Three Compact Cameras – Beyond Point & Shoot

By Bruce Philpott

Three of the latest compact cameras reviewed and compared:

• Canon PowerShot G11
• Leica D-LUX 4
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3

I love my professional camera gear and wouldn’t expect a compact camera to perform like a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera, but there are many times when I’d like to have a camera along and don’t want to haul a bunch of equipment with me. With this in mind, I compared what seem to me to be the best of what I’d previously called “Point & Shoot” cameras.

Having put these cameras through their paces, I realized I needed to change my terminology. Every high-end DSLR camera has a mode in which the camera makes all of the exposure decisions. In that mode, those professional DSLR’s could be called point & shoot cameras.

Point & Shoot defined

Now my definition of a point & shoot is a camera which won’t permit the photographer to do anything but point & shoot. It won’t permit them to conveniently adjust their f-stop, shutter speed and ISO and won’t permit the photographer to intentionally over or under expose a scene when desired.

These cameras aren’t Point & Shoots

None of these tested cameras hinders the photographer in these ways. I was very impressed! Now I just consider these to be “compact cameras” with all of the basic functionality a serious photographer looks for in a camera.

These three cameras have a lot in common. They’re characteristics which attracted me to them, so I’ll start by listing their shared features.

Each has a lens with an aperture of at least f/2.8 (the Leica and Panasonic even open to f/2). They all have a zoom lens which goes as wide as (the 35mm equivalent of) 24mm and as long as 60mm on the Leica and Panasonic and up to 140mm on the Canon. They all offer ISO’s from 80 to 3200. They’re fairly close in their external measurements (although the Canon occupies more volume; the Leica and Panasonic weigh a third less) as you can see in the pictures of the cameras at the beginning of this article. Any of these will fit comfortably into a jacket pocket. They each have a built-in flash. Each of these cameras will shoot in Raw, permitting me to adjust exposure extremes in processing. Each has a hot shoe atop the camera and each uses an SD memory card. With each of these cameras, you can move the auto-focus point around a large LCD (the Liquid Crystal Display scene preview on the camera), choosing where you want it to focus. You can also choose to have your histogram displayed full-time atop your image on the LCD. You can even choose to have a “rule of thirds” grid appear on the LCD and they will all let me operate the camera “beep-lessly,” which I prefer.

This won’t matter to many photographers, but the Canon G11 also offers remote control. Canon makes a 2-foot wired remote accessory and Vivitar markets an inexpensive radio remote which will work on the G11. The other cameras tested offered no remote release capability but all of these cameras have a self-timer.

They’re all feature-loaded cameras, and I’ll mention some of the things I didn’t test on them… features which don’t come into my usual work flow. Although each of the cameras will take movies, this wasn’t tested or compared. I didn’t compare their built-in flashes, because I really dislike the results of on-camera flash. Digital zoom degrades image quality, so I didn’t test this feature on the cameras, either. Each of the cameras offers a pretty incredible macro mode (Canon down to .4” lens to subject; Leica and Panasonic to 2.4”), but I didn’t test these.

I tested these cameras not as a typical family/party snapshooter, but as someone who expects to control his exposures to get consistent results. I usually shoot in camera Raw. This gives me the most control of my exposures. I switch between Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority using Exposure Compensation to get the exposures I want, and going to Manual mode if those don’t give me the desired results. I didn’t try any of their many fully automatic modes which give the user different settings for Sports, say, than for Portrait. I’m used to deciding on my own settings, thank you, and don’t like any camera which was “born yesterday” telling me what to do.

Each of these cameras has face recognition which I haven’t used yet, and the Canon even has a Blink Detector! It’ll put a funny blink icon on the LCD preview if someone in blinks in your picture. I tried it and it seems to work.

At first I found it disconcerting that I didn’t see both f-stop and shutter speed displayed on the LCD, but when I partially depressed the shutter, any missing information appeared (including an exposure scale in Manual mode). All of the information I wanted was displayed on the LCD’s of each of these cameras. Again I was impressed.

The Leica and the Panasonic are practically twins. They’re shaped the same and have all of the same buttons and knobs in the same places. If you know how to operate one of these, you won’t miss a beat when handed the other brand. They even have the same lens. The Leica, though, is twice the price of the Lumix. Was one worth twice the price of its twin?

I had read that Leica gave better image quality than the Panasonic on two counts: Better Raw conversion software (Capture One 4.1 as opposed to Panasonic’s SilkyPix) and a better jpeg “engine” which (for those who don’t shoot Raw) gave better jpegs. I planned to check into this and compare the results in each format.

My expectations

Having worked with big name brand cameras all of my adult life, I’d heard and seen nothing but the highest quality from Leica, specifically their lenses. Although I’d never used a camera by Panasonic before, I could see this one shared a lens and body with the Leica, so I was interested to compare it to the “real” Leica. I’ve been a Canon user since my first DSLR, but was ready to “jump brand” if either of the other two could sufficiently impress me.

First impressions

The Canon is the only one of these three cameras which has a self-protecting lens (an automatically closing lens shield) and the only one which will protect its LCD (you can turn it inward towards the camera body). I like both of these features. On my DSLR’s, I use high quality clear filters and don’t bother with front lens caps (with the exception of my fisheye which won’t accept a clear filter), so I found the Leica/Panasonic lens cap a real nuisance. They each come with a cap tether cord and I guess I’d get used to it over time.

The LCD screen on the Canon is the only non-fixed screen among these cameras. As mentioned, you can stow it swiveled in towards the camera body for protection. You can have it flush with the back of the camera body, facing you the way a fixed LCD does, or you can swing it out to the side and use it as a waist level finder (this would be great for kid candids) or as a perfect periscope for over-head shots. The LCD can even face the same direction as the lens which would be good for self-portraits.

Someday, I hope Canon will make this feature available on their DSLR’s with one addition: I’d like them to make it a removable remote viewfinder with some basic remote buttons attached. Ah, well… I can dream.

The G11 has slightly larger knobs and dials (one of the reasons it takes up a bit more space), each of which has a nice click stop at each mark which tend to keep it in the chosen position compared to the Leica/Panasonic dials which are more dainty and can accidentally get bumped into the next setting.

To change ISO on the Canon, you twist a knob on top of the camera. To adjust exposure compensation requires just a click of another knob atop the camera. Changing ISO on the Leica/Panasonic requires bringing the menu to the LCD and navigating to the Sensitivity adjustment, then scrolling up or down as needed. I know the adjustment knobs on the Canon are causing electronic things to happen inside the camera but they feel like simple mechanical adjustments. In contrast, the tiny joy stick on the Leica and Panasonic felt like a remote control which was causing motors to operate someplace far away. I could make fine or gross adjustments by feel on the Canon.

When in Aperture Priority on the Leica or Panasonic cameras, the little joystick gives you a left/right choice between exposure compensation and f-stop adjustment (and a similar setup for Shutter Priority). Having chosen one of these (displayed on the LCD), you use the joystick to adjust that feature up or down.

I much preferred Canon’s knobs to going into the Leica/Lumix menu for ISO and toggling joy stick behaviors.

As mentioned, each of these cameras will let you choose an ISO of up to 3200. If you want grainy “surveillance” photos, go ahead and use ISO 1600 or 3200. For anything decent, the high ISO’s are a joke on all of these cameras. I’d only go to ISO 400 in a pinch, and forget the higher ones.

Each of the cameras will permit me to focus manually, but this usually involved estimating how far my subject was from the camera and adjusting a slider. The reason I’d want manual focus is for precision, but there’s not much I could do to assure precise focus on these cameras besides using their magnifier feature which worked to a certain extent.

The G11 is the only one of these cameras which has a built-in optical viewfinder. It does zoom in and out as your lens does, but since it only shows 77% of what your lens sees, it’s good only as a rough guide for use in very sunny situations where you can’t see much on the LCD. There’s no exposure information displayed in the optical viewfinder, though, and although it has a diopter adjustment, I never could see perfectly through it. For the other two cameras you can purchase optional accessory viewfinders which will mount in the hot shoe. (What if you want to put a flash in that hot shoe, too?) None of those accessory viewfinders will zoom with the lens, however.

In very sunny situations it was difficult to use these LCD’s to compose the picture or read my exposure settings. The swiveling LCD of the G11 made it possible to put the screen at a more glare-free angle.

As I mentioned, each of these cameras has a built-in flash (ugh!) and a hot shoe. A swivel/tilt accessory flash can give some pretty good light in a reflective room. The Leica and Panasonic cameras each offer a tiny accessory flash. Neither of these flashes will give you automatic flash metering through the camera’s lens and they don’t swivel or tilt, but the Canon G11 supports all of the Canon-compatible ETTL flashes (their light is automatically metered through the camera’s lens).

With a Canon 580EX II flash (and a Stofen Omnibounce) atop the G11, I was able to bounce the flash’s light off a white wall, achieving a very pleasing “off-camera light” look. The Stofen redirects the rest of the light elsewhere around the room to bounce to the subject, filling the shadows. All of this bouncing light comes back to the camera through the lens and is metered at the sensor for a very accurate exposure each time. You could add a 3rd party flash to the Leica or Panasonic such as the Vivitar 285HD and you’d have swivel/bounce flash, but it would be metered trough the flash’s sensor.

The large-ish 580EX II flash looks a bit strange attached to a small camera like the G11, but it’s a fantastic, simple to use flash photography setup which takes up very little room. The camera and flash could easily be carried in a sports waist pack. (Remember, the flash “bends.”).

In every aspect of photography, each advantage seems to come with a disadvantage. While the Leica/Lumix lens varies only from f/2 to f/2.8, the Canon lens is at f/2.8 only wide open and then steps quickly down to f/4.5, making it not nearly as good a lens for low-light situations.

How they performed

I was willing to ignore all of these great features (as well as any faults) if one camera clearly outperformed the others. Since these are all such high quality cameras, I didn’t expect a clear winner (and everyone enjoys a close race). I’ll show you a typical sample of what I found.

Here’s a picture I took of the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day with these cameras. That rectangle in the photo shows you the 100% crop I took out of each image as a comparison.

Below are the un-Photoshoped results at 100%:

Canon:

Leica

Panasonic/Lumix

The colors of the Leica/Panasonic images are a bit more saturated, but those images aren’t as sharply focused as that of the Canon G11. Nothing I can do in Photoshop will sharpen the Leica/Panasonic images to match the Canon image. Magnifying an image to 100% (each pixel you see is a pixel on the original image) is a pretty severe test. For enlargements under 8×10” and for the web, I doubt you’d be able to see the difference.

I’ve had classes in testing and know about random errors, so I did quite a few similar comparisons. The results were very conclusive to me each time. Here’s another series of pictures, this time the shady side of a Victorian home turned winery. You can see the 100% crop rectangle in the photo.

Here are the three crops for your own comparison:

Canon:

Leica

Panasonic/Lumix

The images from the Canon G11 were consistently sharper than those of the other two cameras. If you look closely, you can see the difference in quality yourself. Again, for small prints and images for the web, this difference in sharpness might not be noticeable, but for me it made the difference. To me, no feature on a camera is as important as image quality, especially sharpness.

If the Canon had only gone to the 35mm equivalent 60mm (the maximum zoom on the Leica/Panasonic) or given me horrible results above 60mm, that would’ve been a fair comparison of the useful ranges of the cameras, but I found that the Canon produced an excellent image even at its maximum of 140mm. The Canon lens has twice the optical zoom of the other cameras, a terrific advantage.

My preconceptions proven wrong

Before testing, I had thought that my favorite of these three cameras would be the Panasonic Lumix. I thought that since I shoot Raw, I could get a “Leica” for half price and that the quality of those cameras would be so much better than the Canon that I’d be swayed away from the Canon, even though it had twice the lens zoom. I had thought that one of these three cameras (probably the Canon) would be the clear winner when it came to high ISO’s. I was wrong on each of these preconceptions.

My conclusion

I do wish the Canon G11 could shoot at f/2.8 throughout its zoom range, and it is a little more bulky than the other two, but in every other respect, the Canon G11 was my favorite of these three cameras.

Everyone has their preferences

I’ve admitted my shooting style and personal preferences here. Yours are likely different from mine. These cameras are among the best state-of the art compacts available. You might prefer a camera a bit lighter and more compact than the Canon G11. In that case either the Leica or the Panasonic would be for you.

These three “best of their type” cameras certainly made me appreciate my Canon 5D Mk II (or any DSLR!). While shutter lag is not nearly as bad as it was on earlier, lower end digital cameras, it’s still perceptible. In many situations, you can pre-focus and anticipate that tiny bit of lag once you’re used to it.

I began this exploration of compact cameras as temporary alternatives to the DSLRs I already own. Depending on the needs and preferences of a DSLR user, any of them might prove to be a good secondary camera. Any of them might be an excellent primary camera choice for anyone who has never used an SLR camera, but if you haven’t used a DSLR, I suggest you try a friend’s for a few minutes. You’ll no longer be deciding if you should get one, you’ll be trying to decide which brand and model of DSLR to buy and which accessories you need first. You’ll still be glad to have one of these full-featured compact cameras as an alternative.

I hope you’ve found this comparative article helpful in your decisions about which compact camera to choose for your own purposes and style of shooting. I suggest you also check out the customer reviews of each camera on the B&H web site:
• Canon PowerShot G11
• Leica D-LUX 4
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3

Many thanks to B&H Photo Video for graciously providing the three cameras I tested.

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