Lumix DMC-LX3

Every once in a while I find myself taking a look around the market regarding gadgets, PC components or alike. Two weeks ago, for example, I was tasked to find a new digital camera for someone. Yep, the term "digital camera" is quite wide and given that I had no restriction on the price nor the brand mark I almost didn't know where to start looking. I searched for prices, specs and reviews on everything from light weight compact toys to full blown SLR behemoths. To make a long story shorter, I ended up buying a camera myself.

My girlfriend and me decided to buy the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z10 camera about four years ago because it was using some kind of fake SLR view finder. This so called "Switch Finder" allows to project the image on the LCD to the view finder which comes in handy if you're used to shoot photos like that or if the daylight makes the LCD unreadable. The rest of this camera's features were all good but none of them were that important either: 8x optical zoom, fast start up, use of normal AA batteries (we used to have bad experiences with proprietary ones) - all at the cost of quite a bulky device with rather low 3.2Mp. Most of the photos I've taken during the last years, including those found on my picasa gallery, were all shot with this camera.
Actually buying a new camera after all these years was something I really didn't expect because the Z10 worked (and still works) without any issues.



I've looked at plenty of new cameras and could narrow the results down quite well by discarding cameras with CCD chips which contain insane amounts of pixels on a small chip area. Thus I was looking at cameras with a chip size of 1/2.0" or bigger to have decent sensitivity and color saturation. Now I started discarding results of cameras which had still a too high density of pixels on their CCD chips which might result in image quality degrade as described on http://6mpixel.org, like the Ixus 980 IS of Canon with a 14.7Mp sensor on a size of just 1/1.7".

At this point I was left with the Sony Cybershot DSC-W300, the Pentax Optio S12, the Ricoh GX200 and, of course, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. I discarded the first two quite quickly because of their cheap plastic body and overall medium features.

Next was the optical system. Without doubt there are plenty of opinions out there about lenses and their qualities and I won't go into detail. The Leica F2.0 24mm DC Vario-Summicron lens however was what made me choose the Panasonic over the Sony device. In combination with the high sensitivity CCD chip it allows the user to shoot pictures in dark surrounding with much higher shutter speeds than any camera in that category resulting in sharper pictures with minimal noise. Additionally, its SLR-like wide angle and very constant sharpness allows for compositions not yet seen from compact cameras.




The only catch for me was the lack of a view finder as I was used to from the Z10 but this got resolved when I could try the LX3 in a local shop to see that LCDs evolved greatly during the last four years, especially in regards of brightness. Also, view finders usually bloat the cameras which, at least for me, is a high price to pay - especially if I can get used to live without them. Another slight disadvantage is the reletively small 2.5x optical zoom. This however is understandable considering the wide angle lense and the total size of the camera and zooming in more than 4x with my old camera resulted in blury pictures anyway, at least most of the times.



The LX3 comes up with some supposedly new and fancy user interface, but to be honest I can't comment much on that because nowadays every new camera naturally features far more functions than the Z10. Overall, the LX3 offers technology which is only found in SLR cameras so far - which is probably why it is targeted at the SLR photographer who needs a compact camera but doesn't want to miss out all the manual adjustment posibilities or the high image quality. On top of all the technical details though, I simply fell in love with the design of the LX3. It looks serious, not cheap, useful and without useless eye catching or modern properties - I think this is why I've got a weakness for Thinkpad notebooks, too.



Last but not least Panasonic offers a couple of accessories, like a wide angel converter, an external, optical view finder and various filters.

I did some field tests with the LX3, to see how it performs in low light situations. The results can be found here:

LX3 shots

Overclocking the Q6600

Woot! I'm running a Q6600 at 3.01Ghz. Although it's the old B3 stepping, it seems to run smoothly at around 55°C under full load thanks to water cooling.
I didn't have to increase the core voltage, so it should remain stable and hopefully won't die on me too soon.

To monitor the temperatures I use ksysguard as shown here. It's very powerful in that it allows you to choose a multitude of ways to display system information. I'm mainly using the signal plotter because one can assign several sources to one plotter cell - in this example I'm graphing idle, nice, system and user load of a CPU core in one cell. In the second row ksysguard plots the temperatures in a scale from 0 to 100°C. I could even monitor remote systems running ksysguardd (e.g. via ssh). The latter only depends on some general purpose libraries and tools which is well suited for servers where I don't want to install the complete set of kde packages.

Water cooling

After a considerable amount of work spent and several weeks of waiting, the water cooling for my PC is finally finished. All parts, except for the pump, are produced by Aqua Computer.

The preparation and modification of the case was finished in December last year.

But unfortunately, while mounting the 120cm radiator, I used screws which were too long, so I penetrated its hull. I mounted the system nonetheless, after all I still had the 240cm radiator.

After filling in the water the system ran perfectly, at least for one day. The second day the pump stopped functioning, probably because of the huge amount of air in the system. Aquacomputer were very friendly and repaired the pump. I also ordered a new 120cm radiator, a cooler for my 8800 GTX and some other accessories which I missed with the first order, e.g. a ball valve. I remounted everything, filled the tubes with water only to notice that the production of bubbles remain.
After some consideration, I decided to mount the equalising reservoir at the highest point of the case so that all bubbles collect there (second half of the following gallery). It was totally worth it because not only did the bubbles disappear. The pump was running much smoother because it used the water as a lubricant and any bit of air has a negative effect on its operation. Also, the temperatures of the CPU and GPU dropped, after all air is rather a heat isolator than a conductor.

The cooling works quite efficient as I've got around 47°C +/- 2°C on each of the four cores under full load (folding@home SMP). I could start overclocking a bit...

Excessive GPU heat

When I bought my VGA card back in April I decided to go with a specially cooled model of the evga ACS³ series. Because this series contains a special heatsink design, it can cope with higher GPU and VRAM clockings. The 8800GTX KO I bought contains a GPU clocked at 625MHz instead of 575MHz while the DDR3 memory is clocked at a juicy 2GHz instead of 1.35Ghz.

Now that it has been loyally pleasuring my visual needs up until now I started experiencing unexplainable crashes, especially while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is even more weird since Crysis was running smoothly. I basically tried everything: I installed XP, lowered the resolution and texture size, removed the game mods, installed all kinds of stable and beta drivers - all caused the game to freeze after 5 to 10 minutes followed by a BSOD after another 2 minutes which just told me that the graphics card was the root of it. I installed the same game on the PC of my girlfriend which happens to have almost the same VGA card (8800 GTS) and the same mainboard. Of course there it worked like a charm.
I finally found out that the card was massively overheating both while idling and under load (85C and 98C respectively) which is way too high, considering that I cleaned the dust off the fan regularly. Setting the fan manually to 100% didn't help but at least using an 18W/220V industrial fan remedied the situation but was unbearable noise-wise.

Frustrated and already sad about having to send it to RMA I carefully unscrewed the covering metal case of the board in a desperate move. What joyful sight that resulted in: The heatspreader was basically blocked by a wall of dust, making it impossible for the fan to send any air through that part:

Now everything's back to normal - except that my newly ordered mainboard turned out to be defective and waits to get replaced. No meddling with hardware until Christmas is over, sniff.