Wednesday, October 21, 2009

A night walk (and some words about LX3 firmware version 2.1)


Street view, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Fence, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Green and yellow, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I had a day with meetings and discussions one after another. Thus, I was able to go out for a walk only well after sunset. It was clouded as usual, but relatively warm, 7 °C. Here are three photographs taken during the walk.

I installed firmware version 2.1 on the Panasonic LX3 today. I didn't notice much difference with the color balance, but then getting it "right" is impossile when you have scenes like this with artificial light sources.

On the other hand, I immediately started to use the setting of remembering the zoom and manual focus position when starting up the camera. Extremely useful! There is a notice on the screen when you use this, but it goes away with the first press of the button, not too inconvenient.

Firmware version 2.1 does not bring dramatic improvements. The LX3 was and is an excellent camera, but some rough edges are being polished away by Panasonic. A good camera is becoming even better.

I couldn't test whether the camera focuses faster in the "wide" zoom position, as there was so little light awailable. I tend to use manual focusing with these night scenes.

2 comments:

Andreas said...

I'm always amazed by how much work Panasonic invests in a camera that old. This is not really typical for this industry, and it is something that makes me like that company.

Juha Haataja said...

I think they had to respond to the Canon S90 somehow, it had some of this stuff so they made a firmware upgrade to compete. Also, it seems that an LX4 may not be appearing any day soon.