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CNET editors' rating:
3.5 stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 12 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Beautiful mechanical focus, zoom, aperture, and shutter-speed controls; high-quality magnesium body; fast lens with sensible zoom range; ingenious tiltable flash; excellent manual focus system.
The bad: Relatively low resolution for an enthusiast model; big and heavy; long raw-format shot-to-shot time; electronic viewfinder isn't the best available; high-res continuous shooting limited to three frames.
The bottom line: This well-made advanced shooter's camera features several unique and very efficient analog controls, but it may have trouble luring buyers away from cheaper digital SLR systems.
Specifications: Resolution: 5 megapixels; Optical zoom: 3.2 x; Display type: 2.5 in LCD display; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 03/25/2005
- Released on: 01/01/2004
Its two-tone silver-and-black styling evokes classic Leica rangefinder models just well enough that we can forgive the camera's too-boxy shape. With an exceptionally solid magnesium body, its fit and finish are excellent, and it's easy to get a comfortable and very secure grip on this camera.
A simple spin of the aperture ring to its A position puts you in shutter-priority autoexposure mode; move the shutter-speed dial to A and you're shooting with aperture-priority mode; set both for A and you're in Program mode. This method was first conceived by Aristotle, we'd guess, and it's still the best.
Other design details are more conventionally digital, but Leica executes them well. You can quickly access crucial settings such as white balance and ISO sensitivity through the Function button on the camera's back. The menu system, which you navigate via a four-way controller on the rear of the camera, is quick to use and logically organized.
Central to the Leica mystique are the company's famous lenses, and the Digilux 2 sports a 3.2X Vario-Summicron Aspherical zoom that covers the range from 28mm to 90mm (35mm equivalent). A gold star goes to Leica for the decent wide-angle capability of this sensible zoom range. The lens is also fast, opening to f/2.0 at its wide end and f/2.4 at its telephoto setting. It's threaded to accept 69mm accessories, such as filters, and Leica offers an optional adapter ring to convert to the more common 72mm size.Advanced shooters will be pleased to find comprehensive exposure controls on the Digilux 2. These include well-designed implementations of all four main exposure modes, three light meters (multifield, center-weighted, and spot), and exposure compensation to plus or minus 2EV. There's also a live image histogram. It's usable but smaller than it should be, and it disappears when you're setting exposure compensation, which is silly. White-balance options include auto, five presets, and custom. You can adjust the CCD's sensitivity from ISO 100 to ISO 400.
The Digilux 2 saves images to an SD card. For JPEG photos, you can choose from six resolutions and three compression levels, as well as record 5-second sound clips that are associated with particular photos. Adjustable image parameters include in-camera sharpening, contrast, and color saturation.
The camera will also record raw-format still pictures, which you can convert to standard formats with the included LaserSoft Imaging SilverFast DC SE software for Windows and Mac. SilverFast DC SE offers pro-level color and tonality controls, making it significantly more powerful than the raw converters we're used to seeing with consumer digicams.
In movie mode, the Digilux 2 records 320x240-pixel QuickTime (M-JPEG) video with sound at 30fps. Clip length is limited only by your storage card capacity.
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.Seconds (Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Shot-to-shot time (raw) | |
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Shot-to-shot time (typical) | |
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(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Number of shots on battery |
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.
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