New Point & Shoot Camera September 28

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I picked up a new P&S camera for KAP– I’ve been doing some ground-based tests with it, and have been generally impressed:

P1030369

P1030315

P1030313

(Click for flickr page, from there you can zoom to the original file) These are the full jpegs that were shot in-camera, no modifications. It does pretty well. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX30K, here’s a list of Pro/Cons I came up with yesterday while e-mailing another KAPer about it:

Cool things:

  • the camera remembers most settings between power on/power off (including the all imporant -2/3 EV correction)
  • power switch is an actual switch on the top
  • shutter lag is crazy low — maybe 1/2 a second including a short AF ( e.g., if it’s already partly focussed)
  • bracketing on a single shutter press– you can do a 1/3 to 1 EV bracket on a single shutter press, takes a total of maybe 1 second to AF, and shoot three frames
  • Even though you cannot turn the LCD off (no viewfinder), I was able to fill a 2GB SD card with the camera on my KAP rig and the battery had only dropped one bar.
  • Image stabilization (not yet tested) via a shiftable element in the lens
  • 28mm is awesome
  • Shutter lag & AF use are both nice enough that it wasn’t annoying to use the camera handheld. (P&S cameras usually annoy me, since I’m used to the DSLR)
  • 30fps/480p 3:2 or 16:9 video (with image stabilization)

Okay things:

  • The camera is *really* small, which means it’s a little hard for my hands to hold without fear of dropping it. Comes with a wrist strap, so I just need to put that on it if I’m taking it somewhere.

Things that suck:

  • The “Venus Engine III” noise reduction sucks, and there’s no way (yet) to turn it off. — Panasonic is being harangued by users to release firmware that’ll permit this.

The Noise Reduction is pretty bad– basically kills all/most shadow detail, visible even at ISO100. It doesn’t start to get too painful until ISO400, but I own Noise Ninja, and I’d much rather use that to deal with noise than have all my shadows be smeary.

I’ll be flying the camera tonight or tomorrow, and we’ll see how it does then.

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