S$1128
Product Summary
7.4
out of 10View score
The bad: Generally soft photos; mediocre movies; no optical viewfinder; expensive.
The bottom line: A good choice for an enthusiast looking for a powerful camera that can fit into a jacket pocket; however, the Leica D-Lux 3 has a price only a Leica aficionado could love.
Read full review of the Leica D-Lux 3 »
Average User Rating
CNET Asia Review
Every year, Leica and Panasonic collaborate on a few camera models that get branded under each company's name. If you can't tell them apart, just look at the price tags. Leica generally throws in about US$100 worth of perks--usually better software and an SD memory card--then charges about US$200 more for the bundle. In the case of the Leica D-Lux 3, the perks over its twin, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2, are Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 and a 64MB SD memory card (you can get the latest version, Photoshop Elements 5, plus a 64MB card for about US$120). Like the DMC-LX2, the D-Lux 3 comes in both black and silver and is just packed with amateur-oriented features, including RAW file support, a variety of focus modes, all of the essential metering and semi-manual exposure options, a wide-angle lens, and an overstuffed information display.
| Editors' note:
This is a US-based review. Some of the bundles mentioned may not apply in your country.
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Design And Features
The D-Lux 3, also like the DMC-LX2, uses a 10-megapixel with a native 16:9 aspect ratio instead of 4:3. To produce 4:3 or 3:2 D-Lux 3 photos, the camera simply uses the relevant fraction of the sensor. This enables the DMC-LX2 to produce higher-resolution 16:9 images than would be possible with a standard 10-megapixel sensor. (It would require a 13-megapixel 4:3 aspect sensor to generate 10-megapixel 16:9 images.) Conversely, the resolution of the D-Lux 3's 4:3 images is only 7 megapixels.
Unfortunately, these are extremely small pixels, which equal extremely high noise. From a measurement standpoint, the D-Lux 3 fares much better than the DMC-LX2 at all ISO speeds, with the gap widening as ISO sensitivity increases. However, that seems to be caused by Leica's more-aggressive filtering, which reduces sharpness. The good news is that they print better than they look on-screen, though you'd be well advised to avoid serious crops.
Performance
Unsurprisingly, the D-Lux 3 performs similarly to the DMC-LX2, always taking a fraction of a second longer than I could spare when photographing animals and children. A 0.7-second lag in typical lighting is just a bit too slow, and 1.7 seconds in dim light is not as good as its twin. It takes 2.3 seconds between shots under the best conditions, and the flash recycling adds little overhead--a mere 0.4 second. Raw shooting takes a relatively slow 5.2 seconds between shots. And though the continuous-shooting speed is a decent 1.3 to 1.5fps, it can take only a few shots before stopping to process.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
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