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| Photo: Richard Butler |
We’ve spent a bit more time with the Leica D-Lux 8, an enthusiast compact camera that captured our imaginations last year. As part of our continued testing, we’ve put it in front of our standard studio test scene, to get a sense of what kind of image quality we can expect from the up-to 17MP crops it takes from a 21MP Four Thirds sensor.
Our test scene is designed to simulate a variety of textures, colors and detail types you’ll encounter in the real world. It also has two illumination modes to see the effect of different lighting conditions.
When shooting Raw, the D-Lux 8 captures a touch more detail as the Sony RX100Va, but falls behind the Fujifilm X100 VI and Ricoh GR III. Its base ISO Raw noise performance, viewed at a comparable size, generally follows sensor size, with the D-Lux 8 exhibiting less noise than the Sony, but more than the Ricoh and Fujifilm, an trend that continues at higher ISOs.
Leica’s JPEG engine is roughly on par with Sony’s when it comes to pulling out fine details, though the RX100 V’s processing is a bit more aggressive, occasionally bordering on oversharpening. At higher ISOs, the Leica does a good job of removing noise, though at the cost of smoothing out some details.
The Leica’s JPEG colors are similar to the Ricoh’s, but slightly more saturated. They appear to hew towards accuracy, which doesn’t necessarily result in the most pleasing skin tones, something you can see in our sample gallery for the D-Lux 8.
It’s worth noting that our copy of the D-Lux 8 couldn’t quite match the peak sharpness that we achieved with the Panasonic LX100 II, despite repeated attempts at focusing and the two cameras using the same sensor and lens combination. This is likely to be a result of copy-to-copy variation.
Dynamic Range
The D-Lux 8 offers a fair amount of image processing flexibility for those looking to pull shadows up. The results from our exposure latitude test can only be used to compare cameras with the same size sensor, which is especially tricky with the D-Lux 8 given that it doesn’t use the entirety of its Four Thirds sensor. When raised, you can expect its shadows to have a bit more noise when you push them by several stops, though the results are arguably still quite usable even after quite large pushes.
The decent, but not class-leading, performance trend continues when looking at its ISO behavior. The camera’s added read noise becomes relatively noticeable in more extreme situations, like if you were trying to protect your highlights by shooting at an ISO 3EV below what you’d normally use for a given aperture and shutter speed and then brightening parts of your image in post. The D-Lux 8’s competitors generally fare better in this respect, but if you’re making smaller changes in post, the difference won’t be as obvious.
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
