Digicam Lessons

I first started really getting in to photography with iPhones, and my phone still remains a regular go to camera (obviously, it’s always there). But after I started a new job last year, and I wasn’t comfortable leaving my main camera in the back room or unattended my car, I wanted something else for grabbing quick shots day to day — something with a bit more interesting optics and a more tactile shooting process than the phone provides. 

I spent a long time pouring through reviews and eBay listings to see what my options were. I wanted it to be super compact, legitimately pocketable since this little camera was going to live in a pocket in my backpack. I wanted a wide to telephoto-ish zoom range (but not too long to try and keep a reasonable sensor size), manual control, a decent aperture, and something that felt nice to use. Above all it also needed to be something that didn’t intrude on my main camera usage. This was to be something to use instead of my phone, not my Sony.

Whatever I chose also needed to be cheap. This was partly due budget constraints, but also so it was on some level expendable. If this thing got damaged, stolen, or stopped working, I needed to be able to easily weather that loss. That meant no RX100s or G7Xs or anything like that. Even when bought second hand, cameras like those still go for $500-$800 CAD or more, and I was looking more in the under $200 range. The first one I fell for was the beautiful Lumix GM-1, a tiny interchangeable lens Micro 4/3 camera, but it was way too expensive. The Fujifilm X10 was also tempting with its cool little optical viewfinder. I even briefly flirted with the idea of the bizarre Nikon J cameras.

What I landed on was the Panasonic Lumix LX line of compacts. Some probably know them better by their alternate versions, re-bodied and rebranded as the Leica D-Lux cameras. Because of this the Lumix LXs get talked up as “budget Leicas”, but I think it’d be more appropriate say the Leicas are overpriced Panasonics. The old D-Luxes are also available second hand, though they’re usually more expensive, lack hand grips, and the Leica name cache just isn’t for me. So I looked at the Panasonic models. While I was initially looking at the LX3 and LX5, I instead went for the cheaper and smaller LX2 as a starter.

DMC-LX2

This thing is small, really small. Being a decade into the age of enormous phones it’s easy to forget what an actual pocket sized device is like. It’s beautiful, and its heavy metal body feels great in hand. I love that it doesn’t have the square shaped auto lens caps that most digicams do. It looks like a “proper” camera.

The lens optics are great. I know that resolution and megapixel numbers aren’t that important, but this is the camera that has re-clarified that lesson for me. In the right conditions its 10 megapixel sensor pulls some stellar results. At the wide end it also has a very close minimum focus distance, paired with a macro setting on the dedicated focus mode switch on the side of the lens. This camera is teachign me to embrace wide angles. It doesn’t have the dynamic range of a modern camera, but coming off of over-flattened over-HDR-ified phone photos, it does really well.

The LX2, like the rest of its siblings, has a switch on the top of the lens for changing aspect ratios with settings for 1:1 square, conventional 4:3 and 3:2, and the wider 16:9. Unlike most cameras though the sensor is itself a 16:9 shape, making that the native aspect ratio of the camera. If I remember right, one of its successors does something even weirder, adjusting which portions of the sensor are used for each setting to squeeze the most usable area out of each aspect ratio. I like these cameras’ approaches to getting the best results they can.

Having a little camera on hand has definitely paid off, giving me some extra photographic flexibility. I got shots of things on my lunch breaks, or stuffed it in a pocket while taking the dog out. Even just by virtue of it being something different, it’s encouraged me to think more about what I take photos of day to day.

I do have some complaints about the LX2. For one, as much as the finish on it is nice, it is so slippery. That little finger grip tacked on the front does a lot to stop you from dropping this camera. A wrist strap is a good idea. It takes several seconds to write RAW files after pressing the shutter button, and has no option to shoot in RAW only, just jpeg or RAW plus jpeg. The screen on the back, being an inexpensive screen from 2006, is terrible by modern standards, with low resolution and little to no off-angle legibility. Manual focusing with the tiny joystick control is rough. I also desperately wish it would let me use auto ISO when in Shutter Priority or Manual modes. I don’t really mind any of these issues that much though, and most got improved with the subsequent models.

Gremlins

I may have fed the mogwai, because my LX2 is starting to act weird. For the most part it does work perfectly fine. But sometimes the camera decides to make some of or everything it sees a bright magenta/purple colour, and I don’t know why or how to fix it. Changing shooting modes, going in and out of photo review, turning the camera off and on, nothing seems to directly address the issue. Eventually the camera decides to go back to normal. Is the CCD sensor degrading? Did moisture get inside of it at some point? Are the electronics starting to whisper at giving up the ghost as the camera approaches twenty years old? Hard to say. But while it is still working, it gets me thinking about what happens if it does die.

Going Forward

As for what to do next, I’m not sure. My top pick for a replacement is the LX2’s later sibling, the LX7. But it does cost about as much as the Meike f0.95 portrait lens I want for my main camera. Maybe that’s a better choice? I’ll also likely replace my aging phone at some point, probably with something like an iPhone 16e/17e, and would enjoy the simplicity of using that single camera with a newer sensor. Then there’s the ton of other weird and interesting digicams out there, and point-and-shoot film cameras I’d like to try.

So who knows what I’ll do, but I’m glad I’ve been trying this out. The little LX2 is a lot of fun to shoot with, and has helped to remind me of some important photography lessons. It’s odd, it’s slow, it’s hard to hold, and I definitely recommend it.