Panasonic LX3 Best Apertures
I started out to be serious to
try and find the "sweet spot" for the LX3 at a few different zoom
settings, but it quickly became evident that I was wasting my time. The
early rough tests found the lens to be so good that it was silly to go
further in doing a "scientific" approach to it as the quality is so
good that only people making maybe A2 size prints would need to be
really careful about aperture chosen and many other items of file
selection and post processing. For everyday use and prints to A3 size
at low ISO this is all you need to know.
No
depth of field issues were addressed, but the depth of field is so
large that it usually does not cause headaches for scenic shots, but
may cause problems for people seeking blurred backgrounds as for
portraits.
The maximum aperture at each focal length step
detected in this table, There seems to be 13 steps in the zoom,
could be one that I missed. The minimum auto and selectable aperture is
f/8 for all focal lengths. The video mode may also go a little further
to f/11.
| Actual Focal Length | 35mm Equivalent | Maximum Aperture |
| 5.1 | 24 | 2.0 |
| 5.4 | 26 | 2.1 |
| 5.9 | 28 | 2.1 |
| 6.3 | 30 | 2.2 |
| 6.8 | 32 | 2.2 |
| 7.4 | 35 | 2.3 |
| 7.9 | 37 | 2.4 |
| 8.8 | 41 | 2.5 |
| 9.3 | 44 | 2.5 |
| 10.2 | 48 | 2.6 |
| 11.1 | 52 | 2.7 |
| 12.1 | 57 | 2.8 |
| 12.8 | 60 | 2.8 |
The
summary of what I found from my quick tests can be best summed up
in a chart below displaying a rough idea of relative quality.
The
test was done at wide, mid range and full tele in good light and hand
held with the OIS set to Mode 2. The subject target building was about
2.4km distant. In the DPReview thread I said it was about 1.5km
distant, but then I checked the real distance via Google Maps......
The
more *** the better. Each focal length treated as a separate issue, so
20 * in one may not exactly equal 20 * in the other in absolute quality
levels, but I do guarantee that it is all good at any focal length.
| Aperture | At 5.1mm (=24mm) | At 9.3mm (=44mm) | At 12.8mm (=60mm) |
| f/2.0 | ******************** | n/a | n/a |
| f/2.2 | ******************** | n/a | n/a |
| f/2.5 | ******************** | ******************** | n/a |
| f/2.8 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************* |
| f/3.2 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************** |
| f/3.5 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************** |
| f/4.0 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************** |
| f/4.5 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************** |
| f/5.0 | ******************** | ******************** | ******************** |
| f/5.6 | ******************** | ******************* | ******************** |
| f/6.3 | ******************* | ******************* | ******************* |
| f/7.1 | ****************** | ****************** | ****************** |
| f/8.0 | ***************** | ***************** | ***************** |
Maybe
the scaling is a little coarse but there really is nothing to worry
about in the falloff at f/8.0, it would only matter when doing very
large prints that will be closely examined. The main point to realise is that there is no real peak
in the performance at any one aperture. To me this may prove that the
lens may have been designed for a much higher megapixel sensor and then
then common sense prevailed and kept the megapixel count to a more
responsible level and thus made the sweet spot so wide.
There's
no point in adding images, it's all done at 200% pixel peeping of fine
jpegs with no smoothing in FastStone Viewer with the 4 image comparison
window.
Conclusion... it's a truly excellent lens on the LX3.