Here we are once again. I've bought another digital camera and once again my own expectations are being undershot. This time I spent a major chunk of change only to plan the return of yet another item to Fry's Electronics the day after purchase.
Let me explain. I own a wonderful 6mp digital camera that is also of the Panasonic Lumix series that I reviewed
here, so my expectations for the upgrade were really high, too high.
When I first tried the Lumix series I moved from 3mp to 6 and the CCD was SO much better that the tiny hairs on my subject's face as well as facial imperfections stood out so bad I couldn't believe it, digital perfection as it was then. So, when I shot a few dozen pic's with this camera I was expecting nothing short of a miracle. What I got were images that were less sharp and less accurate on color. I could not believe it so I did another few dozen pic’s under different light, focusing mainly on eyes as my wife's eye's are gorgeous and the Z25 bring out the wide range of colors in them, the DMC-LX2 on the other hand blended the colors in her eyes where she has splotches of cinnamon and greens on her mainly blue eyes. The eyelashes were flattened and less defined and the skin imperfections smoothed.
Wait a minute? I just paid $499 for a camera that has WORSE end quality?? Yeah, I did and it's going back tomorrow after work.
For someone that has not used a Z25 they're going to think I'm crazy, that the camera is a huge improvement over the average digital camera out there - and they're right, to the extent that it's better then most, but it's just not an improvement over their previous lines.
If you're looking for widescreen photos though, this has an excellent wide screen ability. The end photos are about 50% wider and about 12.5% taller than a 6mp camera. That said though, unless you're really taking WIDE images, you're not getting what you're thinking your getting.... lol, I'll try to explain my point and additional frustration.
Look, when you move to 10mp you're expecting the overall photo to change dimension and the only move you're going to see with this 'upgrade' is horizontal. In my case my 6mp at 2816x2112 to this one 4224x2376. Sure, it's 10mp but only if your really using wide angle shots. If you set it to the 4:3 mode you cant still use 10mp - it doesn’t just change the dimensions to 3660x2745, it drops your mp down to 7.5mp or 3168x2376. So I guess that's my biggest gripe, that 10mp only works at widescreen.
Another gripe is that if you've been buying AA rechargables like I have and you want to use this camera you can toss those "cheap" rechargeables in the trash because this camera only takes it's own mini brick version that runs in its own charger - takes about 2hrs to charge it up... but they're rated at about 300 shots per charge if you're not using flash all the time and if you're not using AF full time either. So be prepared to buy another battery at about $50.
You'd think I'd be done complaining but I'm not. I really expected their stabilizer's to be getting better with a major upgrade but in fact I had more photos blurred with this new camera than I ever have with my last one. I use the LZ5 nearly daily with my kids and they're not exactly slow moving targets so I know what the older version was capable of - this one just didn't do as well keeping the kids focused.
One other thing that I've really had a problem with is that anything beyond ISO100 is grainy in the various lights I tested, it's like their noise correction is possessed. I've tried running the images in raw format and using their (awful) silkypix software (basically I'm spoiled with Photoshop-level expectations and this reminded me of ms paint user friendly design) and made some ground in cleaning the images but even after spending 20 minutes on a single photo I was unable to get it as clean as my good old LZ5 did without any games. Granted, the auto focus is faster on this new one but if its fast and still doesn’t get the job done then who cares if it's faster?
I did do a couple quick videos and found the overall size of the video to be about 20% larger than with the LZ5 but the frame flicker and overall quality to be no real improvement.
People, honestly, walk away from this one - go buy a solid LZ5 with lower MP size but quality you can depend on and print 8x10's with - not to mention save $300.
Here, take a look. The photo on the left is from this new DMC-LX2 and the photo on the right is from the DMC-LZ5. No comparison.
http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o287/slick-smiley/4f4f5bc0.jpg
