Panasonic's flagship compact gets a new extra-bright 24-90 (equivalent) f/1.4-2.3 Leica Vario Summilux zoom lens
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 is a two year old design at a time when many compact digital cameras are out of date after just six months. Even so the 'elderly' LX5 remains in demand because of its excellent image quality. So the new LX7 has a lot to live up to and based on my brief use of a pre-production example at a Panasonic new camera seminar in Budapest, Hungary, a couple of weeks ago, the LX7 has built on the strengths of the LX5.
Top of the list of changes must be the new lens. It's the same focal length zoom range as the LX5 (24-90mm equivalent) but the maximum open aperture is now f/1.4-2.3 instead of f/2.0-3.3. That is a whole stop of additional brightness, doubling the amount of light transmitted by the lens. Despite this the physical size of the lens and its barrel assembly hasn't become monstrously large, although it is bigger and the overall size of the LX7 is definitely a little up on its predecessors. One reason how Panasonic has kept control over the size of the optics is in using a slightly smaller sensor, although retaining the same 10.1 megapixel count. While the LX5 shares the same zoom field of view the LX5 focal length range is 5.1-19.2mm while the LX7 lens ranges from 4.7mm to 17.7mm. However some of the increased size does house some new features, like a control ring that has the primary function of adjusting the aperture like a traditional aperture ring. There is also a hot-shoe accessory port that appears to be for the DMW-LVF2 optional electronic viewfinder we first saw for the DMC-GX1 Micro Four Thirds compact system camera, although this was not acknowledged in the LX7 literature supplied or in the main presentation of the camera's features at the seminar. The rear control dial has been retained and is now supplemented by a lever that switches on manual focus mode or deploys internal neutral density filters to maximise the possibility of using a wide aperture in order to creatively manage depth of field.
The new Venus Engine VII FHD is used in the LX7 and this means full HD 1080 video recorded at 50 frames per second progressive is available and there is a generous selection of dynamic creative effects. The new sensor and Venus Engine VII FHD work together to enable the extension of the ISO sensitivity range up to 12,800 from a starting point of 80.
I spent the least time shooting with the LX7 in Budapest so it's difficult to come to any serious conclusions about image quality, but the early signs are very positive. The Leica-branded zoom looks sharp and there is a colour and tonal rendition in the images that belies their compact camera origins. Noise seems to be well-controlled without too much sacrifice of detail and there is less of the spotty mottled fine pixel-level detail that you see with typical compact cameras. You can judge for yourself by looking at our image samples on page 3 of this article. The next page, however, covers some shots of the camera itself.
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LX7 product photo gallery
Lumix DMC-LX7 illustrated tour
Below is a gallery of thumbnail views of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 taken at a product seminar in Budapest, Hungary. To see a larger view of the the thumbnail, just click on the thumbnail image you are interested in to open a new page with the full-size view.
To return to the thumbnail gallery, click the home arrow at the bottom of the page, or navigate forwards or backwards through the gallery using the backwards/forwards arrow buttons.
Lumix LX7 Sample images
The cameras that we were provided with to use in Budapest were not final quality examples so we were asked not to publish RAW files or full resolution JPEGs. Instead, our gallery of sample images has been resized from 16 megapixels to 5 megapixels at Panasonic's request. Even so, 5 megapixels is a reasonable size for sample images given the situation and we're grateful that Panasonic has allowed this resolution instead of very low resolution VGA files in similar circumstances in the past.
To view the photo in your browser just click on the appropriate thumbnail below. To download the image file, use the 'save target as' or equivalent function on your browser. All sample images provided here are copyrighted and made available for personal, non-commercial, evaluation only.
