Leica Digilux 2 review

In addition to its clever design, the flash has more common features, such as flash exposure compensation adjustment (plus or minus 2EV) and second-curtain synchronization; the flash fires at the end of the exposure, rather than the beginning. Finally, a hotshoe lets you mount external flashes, such as Leica's SF 24D dedicated flash.

The Leica Digilux 2 performs quite well overall, but there are two disappointing aspects. The first is start-up time, which is a subpar 5 seconds. Its shot-to-shot times for JPEG images are good--2.5 seconds with flash and 1.8 seconds without--but raw-capture shot-to-shot time is 6 seconds with a fast SD card (11.5 seconds with the included Leica SD card.) Obviously, that's a big--and frankly, careless--obstacle to using raw format. In continuous-shooting mode, the camera can capture a burst of three high-resolution JPEGs at 2.7 frames per second. And the Digilux 2 fired off a reviewer-tormenting 1,245 shots in our battery-life test.

The autofocus system operates fairly quickly and quite decisively even in low light, resulting in a reasonably short shutter delay of 0.7 second across a wide range of lighting conditions. With manual focus, shutter delay drops to 0.2 second.

Manual focus, in fact, is one of this camera's standout features. The manual focus ring is smooth and precise--nearly as good as one of those stone-age, helical-focusing lenses. The camera will also magnify the center portion of the image (either in the electronic viewfinder or on the LCD) to help you judge focus, and this works very well. Finally, clear distance markings on the long-throw focus ring allow quick and easy zone focusing for us Cartier-Bresson wannabes. The zoom ring is just as smooth and well crafted as its focusing counterpart and, again, reminds you of a good 35mm lens.

The camera's large 2.5-inch LCD is fairly sharp and reasonably usable in outdoor lighting, and it shows close to 100 percent of the actual image. The EVF is sharper and more usable than average, but it's far short of the best (the one in Konica Minolta's Dimage A2). It, too, shows close to 100 percent of the actual image. Overall, both the EVF and the LCD are decent, but we expect a Leica--especially one that costs $1,600--to lead the field in viewing experience.

The built-in flash has an unusually good maximum range of 15.7 feet at ISO 100. The range will be considerably shorter when the flash head is tilted for bounce, but we got good bounce-flash exposures at distances of 6 to 7 feet.

Overall, the quality of our test shots from the Digilux 2 is top-notch when compared with other consumer digicams' but not with digital SLRs. Sharpness and detail are very good for a 5-megapixel camera, and the lens performs exceptionally, with good edge-to-edge sharpness, very little barrel distortion at its wide end, and essentially zero pincushioning at its telephoto setting.

Colors are natural but vivid, and we noted good, neutral skin tones with both existing light and flash. We got consistently sound exposures and found the auto white balance to be impressive in varying outdoor light. We also experienced exceptionally few digital artifacts.

At ISO 100, there is somewhat more visible noise in the Digilux's images than we've found in competing models, it gets worse at ISO 200, and telltale signs of noise suppression postprocessing show up in the form of slightly smeary patches here and there. The noise suppression is quite strong at ISO 400, which results in lower-than-average noise but noticeably oversmoothed, or painterly, sections in many photos.