When it comes to compact-yet-complete digital cameras, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 is a wonderful and successful piece of
technology. It has a huge community of enthusiasts, fans and supporters hanging
around on all continents (see for instance its popularity on the Panasonic forum at DPReview.com or the dedicated group at Flickr).
Why I like it
This nice little toy comes with many advantages and actually very few
drawbacks:
- Quite small and easy to carry, even in your pocket
- Luminous Leica lens opening at f/2.0 (yummi) and wide field (eq. 24mm)
- Multiple true aspect ratios, 16/9 or 3/2 or 4/3, without
cropping
- RAW (.rw2) shooting with or without sidecar Jpegs (sometimes useful as
reference)
- Nice "Dummy mode" a.k.a. "Intelligent auto" for instant
point-and-shoot
- Lots of things and functions to customize for the nerds...
Among the few drawbacks:
- Short zoom, it encompasses only the 24-60mm span...
- The objective cover might be annoying...
- Custom shooting modes are enabled, but at times limited (and limiting)
Well, that's a really brief overview of why I bought one last spring for my
trip to China. I've not really been disappointed ever since, in spite of the
short zoom - by looking at my photographic archive, I rarely shoot over 60mm,
with 95% of my pics taken below 80mm.
The firmwares
Panasonic has made a good job of providing its customers with regular
firmware updates. Not only do they correct bugs and tweak a few things (white
balance...), they also add some new features that LX3-fans have been expecting
for ages.
A recent mishap resulted in the withdrawal of a short-lived 2.0 firmware, released at the beginning of october
with many interesting features but unfortunately a couple of bugs too. As the
new corrected DMC-LX3
Firmware version 2.1 (Zip, 6 MB) has been released two days ago and the
japanese web site does not seem to save deprecated versions, I will keep a copy
on this website for future archival and downgrading if needed...
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 firmware v2.1 (21 Oct 2009)
LX3__210.bin (6 MB)
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 firmware v1.3 (1 Jun 2009)
LX3__130.bin (6 MB)