The perfect take-anywhere camera? Not!

I bought a LX2 last week and took it for a test drive in San Antonio, TX. I liked the camera very much: size, controls, build quality, lens, 16:9 aspect ratio, responsiveness and of course the ability to shoot raw.

Mega O.I.S is very helpful if not as effective as what I am used to with my Pentax K10D or K100D.

1/2s hand held! Not too bad ;-)

Unfortunately, the image quality doesn't seem to be up to the challenge: soft corner, serious CA (easily corrected with ACR, though) and, worst of all, horrible painterly effect on dark areas of images, event when shot at ISO 100 in bright light!

1:1 crop. Yes, this is ISO 100 and raw format!

full image

I can't believe that Panasonic decided to apply what seems to be some aggressive noise reduction to raw images. It just doesn't make sense!

The camera is on its way back to amazon.com. Too bad :-(