Goodbye to the LC1

[john_r_smith]

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Goodbye to the LC1

 

Well, I have made my mind up and now the Panasonic LC1 is sold, so I am currently without any Leica equipment other than a Leitz series 8 UV filter (I am really hanging on to my Forum place by my fingertips here). After a year with the LC1, how do I feel about the camera and its sister the Digilux 2? Well, it was mixed feelings, really, which is why I ended up selling it. This was a camera which is in many ways unique, a design triumph in some respects, yet, perhaps because it was slightly before its time, also fatally flawed. The good points for me were –

 

• The manual aperture and shutter speed controls made it easy for me to swap between the LC1 and older film cameras, and back again. And the manual focussing ring was superbly smooth (but see below).

• Reasonable size and light weight made the camera easy to carry and use. Ergonomically, everything seemed to be in the right place.

• The lens was excellent, fast and sharp. In good light and at 100 ISO the results were first class, and often were a match for my MF film cameras at A4 print size. I have the feeling that this lens deserved a better sensor and processing engine.

• The metering system is astonishingly good. Most of the time I just trusted it, and always got great exposures.

 

But despite using the camera intensively for six months or so to produce some great pictures, eventually I tired of having to work around the LC1’s problems. These were (in no particular order) –

 

• The electronic viewfinder. I had hoped that I would get used to it, but I never did. The image is small, grainy and utterly hopeless for critical composition, focussing, or assessing depth of field. It makes the manual focus ring on the lens pointless even with the magnified view, unless you are at maximum zoom.

• To get reasonable quality at ISOs above 100 or with long exposures on a tripod, you have to use RAW, not JPEG. But the lack of a RAW buffer makes this extremely tedious, because you have to wait between 6 and 10 seconds for the buffer to clear after each shot. This is completely useless when shooting social, sports or candid work.

• Despite the nice things I said about the lens earlier, it does suffer from noticeable barrel distortion at the widest end, which made it less useful for architectural work.

• The auto-focus would sometimes lock onto an arbitrary plane for no apparent reason, so critical focus was a bit hit-or-miss. I often lost a good shot as a result.

 

So the LC1 has gone, and I have to say without much regret on my part. For a camera that promised so much, and which in fact delivered great results most of the time, I am now surprised how little I actually enjoyed using it. Certainly, I would never buy another camera with an EVF.

 

Your ex-Leica owner

 

John

[steve_l]

I (and others here) have similar ambivalences about this camera - I had a Digilux 2, sold it for the reasons above, and then bought an LC1 because I remembered how much I liked the pictures it produced.

 

Got an R-D1, loved that but it also has a few serious flaws (multiplier, fragility,...). Sold it to get my M8, which arrives here in three days!

 

We are still in the first generation of serious digital rangefinders, I'm afraid, and doomed to keep upgrading for a while longeras models appear with fewer and fewer serious design/manufacturing/technology flaws.

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[Riley]

yes the D2/LC-1 is a beautiful albeit terribly flawed camera

 

The manual handling, and the fast F2 lens with fabulous IQ promised much for photographers, especially those from a film background. Having to twirl rings and knobs is absolutely the best way to handle a camera. What baffles me is that still many camera designers will us to have it otherwise. Added bonus was the innovative bounce flash and TTL mode.

 

Then there is the insistence on managing the process by menu within menu until you are absolutely baffled by 'where was that dam thing again". The utter simplicity of the control layout, the logical layout of shortcut buttons, are key features that have been way underrated/overlooked by almost every camera since, sans D3 and M8.

 

Yet the iso performance totally sucked, so much so that it actually doesnt have any iso performance. Even at iso100 it is possible to be troubled by the dreaded noise, the solution with PP providing a plastic look to images that perhaps you didnt seek. 400iso becoming an unbearable joke, just where was one to use it.

 

Then we come to the EVF, for it is possible to have a supremely better EVF than what was included. I have never subscribed to the view that an OVF would have succeeded, the use of a 28-90 zoom to my mind forbids it. I would be happy, even delighted to know of an alternative that would make an OVF more useful, but you would find me hard to convince.

 

Lastly, in my dreams, I seek out a Fuji F30, and successfully marry the two together. For a blend of a CCD that works without fear of sudden death syndrome, and an iso that goes better at 3200 than D2 does at 200.