Baby Leica – 2

So, I’ve had the little Leica D-Lux 8 for a few days, and as I get ready to pack it up to send it back tomorrow I have a few thoughts…

It’s a lovely piece of kit, don’t get me wrong, but it just didn’t “grab” me as I’d hoped it would. It is responsive, has a lovely lens with some quite nice bokeh and a nice macro feature, the color is nice, and the small sensor has actually not bothered me at all. Some of these pics have benefitted from Lightroom’s AI denoise feature or from being put through Topaz Photo AI, and with these tools at my disposal the slight lack of details and extra noise from the smaller sensor is less of an issue.

One of my questions was whether I could shoot a Sunday morning with this camera- and yes, I certainly could. Would I get better results with a full-frame Sony and my Tamron 35-150? Yes, and that is what I would use if it was a more “important” Sunday, but for posting on FB these are more than adequate 🙂

So, would I buy it? Probably not. It’s great and I have certainly enjoyed playing around with it for a few days, but for $1,600 I need to feel more for it- and for that price the lack of any weather-sealing is a pretty criminal omission! It has rained for a couple of the days it’s been with me, and so I did not feel comfortable taking it on all my daily dog-walks.

So, I think the search for the perfect EDC camera goes on, and I have rented another contender that arrives later this week- the Sony RX100 VII, which has a better zoom range but an even smaller sensor and also, sadly, no weather-sealing. But it gets rave reviews from a couple of photographers I respect, so we’ll see if it can live up to them, watch this space…