I now have an LX3 and will try to report on its performance over the next two weeks.
Already, I can verify that it is capable of taking pretty decent pictures for a pocket camera, even with the silly little built-in flash. I can also confirm that it has enormous quantities of dubious features layered into a poorly-conceived and internally inconsistent, fiddly user interface, that many of the switches can be easily mis-set through friction in a handbag or pocket, and some of the little doors and flaps look like they could be snapped off by a light breeze. Hrmph.
I'll append to this thread as I go; if you have any experiences to share, please do; if you have any questions, I'll try to get you answers.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
The manual for the LX3 is a criminal violation of interpersonal communication. The responsible party should be poked in the eye once for every one of its wretched pages. There's simply no excuse.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Ok, I've spent a week with the LX3. What can I say for it?
The LX3 is very small without being enragingly small. (This is purely a matter of personal taste.) It is not particularly easy to hold. On the other hand, it's reasonably easy to pocket.
This camera has more features than you can shake a stick at, and they're nearly all useless because they're buried in menus which you sift through using a forest of tiny buttons and switches. Chimp city. Luckily, you can pretty much stick the camera in Program mode, point-and-shoot, and get consistently useful results.
The LX3 is not an SLR. It’s nothing much like an SLR. It doesn’t particularly inspire me to be creative with it, because the required effort to control imaging fundamentals (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) is simply too high.
The LX3 makes noisy, grainy photographs, except under bright illumination, and then it only sometimes makes noisy, grainy photographs.
The photos the LX3 takes, even under low light, are actually pretty useful, provided you’re expecting snapshots. Subjectively, the way this camera renders color seems abnormally good, even relative to some DSLRs. Overall, the image quality simply blows away any snapshot camera I've ever used, film or digital, and even some early DSLRs.
The RAW support from the LX3 is genuinely useful: I have pulled the RAW files into Lightroom and worked on some of them. The in-camera JPEGs seem pretty reliable, as this camera seems to do a pretty good job of managing auto-exposure. I'm even suspecting its automatic color balance may be better than my 5D's.
Just about all of my complaints about the LX3 are broadly applicable to the entire digicam market. It reminds me a lot of the smart phone market three years ago before Apple rewrote everyone's expectations with the iPhone: a fairly mature technological basis was in place, but the packaging and exposure of that technology was severely lacking. The digicam market needs a similar shake-up.
I bought the LX3 because everything I read suggested it was the best overall digicam on the market, today. Nothing in my experience thus far contradicts that position. But that doesn't mean I'm exactly thrilled to pieces.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Just to add my 2 cents worth. I find my LX3 extremely usefull with the settings at Pmode defualt. It makes an easy to carry reasonably high IQ pocket camera that requires no fiddling for grab shots. I also find that with the 1.2 firmware the low light images are execellent. Note the follinging images shot is a museum with no flash allowed. By far the best of my several P&S cameras.
Linear Mode
