Panasonic does a good job of keeping noise under control with the DMC-L10, though you will probably encounter noise at the camera's highest ISOs. Depending on the lighting you're in, and your subject matter, you may be able to get acceptable prints from the L10 even up to its highest sensitivity setting of ISO 1,600.
However, in some lighting conditions, such as extremely yellow tungsten hot lights, we saw enough noise to make prints unusable. Still, we were impressed with the L10's noise profile, though its low noise comes at the expense of a fair amount of finer detail once you get up to ISO 800 and above. While it's nice to have usable performance across the camera's ISO range, we do wish that the L10 at least went to ISO 3,200. Even entry-level SLRs should be able to go that high at this point.
Conclusion
In the end, Panasonic's Lumix DMC-L10 is a
lot like Olympus' E-510. Both use Live MOS sensors, and thus have
live-view modes, and both showed similar performance and image quality.
We'd give Panasonic an edge for the body design and for including an
articulated LCD, though Olympus gets a big edge in price since you can
get an
Panasonic might argue that its lens is nicer and includes optical image stabilisation, but Olympus can easily counter that the E-510 includes sensor-shift stabilisation. If price weren't an issue, we'd choose the Panasonic. However, on our writer's salary, we'd have to go with Olympus on this one.
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday
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