Panasonic Panasonic LX7 Hands On Review.

[lenshoarder]

This is the first I've seen.

Hands-on: Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 review - Pocket-lint

 

[Ray Sachs]

DPreview has their preview up. Lens looks really nice. Controls were already great on LX5 and look a lot nicer on LX7. But sensor initially seems disappointing. About the same as LX5 on comparometer. Looks like a blast to shoot with but any IQ improvements probably limited to low light due to faster lens. looks like f1.4 at 24 and 28mm equivalents.

-Ray

 

[nippa]

I like the aperture ring and ND Filter but 10 mps on a smaller sensor was unexpected.

So what happened to the larger sensor that Panasonic Engineers had suggested

Panasonic LX series to have larger sensor | News | TechRadar

 

[Ray Sachs]

I've seen the suggestion that there's gonna be ANOTHER Panasonic compact with a larger sensor, maybe more of a G1X competitor(?) announced in August or at Photokina or something, but I have NO idea if there's anything to that. Just idle chatter on DPR's Panny forum, so there might be something to it, or nothing. I like the Aperture ring and the additional manual focus/ND control lever (the less I'd have to use that click wheel for, the better!) and of course the f1.4 - 2.3 lens. But if the ISO performance of the sensor is no better than the LX5, which it appears not to be, my guess is this is still gonna be a really limited camera. I love the handling of the LX-5 - by far my favorite small camera for the shooting experience (and I've tried a lot of 'em) - but the way tech is moving forward to essentially skip a sensor upgrade in this camera seems like a bad move to me. Still gonna have to wait this one out a bit until all of the cards are played over the next several months. The RX100 looks very very impressive yet doesn't really appeal to me for some of the same reasons as the S90 ultimately didn't cut it for me. The LX7 doesn't look like much of an improvement except making a great handling camera even better. At this point, the X10 with the fixed sensor still seems like the sweet spot among these cameras, but I'm interested to see what Oly and Ricoh will do and if Panasonic has anything else up its sleeve...

-Ray