I usually shoot with Canon EOS 1DmkIII and pile of Zeiss/Canon/Leica/Nikon primes. However due to my work I travel quite a lot, once a month for a week as minimum and maximum few weeks (typically to separate locations). Since I could not carry or it's not worth the effort and risk, I started looking for smaller camera for these work trips. Based on reviews I selected Panasonic LX-3.
First impressions after a week:
+ possibility to set camera to manual focus and use autofocus when user wants it via focus button (exactly the same way I focus with 1DmkIII - only when I want with the thumb button)
+ lens is very sharp and has good contrast at apertures larger than f/5, even wide open
+ M and A modes (my earlier point and shoot camera did just have P, which I never use if I have M or A)
+ image stabilization does seem to work pretty well
+ aspect ratio selection with slider on the lens is very handy, helps composition and removed need for cropping at computer
+ usable with (thin) cloves at freezing temperature
+ hotshow for bubble level (camera is too small to have flash on top of it, at least all my flashed do weight over 2x LX-3 weight)
- no Mac OS X RAW-support (I use Aperture, and I even don't have Photoshop CS4 yet) and Silkypix sucks big time
- 2s self timer has to be activated for each photo (pain in the #ss for tripod work since it has to be done for each photo)
- only +-1 stop bracketing
- lens has vignettes (even after Silkypix RAW development) and bad bokeh in tele end of the zoom (may have bad bokeh also in wide end, but I haven't yet seen it)
- electronic lens cap like in G10 etc. would have been nice
- since there is no lens hood, in wet conditions the lens needed to be wiped all the time
I don't yet say final verdict of image quality since I was first time out today and it was so dark in Finland that at midday in forest ISO 80 f/5.6 required 0.5-1s shutter speed. Also I have not yet been able to shoot landscape photos, in which the subject is far away. Based on today's experience * I would say about LX-3 image quality that it's OK for webpictures and small prints (A4 or smaller) * photos which have date of 2008-11-30 on the link below
