Why so many "left the RX100 for pana LX7" mentions in Panasonic forum?

I have an RX100 and had I seen the $300 LX7 special before I bought I might have bought one instead.

Coming from a Canon S90 the Sony controls coming out of the box are inferior. It took me several hours to pore over the manual and re-configure the camera to improve the controls, and now they are not bad.

The controls are saved by the Fn button, which lets you put what you care about in a good place.

The flash and drive buttons can be re-assigned as well; I put AEL on the flash button and moved the flash to Fn. The help button is wasted as it cannot be re-assigned and the help is lame.

The rear control wheel cannot be re-assigned, while the lens ring can be. By default they control the same thing which varies by mode. This is unfortunate, but you get used to strange things like using the rear dial to change aperture so the lens ring can do something else (ISO in my case).

After the fiddling the controls are not bad, but I can believe the LX7 controls are better. Sony could improve the camera quite a lot if they were willing to do a significant firmware update. Possibly the single change I would most want would be to save all three HDR shots in RAW+jpeg.

It fits in my pocket, the focus is fast, the image quality is great, ISO 3200 is amazingly good, and the multi-shot HDR works better than you would think.