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Olympus xz 1 sensor11/5/2023 For now, there’s little we know about what the XZ-1 does to beef up the video. On paper, it suggests you’re not going to get the world’s best results at high speed and full resolution. Like most compacts the kind of HD recording they offer is of the 720p variety and at the 30fps frame rate as well. On the surface, both cameras are sporting the same video shooting credentials. Nothing significant missing on either plus the odd professional touch like bracketing. There’s AF tracking with an AF assist lamp, art modes for both stills and video and they each have multi-aspect modes depending on how you like your pictures cropped as well. There’s full auto to manual snapping with PSAM modes, and image stabilisation - Dual or Powered - however the companies wish to dress it up. They’re top end compacts and that’s just what they offer. When it’s all weighed up though, you’d have to mark both shooters equally highly. One will offer a filter that the other doesn’t have but perhaps come back with a shooting mode absent in the first. These cameras are not identical in the modes and features department. We know how useful and fun this from the same touch on Canon’s Powershot S90 and S95 and for that reason, we hand this category over to the XZ-1. But, where the newcomer gains points a-plenty though is by using the control ring around the lens as a function which the user can assign. There’s also the inclusion of the AF/AE lock on the Panasonic absent on the XZ-1. The main differences are that the LX5 features a dedicated jog wheel by the thumb instead of the one lower down and integrated into the nav buttons on the Olympus. Both have video buttons, built-in flash and a good button layout on the back. Fortunately - from our full review with the LX5 and first look at the XZ-1 - both have got it pretty much right and they’ve adopted very similar solutions. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding out that it’s misled you into changing your exposure or colour settings when they were right all along.Īt these form factors, it’s important to get usability right with so many functions and such little space on the camera bodies. What we will say for sure is that the display is a lot more important an area on a camera than many give it credit for. Now, on the one hand, the company may have decided that it wasn’t worth beefing up cameras with what it puts in proper AV equipment, but, on the other, perhaps what’s there is just far better tuned than anything Olympus can come up with. Our only slight reservation here is that Panasonic also happens to spend a rather large amount of its business selling TV panels. What’s more, OLED technology is less power hungry than LCD meaning that the XZ-1’s battery life should be better as well. The OLED should offer better and brighter colour representation and with 30 per cent more dots on the screen, there’ll also be that much more detail to be able to make out in your previews. At least not just yet.īoth the level of detail and the screen technology itself is certainly better on paper with the XZ-1 than the LX5. Both have chosen well by not over-cramming the surface with pixels and, although a larger sensor would have been nicer for better low light performance, you’re just not going to get that on a camera of this size. Whatever the case though, it remains that you can’t separate these two on grounds of the image sensor. The fact that the two companies both collaborated with Micro Four Thirds might even add some credence to the idea. One could be forgiven for thinking that these two high end compacts are actually using the very same sensors as one another. High sensitivity 1/1.63-inch CCD (10.1 MP) On spec though, one has to hand it to the Olympus. That said, the Leica DC Vario Summicron glass on the Panasonic is certainly no slouch and its not beyond the realm of possibility that it’ll just happen to give better results when it comes to testing. The bottom line is that you should get a better performance at low light conditions throughout the zoom range of the Olympus with a delightful bokeh (background blur effect) at the wider end. As it stands though, what sits atop the XZ-1 has both a marginally better zoom range but, more significantly, is incredibly fast all the way through the lens. Were it a straight fight, we’d probably go for Leica glassware over the admittedly tasty Zuiko optics, the latter with its roots in 1936 Olympus history.
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