I own several small Cannon digital cameras and love them because they are quick, I also own a large modern Cannon DSLR with a great L series zoom lens and love the quality. The Panasonic LX1 turns out photos that are more sophisticated than any other camera that I own. The white balance controls are superb. Great lens for portraits and everything, I use the macro feature and get great results. Love this camera!

the claring error in design is the out moded tethered lens cap. The lens is large and unprotected- no auto retraction of lens with auto cover..Manual removal of tethered lens cap is a pain.. got some awful color abberations while using the camera set in auto- daylite and flash both. no explanation of a deep blue tinting of entire photo and purple outlines and light streaks. most still shots at normal lens opening were good. using the 10x telephoto is only practical to about 4x. after that a tripod seems needed to stop blurriness .. So, the practical limitation is about 4x- forget the digital additional telephoto capability . even on a firm base ,long distance stils in auto at te max digital tele mode was not good. far from sharp..The Lieca lens is a great portrait lens ,but for action and other more cmplex uses it has no advantages over aspherical lenses. there is no view finder , so it is "A GUESS OR BY GOD" -aiming, when the LCD is blanked out by bright sun light .. I was drawn to the camera because of the magical conotation of superiority LIECA brings to a lens.. Saw no
great lens improvement in the resulting photos..
Pansonic must figure a way of automatically retracting the lens .. the Canon A700 w/ a ^x retracting lens is a more practical choice. You can use the 6x in both,with a steady bolster. the extra 4x optical zoom in the pansonic DMZ-TZ1 is not a great feature as I have pointed out above.. It is intrinsically unsound for practical long range photos, especially if hand held.In conclusion , there are better choices for less money.. The use of a battery system other than AA is a nuicence. A charger is needed.. Lithium throw away AA batteries,may end up costing more per photo taken,but the cost is minimal..

What I like about the camera
a) Manual Function akin to an SLR
b) Easy to use and intuitive
c) Classic Camera feel
d) Nice wide angle with LEICA lense

What I dont like about the camera
a) Noise is apparent at low lighting condition
b) OIS (gyro sensor) cannot fight the rival which use RAW image processing see rival like S7 (nikon) and T10/30 (Sony).
c) Protuding lense - a bit of a hassle for light travellers i.e. too big to tuck in pocket
d) Slightly pricey compared to others in its class but you're buying a Panasonic Brand (my fridge of 15 years which is National (MAtsushita) still works perfectly.

this camera is great the image noise has not been a problem at all. If you change some settings around, use flash, a tripod, or take your pictures in well light areas you have no noise at all. Buy this camera if you want a small camera that takes great pictures and are a person with enough knowledge of photography to appreciate its fantastic feature set. The build qaulity is fantastic and i think anyone who buys it will enjoy having it. My advice though is to but a panasonic card i got a Extream Performance one because it was 150x speed and only $30 but the camera is hard on the memory cards and the panasonic ones are the most durable.

Great camera..... 16:9 awesome. Hey the noise is not bad at all...Built like a brick this is an awesome point and shoot. Forget Canon, Nikon, Olympus.and all the others this is the one buy it, you wont be disappointed.

With great sadness, the camera does not perform even close to levels suggested by the spec. It should be great but is weak in anything other than strong sunlight (outside). Noise levels are a problem, and as yet RAW from this camera is not supported by Apple for Aperture.
Do not buy unless you accept you will be disappointed.

I wanted to get a Canon S80, but ended up buying the LX1. Really liked the camera overall, the only complaint being image noise.

True, it can take RAW, and image noise reduction software isnt hard to find either. That's just un-needed inconvenience IMHO.

instead of taking my SLR camera on holiday I took this great little camera. The wide 16:9 shots are superb. Detail is amazing. I actually prefer this to my SLR camera now! Movie mode is great too.

beautiful gem of a camera having had standard film Leicas, when I saw this and checked out the specs I bought one. Great features 3 aspect ratios great control easy interface, has everything a user could want and more.
Butttttttt..... after using it for a 2 days,
the images are really noisy and speckling is really unacceptable for me, I compared the imaging to shots I had from my sony wm-2 which I was replacing due to it being lost. Imaging was just better. When you zoom in on images the pixelation and noise is obvious I tried shooting using all the variables available to me on the Lumix-LX1,and then tried all sorts of photoshop filters, I could get better images but to much hassle, If I wanted to do that much work I would just drag out my spot meters and my 2-1/4 mamiya.
So disappointed I returned it, I really liked the features and styling. I bought a Sony DCS-N1
images are sharp and noise free. Here is another review I found looking for what the problem was,
http://www.creativepro.com/story/review/23883.html
To bad I really wanted to keep it, Panasonic if your reading this change the sensor and I would buy it again.
Ray

I bought the Lumix LX1 with high hopes , great features and a Leica lens, 3 image ratios, stabilizer, 8.6 megapixels. WOW!! sounds great.
I bought one, well after using it for 2 days, I was very dissappionted with the image quality of the majority of the pictures, I thought it was just my camera, but I looked online and found this is a problem with the sensor, of course I could have corrected it with software afterwards but why? I even shot manual and got better pictures.No thanks for that kind of money I can get a camera that will do all this and get the same and better quailty images. I do not recommend this camera unless you want a $600 paper weight, that takes so-so pictures. To bad I really like everything about it except the pictures.

I had been researching this camera for awhile and was really excited to get my hands on it even though the claims of too much noise.
I love all the features,camera build and size. Its everything you can want in a small compact camera until I tried it out. Very sleak and elegant.
The pics taken were ssooooo noisy even at ISO of 100. Even in decent lighting noise shows up in the dark areas and then much worse in lower light.
This is not what you'd expect from such a pricey camera so I decided to return it. Compromising quality for all the great features was not worth it.
I now have the Canon A620 and am very happy with it.

Amazing image quality from such a small, portable package. Best results are obtained when shooting RAW, post-processing with a quality software application and printing with a photo-quality printer. Images are not quite as detail-rich as from a 6+ mp dslr, but, hey, YOU CAN CARRY THIS CAMERA/LENS IN YOUR POCKET. I see this camera as as serious shooter's add-on to their dslr.

JPEGs straight out of the camera at higher ISOs can be noisy.

Is the smallest digicam to shoot RAW afaik. It features a true native 16:9 wide aspect ratio sensor, which I really like, and it has optical image stabilization, which anyone using a digicam knows how important is.

A must have.

Since it shoots raw, noise problems are de facto irrelevant.

The zoom this camera has is amazing (embarrassing to some as it can depict even hairs on the nose from a portrait picture). It is exactly what I was after - reasonably small, great picture quality and large LCD screen.

I'm extremely happy with my new LX1. It's everything I hoped for and more. I'm used to lugging around a Canon 10D which is fine, but Panasonic is a "take everywhere camera". I can't believe they have all the features plugged into such a small format. Very impressed with the anti shake feature. I need it!

This is the camera you want to have in your pocket when you wander around.
There's noise above 100 asa... not much but enough. So what? You can easily eliminate noise with any anti-noise software. The most useful is maybe adobe photoshop CS software (that you can download for free almost everywhere on the web: search for "Photoshop.9.0(CS2)iso.part1.zip" and so on).
If you do noy know how to search, learn it on searchlores.org :)

So this is a VERY good stable small camera that packs RAW/TIFF/JPEG verfy sharp images (thank to the laica lens).

It costs next to nothing (400 euro) and it's incredibly light and ergonomically correct :)

A must have, for at least a couple of years...

I was cought by the hi tech specifics of the camera and took it for a bike ride in the alps.
After returning I reviewed my pictures made in Automatic Mode (factory presettings): The sky was a blue green (turqouis), not blue. When the color settings are changed to "warm" the blue is less green, but still not fully natural.

Go out and buy one super little camera results are best I have seen from a compact camera - well done Panasonic .....

Test of this little gem today with the family, was very suprised at the close-up quality and lots more. The grid superimposed on the view screen will a normal selection, found it useful in the 16x9 mode, which I intend to shoot mostly in. Happy to send some of my shots to those interested.