Of course there's nothing wrong with that. There are about as many reasons to take photographs as there are people taking photographs. There are a LOT of people who take the strictly documentary approach to photography that you're talking about - I want to see what I saw in the viewfinder (or lcd or whatever) and nothing else and I want to see it as accurately as possible. That's one approach, its a very common one, and it is exactly as legitimate as any other approach, of which there are many - no more, no less.
But in getting that type of photograph, how do you set up your cameras for jpegs? Do you adjust the contrast? Do you adjust the NR, the sharpening, the saturation? Or do you just leave the camera set to its default positions? If you change any of them, why? Probably because those settings give you an image or set of colors or clarity or softness that you find more pleasing than some other setting. The point I was trying to make in an earlier post is that each of those adjustments is essentially the same as post processing - its adjusting the camera's software to render an image a particular way. The difference between doing that in the camera before you take the shot and doing it either in the camera or on a PC after the shot is taken is simply one of timing and, in some cases, degree. You don't like much processing - that's fine. But I assume you do some degree of fine tuning in your settings and my only point is that this is really no different than trying to achieve those same fine tunings AFTER the fact on a computer screen with several more levels of control over them.
What you do with them is your business - whether you're going for perceived accuracy or something completely different is totally up to you as a photographer.
When you do the fine tuning (processing) is also up to you, but don't be under the illusion that you're not doing it. And if you're not changing ANYTHING from the camera's defaults, you're just letting whoever designed the jpeg engine for the G3 make those decisions for you. Which is also totally your prerogative - just don't be under the illusion that your shots aren't being processed - they're just being processed to a set of parameters that either you or someone else set before the shot was taken - or adjusted after the shot was taken...
As to you question of "why is it necessary to manipulate a picture"(beyond the manipulations built into the jpeg engine)? For many, clearly its not, you included. That's fine and totally up to the individual. But there are various reasons that many of us DO want to. First, even getting back to your point about 'just showing what I saw as accurately as possible' (I'm paraphrasing here). We see in three dimensions and in almost 180 degrees as our eyes take in whatever scene we're seeing. We're processing a ton of information every second in ways that it takes a full human brain to process (and manipulate - we each bring our own built-in filters to what and how we see the world) - what stands out in the very same scene may be very different for me than it would be for you even if we were looking at it at the same time from the same spot. So the attempt to create a two dimensional image that fits into a 3x2 or 4x3 or 16x9 or 1x1 frame that somehow communicates what we saw (and felt when we saw it, because that's part of our experience too) when looking at any given scene often takes something other than a very basic and clean rendering. Again, if you're only trying to capture an image that triggers a memory of a specific scene for you, you may not (and clearly don't) wish to do anything beyond print out that jpeg or look at it on your computer screen. But if you're trying to communicate what it looked and felt like to someone who wasn't there, all in that highly confined frame, you may want to do other things to the image.
Just one simple example. I was at the beach last summer, on a small barrier island off of the east coast of the US. An enormous and violent storm was slipping up along the coast of the mainland, just a mile or two to the west of where we were, but it was sticking right to the coast of the mainland and totally avoiding our little barrier island, where we were enjoying peaceful day bathed in sunlight. It was frankly one of the most dramatic natural scenes I've ever seen anywhere. I took a few photos of the storm across the water from us to try to convey this drama. But just sticking to the color jpegs didn't even begin to convey the drama of the situation. I showed some of these to my friends and family at the beach and they were unmoved. Then I processed these photos in B&W, really accentuating the clouds and contrast in the scene to convey some of the drama of it. I showed the same people these processed shots and they were just out of their minds about them, saying things like "THAT really gets the power of the moment", or "I can really FEEL the drame I felt when I see it that way", etc. The more processed shot was clearly the less accurate of the two versions - I didn't add anything that wasn't there but I accentuated the image to attempt to show the power of the moment in a way that the original jpeg didn't, at least within that limited 3x2 frame. And I showed it in B&W which clearly isn't how most of our eyes work. Now, you could say, maybe if I'd adjusted the jpeg settings before I took the shot or used a wider angle lens to show more of the scene I could have achieved the same end without the post processing. Maybe so, but aren't those also ways of manipulating the scene to show the drama I felt in it? Sure, its just a matter of when those decisions were made and how...
Just for the heck of it, here are the before and afters. I'm not suggesting that anyone else should like or dislike or emulate this approach or should do anything beyond just take a shot and pull it out of the camera and enjoy it that way. But you asked why you might, and this is one example of why you might. I almost always do because I have different photographic goals than you have - to each their own.
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There's no right or wrong here, and this discussion has obviously gone well beyond the LX5, but there are a lot of options available to photographers and each of decides which ones to take advantage of and which to leave alone. And, of course, you should use whatever camera you personally prefer to achieve your own ends.
To tie it back to the LX-5, my point is simply that I don't find the LX-5 to be a limiting factor in producing the types of photography I like to do. Except in specific situations, low light being the one area where its capabilities start limiting me pretty notably.
-Ray
