Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Panasonic LX5 build quality, Aperture Library - and other worries

I'm having some problems with the Panasonic LX5.

First problem is the zoom switch, which occasionally acts up so that the zoom gets stuck, in either direction. This is a nuisance, as not only it isn't possible to get precise zooming, also other functions of the camera don't work while the zoom switch is stuck.

The second problem is the jog wheel, which occasionally becomes unresponsive, and it takes several tries until a press or a turn of the wheel is registered.

And then the textured plastic of the handgrip is loose from one edge, as the glue which holds it to the body of the camera doesn't hold properly. Maybe putting some new glue there could fix this issue.

I didn't have similar problems with the LX3. Well, not until it died in a thunderstorm, after I had taken 203,318 photographs with it. I have taken less than a third of that many photographs with the LX5.

And not only is the LX5 acting up, I have problems with managing photographs, as Aperture started filling up the disk once again.

This time the reason wasn't orphaned files as happened previously. (I'm no longer deleting the Aperture project in which I import photographs, which was the culprit for orphaned files.) Now the Thumbnails folder was over 60 GB in size.

Well, I did the easy thing. First, Quit from Aperture. Then I deleted the Thumbnails folder from inside Aperture Library. When I started up Aperture again it regenerated the thumbnail files, but now less than 20 GB of disk was consumed by thumbnails of the 26,000 photographs I have in Aperture. This freed 40 GB of disk space.

Finally, as another kind of foolishness, Facebook is said to be buying Instagram for $1 Billion. It seems that software which crops photographs to the 1:1 (square) format is valuable indeed!

2 comments:

PB said...

How is the LX5?

I know this is a gear question, but....

If you could, what camera would you buy now? And why?

I presently use a Nikon P7000, I'm thinking of moving to a camera that (1) is a bit smaller and (2) opens a stop or more wider than the f/2.8 the P7000 does. The LX5 is an obvious option. Would you continue to recommend it?

Thanks!

Juha Haataja said...

@PB: I made today a posting in which I discussed the topic of LX5 vs P7000, maybe it helps.