why I returned my LX100

[cainn24]

Do you think this is about 22mm wide, perhaps? What would you guess?

If by wide you actually mean "wide", horizontally, I'm guessing it's probably about as wide as a 3:2 sensor crop. But I'm too lazy to work it out exactly right now

The blacks turning purple is really obvious in this example, as well as the one above, but not only in the top, left corner (which in other examples have been blue), but also in the lower left and both diagonal white cards on the left side.

All that stuff usually gets corrected pretty well in-camera. It's easy to correct in post as well. Here's a Photo Ninja conversion with attention paid to cleaning up all the CA/fringing, and a few other routine tweaks:

 

[Camp Freddy]

Well pp they certainly have made a pigs-ear of the jpeg engine, but that is fixable.

Resolving power seems though to be not as good as the first generation mFT with maybe kit lenses, i did look at comparisons but dp review have recently removed the older mFT from the studio "lab " shots

But it is better than the other enthusiast compacts which it also beats for iso performance, DR and of course shallow depth of field.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

I have always been very impressed with my m4/3 cameras with their sharpness.

Very happy with Olympus E-PL3, PM2, PL5, PL6. Also very happy with GM1.

Use the Pana 20mm 1.7, my sharpest lens. Also happy with 14-42 lens, 40-150 lens, 45mm 1.8, 75mm 1.8.

Love the VF-4 viewfinder, super sharp and ample, large feeling.

But the LX100 presented me with a tiny, tunnel like viewfinder. And the pictures are just not sharp. A lot of fuzzy pictures, and the few keepers are not even that sharp. It just feels like so much compromise was put into it, that it ended up taxing the system ... I feel the lens is trying to do so much it lost its sharpness along the way.

Above ISO 1600 the pictures are too noisy. The camera needs light. It ends up being really a day camera. Often indoors I saw "use flash" suggestion. And outdoors it is still compromised.

I'm sure the video is great.

"I'm sure the video is great" sums it up for me.

Many of us waited much of the summer for the LX8, based on a 1" sensor, but then panasonic did this radical leap instead, apparently to make the smallest 4K camera, instead of the best compact, single shot camera.

My advice is to enlarge the camera in order to accomodate its ambitious specs.

They could have made the body much smaller (using a 1" sensor), and then made a big enough lens to get great IQ and longer zoom range, having ~17MP in 3:2 and 4:3, and lots of MP in 16:9!

The LX8 would be the perfect compact camera for still shooters.

But now it's all about 4K, which many LX owners would never use.

Ughhh! I feel cheated, actually. Everything is about getting the best 4K now, instead of making a best compact video camera and a best compact still camera. They have to do both in one camera, and compromising stills for 4K.

Canon seems to be compromising their SLRs too, in order to get the best video they can.

Still shooters are apparently now second fiddle. They're abandoning their base.

The viewfinder of the LX100 says it all, it just does not compete at all with the VF-4 or the Fuji X-T1. It is hard to see in it.

I'm staying with the sharp as nails GM1 and 20mm 1.7 lens.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

Well pp they certainly have made a pigs-ear of the jpeg engine, but that is fixable.

Resolving power seems though to be not as good as the first generation mFT with maybe kit lenses, i did look at comparisons but dp review have recently removed the older mFT from the studio "lab " shots

But it is better than the other enthusiast compacts which it also beats for iso performance, DR and of course shallow depth of field.

How do we know it's better in DR?

 

[Simon Roscam Abbing]

Well maybe your camera is faulty but for me the LX100 exceeds my expectations. Is it the perfect camera? Well maybe not for pixel peepers, the image quality from my much cheaper Sony A58 is better. But for a lot of situations it comes pretty close to perfection I think. After reading your post I took this shot at 3200 ISO to illustrate my point, it certainly has some noise but I don't condsider it disturbing, I think it has a nice bokeh and this comes out of this wonderfull, unobtrusive camera that is small enough to carry around, big enough to be comfortable to use and that produces result that for me are more than acceptable.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

Do you think this is about 22mm wide, perhaps? What would you guess?

If by wide you actually mean "wide", horizontally, I'm guessing it's probably about as wide as a 3:2 sensor crop. But I'm too lazy to work it out exactly right now

The blacks turning purple is really obvious in this example, as well as the one above, but not only in the top, left corner (which in other examples have been blue), but also in the lower left and both diagonal white cards on the left side.

All that stuff usually gets corrected pretty well in-camera. It's easy to correct in post as well. Here's a Photo Ninja conversion with attention paid to cleaning up all the CA/fringing, and a few other routine tweaks:

Some of the blacks are green now, and the blacks still aren't completely black.

What do you mean by "and a few other routine tweaks?"

And are you "cleaning up all the CA/fringing" by adjusting the CA slider, or whatever Photo Ninja has for CA correction? I'm not familiar with the program.

Also, it seems that when lenses have a lot of CA in the photozone.de tests, they aren't very contrasty either. I could be wrong on that, though, and maybe this is aliasing, some have suggested.

 

[cainn24]

Do you think this is about 22mm wide, perhaps? What would you guess?

If by wide you actually mean "wide", horizontally, I'm guessing it's probably about as wide as a 3:2 sensor crop. But I'm too lazy to work it out exactly right now

The blacks turning purple is really obvious in this example, as well as the one above, but not only in the top, left corner (which in other examples have been blue), but also in the lower left and both diagonal white cards on the left side.

All that stuff usually gets corrected pretty well in-camera. It's easy to correct in post as well. Here's a Photo Ninja conversion with attention paid to cleaning up all the CA/fringing, and a few other routine tweaks:

Some of the blacks are green now, and the blacks still aren't completely black.

LX100 support in Photo Ninja is not complete so the colours are off (the black point in particular). I was mostly just trying to illustrate CA correction anyway. But since you're so demanding I revisited the image and took a different route just for you:



This version was developed as a GX7 RAW file so the colours are more correct

What do you mean by "and a few other routine tweaks?"

Sharpening and noise reduction.

And are you "cleaning up all the CA/fringing" by adjusting the CA slider, or whatever Photo Ninja has for CA correction? I'm not familiar with the program.

It's basically a one-click solution in Photo Ninja most of the time, but there are plenty of manual controls if things aren't quite right. Sometimes it's impossible to get things perfect, but you do what you can. With some images I resort to desaturating entire colour channels (if doing so doesn't negatively impact on the image) just to get rid of some artifacts that I can't get rid of any other way.

 

[Keith Jefferies]

I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Jeff has no intention of buying an LX100. He is only here to complain about it!

 

[cainn24]

I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Jeff has no intention of buying an LX100. He is only here to complain about it!

I have no intention of buying one either (fixed-lens cameras without much reach just don't float my particular boat). As such it's become almost comical how much time I spend investigating issues of LX100 performance.

Heh.

But it is nonetheless a really interesting camera in my opinion.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

Do you think this is about 22mm wide, perhaps? What would you guess?

If by wide you actually mean "wide", horizontally, I'm guessing it's probably about as wide as a 3:2 sensor crop. But I'm too lazy to work it out exactly right now

The blacks turning purple is really obvious in this example, as well as the one above, but not only in the top, left corner (which in other examples have been blue), but also in the lower left and both diagonal white cards on the left side.

All that stuff usually gets corrected pretty well in-camera. It's easy to correct in post as well. Here's a Photo Ninja conversion with attention paid to cleaning up all the CA/fringing, and a few other routine tweaks:

Some of the blacks are green now, and the blacks still aren't completely black.

LX100 support in Photo Ninja is not complete so the colours are off (the black point in particular). I was mostly just trying to illustrate CA correction anyway. But since you're so demanding I revisited the image and took a different route just for you:



This version was developed as a GX7 RAW file so the colours are more correct

What do you mean by "and a few other routine tweaks?"

Sharpening and noise reduction.

And are you "cleaning up all the CA/fringing" by adjusting the CA slider, or whatever Photo Ninja has for CA correction? I'm not familiar with the program.

It's basically a one-click solution in Photo Ninja most of the time, but there are plenty of manual controls if things aren't quite right. Sometimes it's impossible to get things perfect, but you do what you can. With some images I resort to desaturating entire colour channels (if doing so doesn't negatively impact on the image) just to get rid of some artifacts that I can't get rid of any other way.

I was wondering because these aren't just the edges of the black that have turned purple (or blue in other examples), so I would think they would be more difficult to correct, and beyond what the average photographer can easily do in Lightroom, for example.

 

[larryr]

Thanks for posting this. That is quite a list of cameras, how do you think it compares to the RX100?

I am going to consider those cameras, but I do want viewfinder, really missed it with my LX3 & LX7 etc. (Haven't had one since my Nikon CP5700 which I sold last year). It does not sound like you can attach the viewfinder to the GM1? Still it is quite small so one could switch from a small setup to a bulkier zoom or several lenses as one might want. How bulky is that viewfinder with the Pen cameras?

The responses have kept the LX100 in the running for me, but I can wait for raw conversion, maybe some bugs will be worked out etc. Now that I lost my lx7 I am getting used to and having fun with my FZ200.

 

[cainn24]

I was wondering because these aren't just the edges of the black that have turned purple (or blue in other examples), so I would think they would be more difficult to correct, and beyond what the average photographer can easily do in Lightroom, for example.

It's important to remember though that test charts like this tend to reveal flaws in a much more pronounced manner than more typical everyday subject matter would. They can even make corner softness look worse that it is with other sorts of subject matter since the softness is often (to varying degrees) due to field curvature which is a more significant problem when photographing a perfectly flat subject (this is one of the problems that Sony is looking to solve with curved sensors).

In other words, test charts are just test charts. Certainly not useless. Quite useful in fact. But they are still just a single shooting condition rather than a definitive indicator of overall performance in the "how do my real-world images actually look" sense.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Jeff has no intention of buying an LX100. He is only here to complain about it!

I have no intention of buying one either (fixed-lens cameras without much reach just don't float my particular boat). As such it's become almost comical how much time I spend investigating issues of LX100 performance.

Heh.

But it is nonetheless a really interesting camera in my opinion.

75mm reach doesn't float my particular boat at all, either. It's disgusting. We should be disgusted, especially because they could have done it right if they weren't focused on 4K.

I actually do have a silver version on order. It will hopefully replace my RX100, which replaced my 24-90mm LX5, which replaced my 28-140mm G11 and G10. The G11 and G10 are big cameras too, a pain to carry around, but 140mm was fun!

I'm a HUGE fan of the multi-aspect ratio system, so I'm going to try to love this camera, but I'm not sure it will work out yet. The RX100 was also bittersweet, but I put up with its extremely poor IS, only 28mm wide, and only-3:2 sensor, because the resolution was so much better.

Olympus and Nikon have a chance, right now, to best Sony, Canon and Panasonic with a great 1", but they probably won't do the wonderful, multi-aspect thing, or better yet: oversized square or round sensor to capture everything the lens sees!

 

[Jeff Fenske]

I was wondering because these aren't just the edges of the black that have turned purple (or blue in other examples), so I would think they would be more difficult to correct, and beyond what the average photographer can easily do in Lightroom, for example.

It's important to remember though that test charts like this tend to reveal flaws in a much more pronounced manner than more typical everyday subject matter would. They can even make corner softness look worse that it is with other sorts of subject matter since the softness is often (to varying degrees) due to field curvature which is a more significant problem when photographing a perfectly flat subject (this is one of the problems that Sony is looking to solve with curved sensors).

In other words, test charts are just test charts. Certainly not useless. Quite useful in fact. But they are still just a single shooting condition rather than a definitive indicator of overall performance in the "how do my real-world images actually look" sense.

You may have seen: one photographer posted a 24mm image in a fairly fast aperture, I think at 24mm, in which many of the tree's green leaves changed to blue.

It was windy, and the tree was probably beyond where the camera was focused on, but it was horrible, and not just in the corner.

Other shots have looked better, though.

If this is because of a lack of AA filter, I can live with that knowing every image will be sharper as a result. But it's really something to watch out for, and a little bit hard to swallow.

The Nikon 800E owners seem to be mostly happy without the AA.

 

[Mark B UK]

I think it is premature to form a view without seeing how mainstream RAW software, genuinely optimised for LX100 files, processes images taken with careful technique.

 

[cainn24]

75mm reach doesn't float my particular boat at all, either. It's disgusting. We should be disgusted, especially because they could have done it right if they weren't focused on 4K.

I'm not disgusted by the fact that Panasonic make cameras that appeal to people other than myself at all.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

I believe LX100 uses very, very pronounced in-camera processing of captured data (even RAW data). Especially at wide zoom, they probably stretch the captured image data like crazy, correcting for barrel distortion etc.

This in-camera processing then lowers the effective resolution to 5-6 MP.

You're greatly exaggerating:


Uncorrected


Corrected and cropped to match the actual framing in the LCD/EVF (denoted by the red square). Images from imaging-resource.com, processed by me in RawTherapee with no sharpening or noise reduction applied.

What we end up with is ~11.2 MP

And this only happens at the extreme wide end. Zoom in just a little bit and the necessary corrections are much more subtle. Keep zooming and corrections quickly become unnecessary.

They simply stretched the imaging technology too much with this one.

I don't think so. In fact the corrections at the wide end aren't even as extreme as we've seen on some other compacts.

I agree that the lens on the LX100 isn't a particularly sharp lens, but most of this complaining is actually really about the lack of in-camera sharpening that is done by default, whether people realize that or not.

One cool thing I've thought about doing. Perhaps you've tried it. Some images would look fine in this semi-fisheye look, and wouldn't necessarily need distortion correction.

Leaving them uncorrected would keep the edges sharper.

I still think PS and LR should offer true RAW, uncorrected images, leaving it up to the photographer whether to correct or not, or how much. And that's why I got DxO, partly in order to have this option.

 

[Lee W]

Shot this afternoon, ISO1000, OOC Jpeg.

Just sit back and think about it. This was shot on a camera I can fit in a coat pocket, at ISO1000, it is sharp where it should be sharp, the bokeh is very nice and noise is hardly existent. The cost for this camera was £695.00 in the UK.

If you aren't satisfied with this result in combination with the above parameters, good luck with finding your perfect camera. You might have a long wait on your hands.

 

[Jeff Fenske]

75mm reach doesn't float my particular boat at all, either. It's disgusting. We should be disgusted, especially because they could have done it right if they weren't focused on 4K.

I'm not disgusted by the fact that Panasonic make cameras that appeal to people other than myself at all.

I wrote above:

Many of us waited much of the summer for the LX8, based on a 1" sensor, but then panasonic did this radical leap instead, apparently to make the smallest 4K camera, instead of the best compact, single shot camera. …

Canon seems to be compromising their SLRs too, in order to get the best video they can.

Still shooters are apparently now second fiddle. They're abandoning their base.

It seems to me they're abandoning their base, "their base" being still photographers.

It's not just a few who are openly disappointed with the large body, short tele reach, 12MP, and perhaps compromised IQ — which all could have been remedied had they used the expected 1" sensor.

One specific example in how Panny is making design decisions for 4K:

The Panasonic rep says they can't use IBIS in future Panasonics because not enough heat can be removed that is generated for 4K and the lcd.

The LX8 was apparently abandoned in order to make the smallest 4K camera.

I think that's sad.

And in 5 years, Canon hasn't improved their base ISO DR in the 7D2; though, they did add dual pixel technology for video.

They probably poured massive amounts of money into improving the sensor for video.

It seems that Panasonic is following in Canon's footsteps. Many Canon users are jumping ship to Nikon and Sony, but the wildlife/sports guys are still mostly okay because they don't shoot at base ISO, and Canon did greatly improve focusing for them.

 

[cainn24]

75mm reach doesn't float my particular boat at all, either. It's disgusting. We should be disgusted, especially because they could have done it right if they weren't focused on 4K.

I'm not disgusted by the fact that Panasonic make cameras that appeal to people other than myself at all.

I wrote above:

Many of us waited much of the summer for the LX8, based on a 1" sensor, but then panasonic did this radical leap instead, apparently to make the smallest 4K camera, instead of the best compact, single shot camera. …

Canon seems to be compromising their SLRs too, in order to get the best video they can.

Still shooters are apparently now second fiddle. They're abandoning their base.

It seems to me they're abandoning their base, "their base" being still photographers.

It's not just a few who are openly disappointed with the large body, short tele reach, 12MP, and perhaps compromised IQ — which all could have been remedied had they used the expected 1" sensor.

One specific example in how Panny is making design decisions for 4K:

The Panasonic rep says they can't use IBIS in future Panasonics because not enough heat can be removed that is generated for 4K and the lcd.

The LX8 was apparently abandoned in order to make the smallest 4K camera.

I think that's sad.

And in 5 years, Canon hasn't improved their base ISO DR in the 7D2; though, they did add dual pixel technology for video.

They probably poured massive amounts of money into improving the sensor for video.

It seems that Panasonic is following in Canon's footsteps. Many Canon users are jumping ship to Nikon and Sony, but the wildlife/sports guys are still mostly okay because they don't shoot at base ISO, and Canon did greatly improve focusing for them.

Every camera is a compromise in one way or another and you're just listing the compromises that you, and some others, would be happy with. But you aren't everyone.