The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 produced some very nice exposures and colours with lots of detail in the highlights and shadows. Only the brightest highlights blew out. Colours were rich and saturated with few colour casts other than a slight magenta bias that sometimes appeared in skin tones and an overall warm tone that appeared in tungsten-illuminated scenes whether we used automatic white balance or set it ourselves. The crisp Leica lens produced sharp images across the entire frame and displayed very little in the way of chromatic aberration; there was a touch of cyan fringing around backlit objects.
In our test photos, the Panasonic Lumix LX1 produced very good exposures and colours (top), but on close inspection, we spotted processing artefacts such as demosaicing errors, which appeared in a yellow-green diagonal stripe pattern on light colours (bottom)
The electronic flash generally produced even exposures, which was a challenge given the wide 28mm view and the 16:9 aspect ratio, and we got well-illuminated flash shots even beyond the rated 4m range for the built-in unit. Although red-eye was subdued, it was still present when using the LX-1's red-eye-reduction system. It's too bad that a camera offering this much exposure control doesn't have an add-on external flash option, as well.
Noise was relatively low at ISO 80 but clearly visible as multicoloured speckles at ISO 800.
Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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