I haven’t checked the camera sites for a few months, and it looks like I missed out on a whole bunch of interesting new camera.
The Panasonic LX3 does look pretty interesting, on account of its f/2.0-f/2.8 24mm-60mm lens. This makes it a lot more interesting for me than the Cannon G10 which I blogged about yesterday.
The LX3 would be a really great companion for my Canon G9. Between those two cameras, I’d be able to cover 24mm to 210mm. The LX3 seems ideal for street photography because of its wide angle and stealth characteristics. I tried doing street photography with my Olympus E-500 and the 11-22mm lens (equivalent to 22-44mm), but the loud shutter noise seemed too obvious to me. One person noticed that I was taking his photo.
The Canon G10 is perhaps the better general purpose camera because most people will find the 60mm maximum focal length on the LX3 rather limiting, but the way I see it, the entire LX3 is less expensive and smaller than a wide angle lens for a DSLR.
The downside of the LX3 is that it doesn’t come with a viewfinder. You have to pay $200 extra for an add-on viewfinder, which seems like a lot of money to spend considering what a short lifespan digital cameras seem to have. The LX3 isn’t like an old Leica that you could buy in 1960 and still use in 1990.
The advertising literature says it does ISO 3200, but that sounds like a joke. I saw an ISO 400 photo on the internet, and I judged it to be usable but barely—not quite as good as the Canon G9 at ISO 400. I also found the G9 to be not usable above ISO 400. However, with the LX3 lens having an aperture of less than f/2.8 and optical image stabilization, the LX3 low light usability isn’t really so far behind a DSLR with a slow kit lens.
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