Panasonic retakes the lead in the advanced compact competition with its LX100. Really good photo and video quality, a great set of features and (for the most part) class-leading performance, result in one of my favorite compact cameras ever.
Despite a full auto mode, however, newbies might face a steep climb up the learning curve. At $900 (£800, AU$1,200), it's also pretty expensive if you're just looking for an upgrade to better photo and video than whatever you're using now.
As a companion for a dSLR or an alternative to a midrange interchangeable-lens model, though, it's definitely worth considering.
Image quality
The combination of a great lens and large -- for its class -- sensor yield extremely good photo quality. JPEG images look clean as high as ISO 800 and good through ISO 1600; by ISO 3200 the JPEGs display noise reduction smearing. If you shoot raw, though, you can eke out more detail resolution as high as ISO 12800.
However, there isn't a lot of recoverable detail in the highlights and shadows of the raw files, which is a typical problem in this class. Shadow detail starts to disappear at ISO 800 and dark colors start to become indistinguishable from each other at around ISO 3200 and whites/light colors at around ISO 400. Also fairly typical.
Even in its default color settings, the LX100 delivers reasonably neutral results, at least up through ISO 1600. At ISO 3200 and above the white balance gets a little inconsistent, developing a slight red cast. However, most of these cameras have a pinkish cast, at least in the JPEGs, across all or part of their ISO sensitivity range.
Its 4K video is unsurprisingly great given that it uses the same imaging engine as the GH4. There are few artifacts, and the video is sharp with a reasonable dynamic range -- it looks better than HD even when viewed on a non-4K display. At midrange ISO sensitivities (like ISO 3200), there's none of the sparkling caused by noise in motion, though like many cameras it clips the tonal range. The audio sounds fine, but this isn't the camera to buy if you're picky about sound, as there's no support for an external mic and the lens operation is a bit noisy. Keep in mind that 4K recording does require aUHS-II SD card.
There's a also a 4K Photo mode that allows you to pull decent 8MP stills from video (it differs from standard recording because it increases the frame rate off the sensor so that it can stop action better, but it also increases battery drain). It seems like an effective way to shoot action when continuous-shooting is difficult.
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