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My wife and I decided to take a “leave-the-kids-at-home” vacation this year for the first time since 2006. We decided that it would be our first time going to Miami. It would be our first time on a cruise ship. It would be, for me, the first time I’ve seen blue water, and it would be the first time I planned to take a point-and-shoot camera on a trip that could have easily benefited from my Canon 5d Mark II…

The hunt for my P&S…

For me, one of the most daunting tasks was finding a point-and-shoot worthy of the challenge. I already have a Canon G9, and it’s really great, but I wanted something more: it needed to be pocket-worthy. It needed to shoot RAW (G9 does, but let’s continue for now…). It needed low-light capabilities in the form of a fast lens. It needed to be wide enough to get the sweeping landscapes and ocean I was sure I’d see from my balcony on the cruise ship. Lastly, it couldn’t break the bank, because I figured enough tequila would make it possible I’d accidentally drop the camera over the side of the boat from 9 stories high…

After checking out all my usual sources, I kept getting referred back to a camera I never heard of while finding that is was oft-compared to a camera I had heard of.

The face off…

While I was initially enamored with the idea of owning a Leica D-Lux 4, the cost was just more than I could stomach considering that 9 story drop I talked about earlier…not to mention how strongly people were favorably comparing the D-Lux 4 with the Panasonic LX3. As it turned out, I ended up finding a guy who actually went ahead and bought both cameras, and posted tons of comparison shots. Awesome! I’d have my chance to truly validate if there was a real difference or a perceived difference (that little red dot stirs up a lot of brand-loyalty). If you find yourself here in a similar quandary, go check out Ianho’s website and see for yourself. In the end, the pictures I saw on his website made it clear that the Panasonic LX3 brings absolutely as much to the table as the Leica D-Lux 4. I went to B&H and hit the “Add to Cart” button. Panasonic LX3 was on it’s way…

There are tons of reviews on the Panasonic LX3, so it’s not necessarily my intention to re-review it here. I will say, however, that it exceeded expectations in good light, performed about as badly as I expected it to in poor light, but most importantly, its small size, intuitive menus and lots of “real photographer” features made it easy to call the LX3 the most fun camera I currently own.

For example, the LX3 can shoot in easy-to-select, multiple aspect ratios (which you can bracket), it snaps multiple exposures (+/- 3 stops, which is better than my Canon DSLRs), the black and white modes are the real deal, and it’s less than 400 bucks. Oh, it also stops to a wide open f2.0, and at the wide end of the zoom you’re shooting at 24mm! That’s plenty wide for you wide angle-a-holics…and at 10.1 megapixels, you get tons of ceiling for big prints if you need’em. Lastly, it shoots real macros, which I’ve never even heard of on a camera this small.

As expected, anything above ISO 400 is a mess, but I don’t care about that. Naturally occurring noise with the Dynamic Black and White setting is a really cool look right out of the camera.

The pix I’ve included in this gallery are about 95% in-camera. I used Lightroom for some basic color correction, but spent no more than about 5 minutes with each photo. All were shot in JPEG.

Check out the full size gallery for some fun, big’ole imagery…