It lacks the LX3 a little compactness. You quite thick and does not fit well in the pocket. Because of the display you can not just tuck somewhere. The best solution is probably the importable pretty retro bag. That makes it nice, but also not less.
Macro mode is simple and good. It's great fun to take pictures of small things. The background of this case is also reproduced beautifully soft.
I find the autofocus fast enough. Well, the face recognition and tracking mode.
The flash I find the rest not too weak, unless you want to illuminate a room at 24mm (KB). Then you should use an external flash (Nikon SB26 went wonderfully with me). When flash with the internal flash is quite often manual exposure compensation needed, especially at distances less than one meter.
The black and white Dynamic mode brings very good results and thirst for more (wishlist) - how about virtual red / orange / green filters. How about a pseudo-IR mode (only using the red pixels)? Technically that would be possible.
-> Problem natural reproduction of skin tones ->
so far so good. It was widely spoken of a natural color reproduction. I can not confirm now. The automatic white balance is not very famous (even if it has improved with firmware 1.3). Skin tones in spite of any manual settings was not naturally reproduce possible. It was always a bit too much magenta in the lively and perfused objects. (Already finished photos of people were reproduced well when photographing). The default settings are not to use in terms of color reproduction in the rest. Best's well even with Movie mode "of course", reduced color saturation and manual white balance correction.
For inanimate objects, the colors are ok.
Gimmicks: because you can not adjust much in the scenes programs, they are not particularly useful. "Beautiful skin" should mean better "chinesiches Propaganda Poster".
HD movies is nice, the color settings are not on speed dial to reach and hide the menu, unfortunately we can here just to the two modes "of course" and "dynamically b / w" does not choose. Too Bad.
Another thing to Focal Length: This is a real wide-angle camera. 24mm are far more angular than 28mm. Therefore, the zoom range up to 60mm (KB-equiv.) Perfectly fine. By speaking "only 3x zoom" I consider unfair. There is no good and compact 2.0 / 24mm-135mm lens (or they would be great, white, had a red ring, an L and took care of Canon EOS). Since the camera eh only partially fit for portraits because of the colors, I am the longest focal length 60mm (KB-equiv.) Not sad.
The portraits I do so on with the short telephoto portrait on film. For all other purposes, the LX3 is a very nice camera useful.
Again in overview:
Good:
+ Good pictures in low light conditions, even at high ISO speeds
+ Flash on with switch, otherwise flash off (no accidental flashes)
+ Fast post / leaves / delete (!)
+ Auto-ISO works very well
+ Design
+ Genuine Wide
+ Lots of manual controls, can be stored as macros
not good:
- Color reproduction, skin tones
- In scene programs hardly adjustment
One more note: In spite of the really good picture quality, the following sentence in the advertising of the camera is simply incorrect.
"The redesign Leica very special value placed on a uniformly high sharpness at the corners and minimal distortion."
If you look at the actual fact RAW data with a free raw converter (eg raw Therapee), notice that the lens itself recorded very strong barrel-shaped. It is then only afterwards just counted. With Silkypix and Adobe products, this correction is also carried out in such a way that the user can not influence, and probably should not even noticed. Given the target group of buyers already a strong piece.
