leica

I had the opportunity to borrow some Leica cameras over the past few days. Saturday night I took the Leica D-LUX 3, a compact point-and-shoot camera home. It packs a punch with a 10 mega-pixel sensor, handmade 28-112mm lens (ie. 4x optical zoom) with image stabilization and a crisp 16:9 widescreen LCD. Since I don't have much experience with point-and-shoot cameras using the D-LUX 3 took some getting used to.

On Sunday raspberrytart and I went to the International Peace Gardens in Jordan Park and Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park. Going from my DSLR to a point-and-shoot felt liberating. I experimented more and tried photographing subjects I would have passed up with my DSLR. I really liked the D-LUX 3's fast f/2.8 wide angle lens and moderate telephoto zoom. It also had a pretty sweet macro feature which worked well for photographing flowers.

By point-and-shoot standards the D-LUX 3 is a great camera. It has a fast lens with a good focal range (28-112mm f/2.8), is well-designed and easy-to-use, and stylish and pocket-able. But it's shortcomings included the typical downfalls of point-and-shoots: so-so exposure metering, limited DOF control, LCD screen that washed out easily under bright sunlight, and terrible digital noise at high ISOs. I realize it's unreasonable to expect the same picture quality from a point-and-shoot that you would get from a DLSR, but after looking through my photos from the D-LUX 3 I was left wanting more. So it goes.

On Monday I took the D-LUX 3 back to Pixels and borrowed the Leica M8, a digital rangefinder.