Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 mini review
I’m a big fan of your , and visit your site almost daily (even weekends!) You are a truly gifted photographer, and a great inspiration to us street photographers!
I noticed that lately you’ve been using a Lumix LX5 instead of the M9. Would you please share some of your experiences using the Lumix–what u like and don’t like. For me, it’s a poor person’s (wannabe?)–I can’t afford anything with that red dot on it, so I’m interested in the LX5. Also, have u tried out the Ricoh GRD3?
Many thanks! Looking forward to your reviews (please consider posting some),
Bette L.
thanks! I’m not a gear review guy, but here my impressions on the LX5, a decent, useable, but not great street camera…
Some time after getting rid of every piece of gear (EOS 5D, Hasselblad XPan, two M8′s, Ricoh GRD II, Sigma DP1) to afford the M9… I still wanted a pocket-sized camera and re-considered the GRD II/III, but at the time wasn’t able to find one at a decent price and I wanted to try something new to me… Over the years I oftentimes came across the Lumix series and photographers generally liked them, but I never used one before. Finally, patience wore thin and I picked up a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 at B&H photo. Purchase the improved Panasonic Lumix LX7 on amazon.
I normally prefer a fixed 28mm lens, and generally dislike zoom lenses for , as a fixed lens simply gives me the ability to “mind-frame” what I see beforehand. The LX5 has a fast f2, 24mm equivalent, wide zoom lens and the ability to step-zoom at “fixed” focal lengths of 24, 28, 35, 50, 70, 90mm helps me somewhat with my mind-set and supports my shooting style. Normally, I turn the camera on and hit the zoom rocker one time to set the lens to 28mm, the rocker has gotten sticky since the camera got drenched in a blizzard, but still works fine. The lens is plenty sharp with some annoying barrel distortion at 24mm.
Another thing I like is the ability to set the camera to manual focus with a small switch, situated on the left side of the lens and the thumbwheel on the rear is used to adjust the MF, supported by a distance scale with a DOF indicator and an enlarged visual on the LCD screen. It is somewhat slow and cumbersome, but good enough for what I do and simply beats the abysmal contrast autofocus, which is useless for quick street shooting.
The lens also has a manual switch to set the aspect ratio, something I never use, but I can see how that’s useful for square shooters (no pun intended) and the display button cycles through grid-line, blank screen and set-up states.
I find the amount of finicky silver engraved buttons and an abundance of menus somewhat confusing, but everything I need for straight shooting is readily available and there are plenty of functions that I’ll never even consider using, since I’m a manual guy…
Shot in RAW and processed in Lightroom 3, image quality at ISO 800 is excellent with a pleasing amount of noise, ISO 1600 has a wonderful grittiness to it, and is pretty excellent for such a small sensor camera. color noise reduction in LR3 kicks a$s btw.
RAW write speed on a class 6 SD card is pretty quick at around one second per frame with a burst buffer that seems to work fine, and I yet have to exceed.
verdict: overall satisfied, but could do with less features mumbo-jumbo
Panasonic’s successor, the Lumix LX7 now sports 7.5x Intelligent zoom, less ghost with Nano Surface Coating Lens, 10MP new high sensitivity MOS sensor, F1.4-2.3 DC vario SUMMILUX 24mm Wide Angle, 60p Full HD Video Recording with Stereo Microphone in AVCHD Progressive /MP4, 9fps High Speed Continuous Shooting