Compact Camera Search, from the S80 to the LX2
Found this post about one man’s search for his next compact camera. I recently went through this search several months ago with almost the exact same situation. I have been a follower of the Canon S line - S30, S40 to S80 and loved it. Especially for it’s time those were the best camera’s. It was small enough for me to pants pocket, reasonably fast lens, started wide (28mm is a great wide angle, I much prefer it to 35) and had the biggest CCD in a compact camera - in fact still has. It took great pictures, really I didn’t have any complaints about it.
Sadly, I dropped it one time too many - put it on a slippery shelf that wasn’t flat and that was all she wrote. I had a lot of the same criteria as Tim does, wanted raw and wanted something with good low-light performance. I also wanted something that gave me some manual controls and having the wide start at 28mm would be a bonus.
Turns out that narrows the field tremendously. One option would have been looking for another Canon S80 on ebay - but I figured, it’s old there must be something better. I didn’t want to go larger, so that ruled out the G7 and that style of camera. Most of the cameras in the compact space didn’t offer any manual controls - the Pentax A20 in his list, as an example. The one that came up consistently was the Panasonic LX2. On paper it seemed perfect, 28mm, big CCD, manual controls, the works. It fit all my requirements. There were some questions about the image quality, but when you read enough and you really want to want something, you find key loopholes and make the case to buy. That’s what I did, I found the few posts that said many of the image problems could be solved by shooting raw - and since that’s what I’d be shooting, seemed ok to me.
Bought the camera and really like so much about it. The ergonomics of the camera are great, it’s really easy to access a lot of features using the little joystick and so it’s great to tweak your settings. It was a bit more cumbersome on the S80. I like the option for the different aspect ratios available on the camera - it’s unique and can give you some really nice panoramics. There’s two problems - the image quality just isn’t there, RAW or no RAW. They tried to cram too many megapixels into it and it just doesn’t work. Plus, because these RAW files are so big, it actually takes a few seconds to write the image to the memory card after taking the shot. So once you shoot, you have to wait before you can do anything. It’s really awful. Also the RAW files are huge and just don’t seem worth it given the relatively poor image quality. In fact, I stopped shooting RAW and switched down to a lower setting, around 5 or 6 megapixels.
The LX2 is almost a great camera, if only it took good pictures. I think if they dropped down the megapixel count it would solve so many of their problems. Sadly, it is what it is. If I could do it over again, I would not get the LX2 - if it was then I’d probably find another S80. If it was now I’d look pretty closely at the new Nikon 5000 and the Pentax A30 (in the article I believe he wrongly says it’s the same as the A20 except for the larger CCD - I don’t believe the A20 had any manual controls which was a deal breaker for me). My fear with both of those cameras is that they both are also 10MP, I wonder if their pictures and write times will be any better than my LX2.
On the comments in Tim’s article people mention the Ricoh - which I strongly considered. But in my compact I really wanted to have the utility of zoom. A fixed 28mm would be too limiting for my usage. Sigh, it seems that the hunt for the perfect compact must continue.
