Leica Announces Compact D-Lux 3

Written by Emily Raymond

Updated October 2, 2014

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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.