My latest purchase is the Panasonic Lumix LX3, a remarkable point and shoot camera. I bought it for a trip to Thailand coming up in March and am getting used to it now.
I’m not even out of program mode but some features are already really impressive. Turn everything off, and it’s a really straightforward point and shoot. Turn on a few things, and you have a real-time histogram, you can change exposure compensation with a little joystick to adjust, and you even have modes for aperture or shutter priority, or full manual (controlled by the joystick). Really nice stuff. And it shoots in RAW.
The most impressive part, however, is the lens. It is incredibly fast – 2.0-2.8 over its admittedly small 24-60mm zoom range. But that means that I can get decent results at ISO 800, which is unheard of for a camera like this, and definitely B&W-convertible stuff at 1600.
I took this photo while walking home, obviously after a short rain storm. Most of the ones I took that night I turned into black and white as they were quite noisy. This one I liked for its simplicity and kept it in color.