Lumix spotted in London sales

3rd January - 2002
By Ian Burley & Danny Chau

Spotted in the London Selfridges department store perusing the new year sales was a man with an unusual looking digicam slung from his neck. It turned out to be a Lumix DMC-LC5, one of two new digicams announced last September (click here) and produced jointly by Panasonic and Leica.

What’s special about this discovery is that the Lumix range is not yet available in Europe. Even more interesting was the owner, Horst Friedrichs, a German national living in London. Friedrichs is a commercial photographer and has used, exclusively, Leica 35mm film equipment for his work to date. So what was he doing with a Lumix that you can’t yet buy here?

It turns out that Friedrichs is doing some catalogue work for Leica. Although he has to be careful what he says, he hinted that there is, as you would expect, a Leica-branded version of the Lumix range in the pipeline. This year sees the biennial Photokina photography show extravaganza and this could be launch pad for the new digital Leicas.

Back to that Lumix DMC-LC5; it’s actually quite a bit larger than it looks in the press photos. As you’d expect of a Leica-inspired camera, it’s also solidly and impressively made. One big surprise – unfortunately we can’t show you in our rather hastily shot pictures – is the enormous LCD viewscreen on the back of the camera, by far the biggest we have yet seen on a digicam.

Friedrichs allowed us to shoot a few images with his camera and we’re waiting for copies of the images to reach us – the Lumix uses SD memory cards, while the Canon S40 we had on the day uses Compact Flash cards.

Impressed that we had spotted his new toy, Friedrichs admitted that using a digital camera for the first time was an interesting experience. He was also interested in the S40 – he’s looking for something compact for his wife!

Horst Friedrich’s Web site is at: www.photohorst.com

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