Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 – Excellent raw photo quality

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 is the updated sibling to the LX3 which was a relatively old compact camera. The new model looks quite similar to the previous one and they both have same specs but there are some changes made and they give you better picture quality. The changes include larger zoom range, new sensor, better video codec, and improved noise reduction. Like most of the large-sensor compacts, the company here sticks with CCD and not CMOS. There is no change in the resolution but the latest sensor here comes with larger microlenses for prevent leakages and reflections and converge the light. There is also a larger volume photodiode which is supposed to improve the highlight capture and also give better response in dim light conditions. The manufacturer has improved the start up and autofocus performance for this mode. There is something called ‘Sonic Speed AF’ for it. Just like the LX3, this camera lets you capture 720p video and it’s upgraded to 30 fps or framesc per second from 24 fps. It also uses real video codec this time instead of Motion JPEG. Movie mode supports zooming and you can use manual exposure modes.

All these changes are really important to keep the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 an attractive option for photography enthusiast. The image quality on this camera is good but I saw the same weakness here which haunts other Panasonic products – the JPEG compression and in camera processing is still behind the competition. They produce a few yellow splotches when you take the sensitive as low as ISO 80. I saw this problem indoors, light of room level or lower and there is also some oversharpening which gives an undesirable crunchy look. I got best results at ISO 200 which is quite interesting. But when I processed raw files of these images, I got usable and clean images up to ISO 800. The raw quality of the camera was also pretty good. The white balance is improved as compared to the LX3 but my lab tests eloqtuently said that noise profile of LX5 improved over LX3 for ISO 400 and later but below that, things were worse.

The color accuracy of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 is pretty good even in the default standard color mode but the saturation looked pushed a bit more than what I would have liked. The picture quality is still quite good. The color presets for this camera gave different results without a lot of hue shifts. The only exception was the Vibrant presets which is not that good in all the cameras. The exposures are good and for recovering a reasonable amount on highlight area detail, there is the dynamic range.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5’s new lens is better than its predecessor. There was some asymmetrical distortion at the device’s widest 24mm-equivalent but it is not a lot considering its focal length. If you see automatic distortion control, then it is built in to raw processing. The distortion was identical in JPEG and raw version.