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September 15, 2006 –* A year after the D-Lux 2’s release, Leica announced the D-Lux 3 today. This compact digital camera upgrades its resolution to 10 megapixels and makes a few changes to components, like including a larger LCD screen that is now 16:9 formatted.
The new Leica D-Lux 3 shares many traits with its elder sibling, including the Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 4x optical zoom lens that measures from 28-112 mm. The cameras’ lenses come with optical image stabilization. Like the D-Lux 2, the third generation camera can shoot RAW and JPEG files in three formats – 16:9, 4:3, and 3:2. Many of the camera’s modes and settings are the same too: the 80-400 ISO range and the manual and priority modes, to name a few.
The Leica D-Lux 3 has very similar measurements to its predecessor at 4.16 x 2.3 x 1.01 inches. The back of the camera has a widescreen-formatted 2.8-inch LCD monitor. While it is bigger than the one on the D-Lux 2, it has the same 207,000 pixels of resolution. The camera body is built from aluminum and comes in silver and black colors.
The widescreen-minded D-Lux 3 can also record videos at high-resolution for 16:9-formatted televisions. While the older D-Lux 2 could record 848 x 480 pixels for movies, the Leica D-Lux 3 can do that at 30 frames per second and record at an even higher resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a frame rate of 15 fps.
The Leica D-Lux 3 makes a few more improvements on the 8.3-megapixel D-Lux 2. The new version boasts faster image processing and comes with a 64 MB SD card rather than a 32 MB card.
"The Leica D-Lux 3 is a compact camera with controls like those of a professional camera and this gives it a particularly wide creative scope," said Marius Eschweiler, product manager for digital compact cameras at Leica Camera, in today’s press release.
Part of the "wide creative scope" Eschweiler speaks of includes the bird-watching hobbyists. The Leica D-Lux 3 can hook up to a Leica Televid scope with an optional adapter to snap high-resolution shots of small subjects at far distances.