Panasonic Lumix DMC LX7

The Panasonic Lumix DMC LX7 is a camera that became an instant sensation the minute it was announced.

Build:

The first thing you should know about the Panasonic Lumix DMC LX7 is that it is one deceptive piece of work. It is rather compact for a camera with such impressive optics, but if you’re looking for something that you could just slip into your pockets and forget about, this is not that camera. Even though the body itself is quite slim, the lens design causes the assembly to protrude quite noticeably out the front.

Features:

 The Panasonic Lumix DMC LX7comes with a very modest set of features, including a 10.1 megapixel CMOS sensor complemented with Panasonic’s Venus Engine image processing chip. The pixel count is somewhat on the lower side, and the sensor dated, given how most cameras in this category have at least a 12 million pixels on a Back-Side Illuminated (BSI) sensor. The lower pixel count does help the sensor keep noise levels low, but we would have loved to see at least a BSI sensor in here.

Video Performance:

 The movie mode on the Panasonic Lumix DMC LX7 is also quite something. The camera is capable of recording in 1920x1080 resolution at 60 frames per second with stereo sound using the AVCHD Progressive codec. The resulting file has a bitrate of a whopping 28Mbps, which is higher than the 25Mbps that most conventional DSLRs offer. In fact, Panasonic has the reputation of delivering some pretty ridiculous bitrates in its cameras, like the DMC-GH3, the camera that can record video at 72 Mbps encoding, which matches broadcast quality.