Panasonic LX3 – First Test

Decision Time
I finally decided which compact camera to buy. I bought a Panasonic LX3 and took it for a drive in the park to see how it behaved. Actually, I took a couple of shots with an LX3 in a local shop before I bought it. I took my SD card into the shop and they let me take a few shots so that I could look at them at home.

I took a shot of the shop assistant and one of the back of my hand. I also took a couple of shots with a Canon S90 but I much preferred the LX3.

In The Local Park
The sky was overcast and flat. In fact it had that very particular gritty, blue tinge that the skies gets around here. That is not to say that the sun never shines here – it is just that when it is not shining the sky looks like someone has poured iron filings and old blue ink over everything.

By the way, ‘here’ is Leeds in West Yorkshire in the north of England, and having just come back from two months in India, the weather here seems all the more unappealing.

Well that is the way to introduce this not very inspiring shot of a tree taken with the LX3.

I shot jpeg, so there wasn’t an awful lot I could do to brighten up the shot in post-production, and anyway the idea was to see what the camera would do with a straight jpeg.

Well, it was not able to magically improve the weather, that’s for sure.

Click on the photo to see a bigger version – it looks a bit better in the bigger size.

I will wait for the weather and then go and shoot the tree again. And I will try RAW as well.

My other settings were, sharpening down as low as it would go and noise reduction down as low as it would go. I may revise these settings.

RAW
I took a test shot of something or other in RAW and it would not play ball in Photoshop CS3, but Lightroom liked it.

First Impressions Of The Camera Itself
I read somewhere that people who used the LX3 didn’t like the ease with which the dial on the top plate moved around too easily. It hasn’t happened to me yet. I set it on ‘A’ for aperture priority and it has stayed there.

I also read that people don’t like the fact that there is a slider that toggles between shooting mode and review mode. The concern is that you could turn the camera on and find that it was in review mode and not ready to take a shot.

I haven’t found it to be a problem. You have to take the lens cap off, so checking that the camera is in shooting mode is just another check to do as part of the process.

I Tried The Flash Today
I did a bit of experimenting for the shot of the anemone at the top of this article. I played with the exposure in Manual mode until the flash was no longer blasting the sensor. Again, click on the photo to see a larger version.

I don’t think it is a good idea to flood a camera sensor with light, so if you want to try Manual mode and flash, I suggest you set the speed to something like 1/100 of a second and the aperture to f8 or else you might kill the sensor.

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Tagged as: Panasonic LX3