Inflationary Pressure

We've had some moderately large household expenses lately, and the market took a dive this week, so to console myself I plucked a hair from the dog and ordered a new carry-anywhere cam, a Panasonic LX-1. Why so, especially since the LX-1 (sold as the D-LUX 2 by Leica) has been generally dissed for having a sensor so noisy it makes ISO 400 "unusable"?

It's part of my ongoing quest for good digital B&W. There's noise and then there's noise. One man's noise is another man's music. Think how Tri-X pushed to 1000 would rank if you judged it with the noise meter commonly used in reviews of digicams. True, Tri-X isn't blotchy and uneven, as so many noisy digicams are. But I downloaded a couple of the LX-1, ISO 400 sample photos at dpreview.com, put them through a few hoops, and found the images admirably sharp and contrasty (that Leica lens). The noise can be managed, at least in black and white. The technique that currently pleases me most involves uprezzing by a linear factor of three, sharpening lightly, applying minimal "poster edges," then rezzing back to the original size. The result isn't Tri-X, it's true, but after all it would be infra dig to use digital capture as ersatz film.

I've had a number of walking-around cams since 1998. My first was the splendid Ricoh GR-1, which I'd still be using if I weren't trying to wean myself away from silver. Then came a Canon S50, terrific except for shutter lag – but that lag just about drove me crazy when I used the cam to photograph the anti-Bush march at the Republican convention two years back. I tried replacing it with a Ricoh Caplio (still under Ricoh's spell), but the Caplio was no GR-1 – images were inferior to the Canon's. Next came a Fuji E550, which was fiddly but excellent. I used it till last winter, when I tried replacing it with a Canon S80. The S80 is in many ways a marvel, but it has no RAW mode and the JPEG's are, I think, marred by too much noise reduction, which smears details and leaves lots of simple geometry in the borders of same-color areas.

For noiseless photography, with the slick, unctuous look I've come to expect from Canon, I have the 20D. What I want is not a little 20D but something different, something that gives me a result closer to the look I got with my Contax G and high-speed B&W film. (I'd pretty much settled on Neopan 400 pushed to 1600.) Whether the LX-1 fills the bill I can't say till I try it. If it does I'll sell the S80 and press on.