Leica Digilux Zoom

Opinion: This is camera is now discontinued, however I am sure is not because of its lack of goodness, but b/c of the speed of digital market in to build and sell new cameras. Leica Digilux Zoom is a superb 1.31 Megapixels camera (1280 x 1024 true pixels). Natural Colours, wonderful manual White Balance, perfect Sharpness, manual Compensation settings, Flash little weak but its brightness can be manually adjusted, Continuous shooting at 640 x 480 up to 9 shots... In manual mode you can review your shot and keep it or not instantly after done. Best thing, the camera is precious and small (metal build, automatic lens cover), you love carry it with you everywhere and not missing a good photo. Flash 5 modes including slow for night subjects is excellent. Smart Media Floppy Disk Adapter is a joy: easy and wireless downloads. Besides, there's a DC INput of 5V to save battery indoors or downloading through software. Long life battery and charger: very good.

Opinion: Great Camera
Small and fits easily into pocket
Great display

Opinion: It says "Leica"! Really cool form-factor, smaller than a pack of cards, redefines Leitz's orginal 35mm concept of a pocket camera. Small size makes it unobtrusive for people photography.
Image quality is out-standing for its size (1280x1024), reproduces acceptable 8x10 prints, lower rez (640x480) excellent for web shots.
Comes with PC & Mac serial cables for slowww download, Flashpath adapter is a must-have. Photoshop 5LE included.

Opinion: I've had this camera for a little over a year now and I'm sorry to see that it's been discontinued. If you mainly view images from your camera on a monitor (and don't print them out) this is a nearly perfect camera.

However, I should point out a few weeknesses. First of all, the camera is horrible in low light situations. It is ISO 100 equivilant and the flash is very, very weak. If your shooting one or two people and there standing within five feet of the camera it's not to bad; any farther than that and the picture will be very dark.

The lack of manual controls is the only other serious weakness. The autofocus and autoexposure systems can be ocassionally fooled and it would be nice to be able to adjust the depth-of-field when shooting.

One other minor point is that the viewfinder is a bit small, in general I tend to use the LCD screen. Shooting in low light represents a unique problem; the image on the LCD screen is too dim to use and a "ready" light next to the viewfinder makes the viewfinder hard to use as well.

With all that said, there are many positive things to say about the camera. First of all, the camera is amazingly convenient. It is tiny camera that I carry arround with me all the time. Once the lens retracts into the body it's very easy to slip the camera into a shirt pocket. I've taken some of my favorite pictures with this camera because I've had it at times when carrying around my 35mm SLR would be inconvenient.

The 3x zoom is great for almost all the pictures I take. This range is pretty standard on more recent cameras but less common on cameras from a year or two ago.

The image size is nearly perfect for viewing on a monitor, and altough I've never tried, would also be OK for small prints (4" x 6"). Image quality is generally impressive, although a little tweaking of the color balance and gamma is necessary for best results. My current routine is to bring the images into Photoshop and convert them from Kodak KDC colorspace to the RGB colorspace. This seems to work pretty well. Ocassionally I will "auto-adjust" the color balance as well; it works well unless there is a large area of uniform color in the image.

This camera is highly recommend as a second camera for anyone who already has a 35mm or high quality digital setup, or if you don't plan on making large prints of your pictures. In fact, if it had manual-focus and manual-exposure controls I think I'd take nearly all my pictures on this little camera. What this camera lacks in features it more than makes up for in convenience; more than a year after its introduction there still aren't many cameras that are as easy to fit into a shirt pocket.

Notes/Comments/Necessary Accessories:
This is essentially the same camera as the Fuji MX-1700. The Leica looks a little nicer and has leather accents (compared to rubber on the Fuji) but the internals of both cameras are the same.

The 8mb card is way to small unless your shooting 640 x 480 images for a web site. Buy at least a 16mb card and preferably a 32 or 64mb when you get the camera. Also, pick up a USB smartmedia reader while your at it; the serial cable is way to slow to transfer anything over 8mb. You won't need batteries or a charge; the internal Li-ion battery works great. If you don't abuse the flash or spend to much time reviewing your pictures there's enough battery life to fill up a 32MB card (about 90 images). If you want to fill a 64mb card without recharging you'll need to pick up an extra battery.

Once last thing to check if your buying this camera; make sure the lens retraction system is working properly. The first unit I bought had a problem and the lens wouldn't properly retract or open.