a setting for "USB MODE: PC" which I didn't have set

Yes, forgot to mention that or thought you knew.

For example the PDF for the FZ-100 contains 240 pages and I never got round to reading it all - since I primarily shoot HD video with it and didn't want to install any Panasonic bloatware (including their AVCHD decoder,) guess I ignored those sub-menus because a card reader is a better way for me to copy HD video (plus some JPEG's and RAW files) to my storage HDD. However, for some reason and confusingly, Panasonic do advise one to use their bloatware when transferring AVCHD but I would imagine that's a codec thing.

Thanks for the tip regarding internal memory > usb > pc that would be better than transferring JPEG's to a SD card, in camera, if it should ever be necessary