woof woof
I like a nice Chianti
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- Alan
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I recently decided to buy one to take on holidays and days out as I wanted a decent little camera with an EVF that'd offer as good and hopefully even better image quality than a camera phone for when my Sony A7 or Panasonic MFT cameras are just too big. I had a little trouble finding one locally but I eventually found one in stock at Argos and so trotted along to buy it.
In the past I had a LX2 and I now have a LX5 and that line of cameras seem to be quality little pieces of kit but unfortunately the LF1 doesn't share the same build and instead they've opted for a more plastic build, but it's ok. It's slightly smaller than my LX5 and less deep mostly due to the lens and the chip is (so I've read) the same as the one in the LX7. That's nice. Sadly the lens doesn't have as wide an aperture as the LX's (the LF1 is f2-5.9) but it does have a good zoom range (of 28-200mm in 35mm equiv. speak.) I'd have liked a wider aperture but for reasonable light shooting it's ok and for still stuff the image stabilisations seems to be quite good.
I have a few little niggles with the controls and handling and the biggest gripe for me is that it's far too easy to turn on. Doing so is done via pushing a button on the top plate and this is easily done when getting the camera out or putting it away and all in all I'd much rather have a sliding switch like my LX5 has which I've never accidentally switched on. I'll just have to be more careful.
The big plus point for me is the inclusion of an EVF as I really don't like the back screen shooting experience of the LX's. The EVF isn't great but it's useable and I'm quite impressed by the image quality at low to mid ISO's and the details seems to be quite good and in fact I think that ISO 3200 is easily useable for whole images. 100% viewing of ISO 3200 or higher pictures on the PC doesn't reveal state of the art results but they're fine for screen viewing, social media etc... and possibly ok to print quite large too and IMVHO they're better than I've seen from any camera phone.
Whole image and then a 100% crop of an ISO 400 shot...
An ISO 3200 full image taken under not great artificial light at f5.9 and what the camera calls 43mm. The shutter speed was 1/60 and I maybe should have used a faster one and traded a little more noise for less movement but there you go.
I'd say that this is much better than my Samsung phone wotsit could manage and better also than my GF's ipone thingy too so I'm happy enough.
In the past I had a LX2 and I now have a LX5 and that line of cameras seem to be quality little pieces of kit but unfortunately the LF1 doesn't share the same build and instead they've opted for a more plastic build, but it's ok. It's slightly smaller than my LX5 and less deep mostly due to the lens and the chip is (so I've read) the same as the one in the LX7. That's nice. Sadly the lens doesn't have as wide an aperture as the LX's (the LF1 is f2-5.9) but it does have a good zoom range (of 28-200mm in 35mm equiv. speak.) I'd have liked a wider aperture but for reasonable light shooting it's ok and for still stuff the image stabilisations seems to be quite good.
I have a few little niggles with the controls and handling and the biggest gripe for me is that it's far too easy to turn on. Doing so is done via pushing a button on the top plate and this is easily done when getting the camera out or putting it away and all in all I'd much rather have a sliding switch like my LX5 has which I've never accidentally switched on. I'll just have to be more careful.
The big plus point for me is the inclusion of an EVF as I really don't like the back screen shooting experience of the LX's. The EVF isn't great but it's useable and I'm quite impressed by the image quality at low to mid ISO's and the details seems to be quite good and in fact I think that ISO 3200 is easily useable for whole images. 100% viewing of ISO 3200 or higher pictures on the PC doesn't reveal state of the art results but they're fine for screen viewing, social media etc... and possibly ok to print quite large too and IMVHO they're better than I've seen from any camera phone.
Whole image and then a 100% crop of an ISO 400 shot...
An ISO 3200 full image taken under not great artificial light at f5.9 and what the camera calls 43mm. The shutter speed was 1/60 and I maybe should have used a faster one and traded a little more noise for less movement but there you go.
I'd say that this is much better than my Samsung phone wotsit could manage and better also than my GF's ipone thingy too so I'm happy enough.
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