| Photo: Richard Butler |
We’ve spent a little more time with the Leica D-Lux 8, an enthusiast compact camera captured our imaginations last yearAs part of our continuing testing, we put it in front of our standard studio test scene to see what kind of image quality we can expect from cropping the 21MP Four Thirds sensor to 17MP.
Our The test scene is designed to simulate In the real world you will find a variety of textures, colors and detail types. It also has two illumination modes to see the effect of different lighting conditions.
When shooting RAW, the D-Lux 8 captures slightly more detail than the Sony RX100Va, but falls behind the Fujifilm X100 VI and Ricoh GR III. Its base ISO raw noise performance, seen at a comparable size, generally follows sensor size, with the D-Lux 8 displaying less noise than the Sony, but more than the Ricoh and Fujifilm, a trend that continues at higher Continues on ISO.
When it comes to extracting fine detail, Leica’s JPEG engine is roughly on par with Sony’s, although the RX100V’s processing is a little more aggressive, sometimes bordering on oversharpening. At higher ISOs, the Leica does a good job of removing noise, although at the expense of smoothing out some details.
The DSLR’s JPEG colors are similar to the Ricoh’s, and although they’re slightly more saturated than the GR III’s, they can appear a little muted next to the Sony’s. They work towards precision, which may not necessarily result in the most pleasant skin tones, something you can see in our Sample Gallery for D-Lux 8,
It’s worth noting that our copy of the D-Lux 8 couldn’t match the peak sharpness achieved with the Panasonic LX100 II, despite multiple attempts to focus and both cameras using the same sensor and lens combination. . This may be due to copy-to-copy variation.
dynamic range
The D-Lux 8 offers a fair amount of image processing flexibility for those who want to pull up the shadows. The results of our exposure latitude test can only be used to compare cameras with similar sized sensors, which is especially difficult with the D-Lux 8 because it doesn’t use the entirety of its Four Thirds sensor . This means that when turned up, you can expect there to be a little more noise in the shadows than when you push it several stops, although even adding 5EV the results are arguably still quite usable.
Given its read noise levels, the decent, but not class-leading, performance trend continues. The camera’s added read noise becomes relatively noticeable in more extreme situations, such as if you try to preserve your highlights by shooting below the normally used ISO 3EV for a given aperture and shutter speed. Trying and then brightening certain parts of my image. Post. The D-Lux 8’s competitors generally perform better in this regard, but if you’re making small changes in post, the difference won’t be as pronounced.
