Ah, Leica. The name alone conjures thoughts of street photography legends, countless masterpiece photos, studious engineers hand-assembling the most desirable cameras ever made. But not all Leicas are created equal. Take the Leica Digilux 1, for example—a camera that proves even the most respected brands can fall flat on their face.
I bought myself a Leica Digilux 1 a few months ago, and it’s been visually pleasing me from its perch on my desk ever since. As a design piece, as a desirable product created to look nice, the Digilux 1 succeeds. It’s a sweet looking little gadget that, in 2002, must have seemed futuristic and sharp, and more than twenty years later, its aesthetic is delightfully retro.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was finally time to shoot the thing, so I took it out for an afternoon with the family, and discovered quickly that, as a functional photographic tool, it’s sort of a piece of junk. The images it makes aren’t very good, not even up to the standard of some of the more exciting early digital point-and-shoots, like the Contax TVS Digital or that Minolta I bought when I was in college (and reviewed here last year).
Worse than its poor image quality, though, is its clunkiness. The Leica Digilux 1 just feels awful.
Leica Digilux 1 Specifications
- Camera Type: Digital point-and-shoot
- Sensor: 4 megapixel 1/1.76″ CCD
- Max Resolution: 2240 x 1680
- ISO: Auto, 100, 200, 400
- White Balance Presets: 6 (Custom WB available)
- Recording Format: Uncompressed TIFF; JPEG in fine and standard quality
- Lens: 33-100mm f/2-2.5
- Focus: Auto focus (contrast detect sensor, single, live view); manual focus
- Focus Range: 11.81″ to infinity (macro mode 2.36″)
- LCD Screen: 2.5″; 200,000 dot; Live View
- Shutter Speeds: 8 seconds – 1/1000 sec.
- Shooting Modes: PASM
- Flash: Built-in flash (4.5m range) with Auto, Red-Eye Auto, On, Red-Eye On, Red-Eye Slow Sync, Off, Slow Sync. External flash capable with hot shoe.
- Power: 1400 mAh lithium-ion battery
- Weight and Dimensions: 1.00 lb (455 g); 5 x 3.27 x 2.64″ (127 x 83 x67 mm)
- Additional Features: Continuous drive at 3.8 FPS; self-timer; exposure compensation +/- 2 EV; video mode; SD card storage (max 2GB);
What is the Digilux 1?
The Digilux 1 was the first digital point-and-shoot camera to come from Leica’s long-running partnership with Panasonic. Back then, Leica said that they developed the camera’s optics, with Panasonic handling the rest. This, so they said, allowed the two brands to lean on each others’ strengths to produce a camera better than either company could make on their own. This arrangement continues to this day, with Leica taking many a Panasonic camera and selling them (admittedly with minor differences) under their own name (see Panasonic’s Lumix and LX cameras).
The Digilux 1 was first designed and released in 2002, and shares much of its design with the Panasonic DMC-LC5. It’s a 4 megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera with a relatively speedy Leica DC Vario-Summicron 7-21mm f/2-2.5 Aspherical lens, tactile switches to operate the usual mix of shooting, focus, and metering modes, and a body made of magnesium alloy. It has an optical viewfinder, an LCD display on the back (with live view capability), a built-in flash, a nice information display on the top of the body, and it says “Leica” on it in seven different places. That’s a lot of German branding for a camera made in Japan.
Visually, it’s a great looking piece of technology. With an immense and bulky persona, it truly looks like no other digital camera from the past or present. It’s more like the digital equivalent of some Argus brick from the 1930s than a sleek and sophisticated design from 2002. This is, after all, what originally attracted me to it many months ago.
In the hands, however, the Digilux feels confused.
It’s overlarge for a point-and-shoot digital camera, even by the bloated electronic standards of its own era, and heavy. It’s also a crime against ergonomics. It has no grip, and its surfaces are slippery and smooth. The dials, knobs, levers, and switches feel cheap and flimsy, being made of plastic, and they actuate with all the precision of a half-cooked rigatoni. Despite the red dot on the front, which proudly displays the Leica script, the camera feels less like the pinnacle of camera culture and more like something we’d find under a greasy pack of fries at the bottom of a Happy Meal.
Nostalgia for Pain
The menu system is an archaeological dig of poor design choices, and the physical controls are maddeningly unresponsive, the viewfinder is a cruel joke, showing literally zero information (though it does have a diopter!). In its place we can use live view on the rear LCD. Except that the LCD is abysmal, being of low contrast, low visibility, and low responsiveness. Leica packaged this camera with a barn-door style LCD shroud, presumably to shade it from the sun and make it more usable. My camera didn’t have one, and if it did, I might have just left the screen covered at all times.
Adjusting settings takes more time than convincing your friends that the Digilux 1 is a “real Leica.” Want to change ISO, or set resolution, or white balance? Hope you brought snacks, because you’ll need to dig through a glacial menu and decipher icons that look like hieroglyphs.
It’s just slow. And bad. Nothing is intuitive. Nothing is fun!
The Digilux 1 sports a 4-megapixel CCD sensor, and while I’d love to tell you that megapixels aren’t everything (because they aren’t), image quality here is very bad. Pictures are riddled with noise even at base ISO, dynamic range is virtually nonexistent, and colors look like they were run through an Instagram filter circa 2011. Highlights? Blown. Shadows? Crushed. Details? What details?
The camera’s relatively large minimum aperture of f/8, coupled with its fastest shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, results in plenty of over-exposure problems on sunny days, so that almost all of my images in these conditions had to have their highlights heavily reined in. A neutral density filter would help, but who wants to carry one of those around?
My sample images in this article were all heavily post-processed, the only way to consider them remotely usable. In most cases, these shots were absolutely atrocious, and this was after I’d spent far too long meticulously adjusting exposure compensation, aperture, and fiddled endlessly with AE lock during picture-taking. Every shot took about five times as long as it would with any other digicam I’ve used from the Digilux 1’s era.
It’s all just weirdly, surprisingly, irredeemably bad.
Want to take a photo of something moving? Too bad. The Digilux 1’s autofocus is so slow it could be beaten in a footrace by a tortoise with a limp. When the camera debuted, Leica boasted that it had the shortest shutter lag in a digital point and shoot. That may have been true, but it’s like saying the Titanic had the shortest stopping distance of any cruise ship. The startup time is long enough to read a Tolstoy novel. Forget about shooting anything spontaneous; this camera demands patience, planning, and a tolerance for frustration.
Oh, and the battery life? Abysmal. You’ll spend more time charging this thing than using it.
A Silver Lining?
Leica/Panasonic did manage to shove a decent lens onto this thing. The Leica DC Vario-Summicron 7-21mm f/2-2.5 ASPH zoom lens (33-100mm equivalent) is fast in low light, versatile, and sharp, supposedly. The optical zoom is capable of… zooming… to 3x. That’s a lot of zooming.
The lens looks nice, and its big, and it gives the impression that it’ll make nice pictures. Did it? I don’t know. Look at the sample images. Frankly, I think they’re not good enough to justify the painful experience of using this chunky Fisher-Price toy camera, nor the inflated price tag which comes with that Leica badge.
Final Thoughts
One question that people have asked me over and over during my ten years of writing about cameras, is “Why?”
Why use a dedicated camera when smart phone cameras are so good? Why use a film camera when digital cameras are so good? Why use an old camera when new cameras exist?
The answer has always been the same. Because they feel nice to use. Taking pictures with a dedicated camera feels better than taking pictures with a phone, just as taking pictures with an old camera, or a film camera often feels better than taking pictures with a new or digital camera. It’s as simple as that.
The Leica Digilux 1 does not feel good. It’s slow, clunky, and produces images that are outclassed by (quite literally) every other camera I’ve ever used. There is simply no upside. Using it feels like a punishment. Especially when we consider the fact that there are twenty-years’ worth of vintage digital point-and-shoot cameras we could choose to buy today. There’s no reason to buy this particular Leica when so many other excellent Leicas exist (not to mention all the other vintage digicams from a dozen other camera makers, most of which cost far less than this pig).
Should you buy a Digilux 1? If you’re a Leica completionist, a collector of nice looking old technology, or you have a perverse desire to own one of the worst digital cameras ever made, sure! It really is a gorgeous little thing, an interesting object that looks neat on a shelf. But if you’re interested in making pictures with a camera that makes the process enjoyable, save your money—or better yet, spend it on something that will actually make you enjoy photography. Because life’s too short to spend more than one afternoon of it holding a Leica Digilux 1.
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With these subjects in the viewfinder it is certainly fun even with this camera…
Greetings, Andy