Late lamented Oly P&S's w Raw and 28mm equiv wide

[doug_nelson3]

I am considering, after reading reviews, a C5060, 7070 or 8080 as a compact travel digital. I want a fairly wide option

on the zoom, with not all that much barrel distortion, and RAW capability. I am willing to live with the ISO 400 upper

limit, maybe some noise at that end, and important functions buried in silly menus. Is a RAW from these cameras

12 bit? I'd like to do my tonal and color corrections in Photoshop in high bit, then go to 8-bit so that the resulting

histogram doesn't end up looking like the hillbilly's teeth in a grade B movie.

 

The Canon G9 craps out on the wide end, and most SLR's are just too big and heavy. The Olympus 410 can offer

me only the 25mm (50 mm equiv) as a compact lens.

 

Also in the running is the Pentax K200D with the pancake 21mm, which is only about a 32mm equivalent.

[Greg M]

What about this new Panasonic LX3, with a zoom that starts at 24mm f2, RAW capability...even RAW burst capability (up to three frames) and very, very compact, with the option of mounting an accessory lens that converts the 24mm f2 lens to an 18mm f2 super wide lens, and an option of fitting an optical finder in the (dedicated for TTL flash with Olympus speedlights) hot shoe. It isn't available yet, but should be soon. The LX series has a button or switch available for choosing almost any feature you'd use in taking pictures....very little to no menu-diving needed.

 

What you need to think about in choosing between the three digicams you've listed is, they are now fairly old in terms of the technology and only available used...and possibly abused. They absolutely do make good images, but RAW capture is very slow.

[doug_nelson3]

Greg, Thanks for the thoughtful reply.This LX3 sounds worth waiting for. Fairly old on the Olys translates to cheap, but I'd have to weight that against having what I need in one easily carried camera.

[rick_dreher1]

There are also the Ricoh twins, the GX200 and GRD II to consider, as well as the Sigma DP1. A few companies are

starting to get the message that typical compact digicams are completely missing the boat.

 

p.s. The Zuiko 14-42 kit lens, while not making the E-420 pocketable, is still darn small and quite good, if slow.

[robert_jaques]

I have an Olympus C5060. It is an excellent camera with very good image quality. I have taken some night photographs with this camera and got very decent results which somewhat surprised me, as I thought P&S digital cameras were not so good in low light.

 

To answer your question the RAW mode is 12bit. The RAW files are slow to write to card, And the Olympus RAW conversion software seems to smear fine detail. I use the free RAW shooter software which retains the fine details better. These are my only complaints of this model.

 

Many of the C5060 (Including mine) had mode dial issues (May have been resolved in 7070 model, not sure). So beware of this if buying second hand.