This first shot was taken with the LX3 in bright light at its lowest 80 ISO sensitivity and therefore represents ideal conditions. If you’re familiar with our other Galleries, you’ll see the LX3 zoomed-out to 24mm is capturing a much wider field of view here than compacts with 35mm or even 28mm coverage. Pixel peepers will notice the crops aren’t quite as clean as, say, the Canon G9 at 80 ISO, but there’s not much to complain about.

Landscape: 4.68MB, Program, 1/800, f4.5, ISO 100, 5.1-12.8mm at 5.1mm (equivalent to 24mm)

						Another shot taken under bright light with the lens zoomed-out to 24mm, but now with the sensitivity increased to 100 ISO. Like all the shots here, the LX3 has erred on underexposure, which successfully protects highlight areas from saturation, but can result in darker areas elsewhere. The crops show lots of fine detail and well-corrected optics.

Landscape: 4.11MB, Program, 1/1300, f8, ISO 100, 5.1-12.8mm at 12.8mm (equivalent to 60mm)

There’s some visible artefacts around fine detail on the crops, but some of that is JPEG compression and can be avoided by shooting in RAW.

Admittedly some of the background texture is down to noise, but it’s not as bad as the LX2, and is in fact around one stop superior to the Canon G9 from this point on.

The LX3’s brighter than average aperture certainly helps in low light, but as you can see here, it’s still not going to deliver very small depths of field.

The crops also reveal visible textures due to noise, but again it’s better than many at this point.

We’re just a fraction further away here to avoid casting shadows, but you can still enjoy great close-ups.

We’ve increased the sensitivity to 400 ISO here without too much of a detrimental effect.

The bright f2.0 aperture has allowed the LX3 to use a relatively quick shutter speed of 1/80 which has eliminated the chance of camera shake, although you have to be careful about the shallower depth of field.

The crops reveal a noticeable increase in noise over previous shots, but there’s still lots of detail and little of the smearing we’ve seen on many other models due to over-zealous noise reduction.

Noise is now quite apparent on the crops, but again there’s still plenty of detail and again little of the smearing we’ve seen on previous models.

Indeed we’d say 800 ISO is quite usable at smaller print sizes, and if you shoot in RAW and carefully adjust the NR, you can enjoy cleaner results.

When using this composition in our High ISO Noise results, we applied +1EV compensation.

As you’d expect at 1600 ISO, the noise has now become obtrusive, but overall on this page it’s refreshing to see Panasonic not applying heavy-handed noise reduction. We applaud its latest strategies.