Wednesday, July 18, 2007

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 :-(

5 comments:

Richard Day said...

I have the LX-1, it does seem better than tha the LX-2, which wasn't a good upgrade!

However I find it still is too slow in Raw, and noisy at above ISO 80. I will probably sell it and may get the new Ricoh GX-100. It will give me a true 24mm WA and up to 70mm, very similar to my DA 16-45.

One of my friends is probably getting one soon, I will test his first!

BTW - Thanks for your PS scripts, Absolute Sharpening Pro!

P.S. It would be nice to be able to change the text point sizes and border widths. Is it possible? ;-)

Guy said...

Is there any possibility that your copy was bad? I am awaiting a succesor to the LX2 as a carry-around camera (Pana said next spring). The fact that it does not have full-speed USB2 (or whatever the confusing name is for real USB2) makes the LX2 a non-starter for me (I never take out flash memory unless it is to upgrade it to a larger one - safer that way.
Guy

mskad said...

Hi Guy,

Unfortunately, I discovered afterward that this was a well known and well documented issue with the LX2 (here, for instance: http://www.gopetition.com/online/9523.html#Update).

mskad said...

Hi Richard!

Thanks for stopping by ;-)

I will be adding new features to ASP and ASW as soon as I can. Not enough time, too many things to do...

Take care.

Unknown said...

Great work guys,

Shout out to all the guys!!

Hey guys checkout the unboxing of my new Sony A230 with twin kit lense at

http://spotlogger.blogspot.com/

Your input on the unboxing will be much appreciated as well :)