I’ve taken the liberty of making NoiseNinja noise profiles for the Lumix LX3. Here are the setup details:

• Tripod (anti-shake turned off)
• f/4.0
• Telephoto to minimize barrel distortion
• In-camera Noise Reduction set to -2 (lowest)
• Everything else was set to the defaults.
• 7 ISO settings (80, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200)
• 4 MP variations - each with 3 individual aspect ratios.
  • RAW (approx 10MP)
    • 4:3 - 10MP
    • 3:2 - 9.5MP
    • 16:9 - 9MP
  • JPG - maximum resolution (same as RAW)
    • 4:3 - 10MP
    • 3:2 - 9.5MP
    • 16:9 - 9MP
  • JPG - next biggest resolution (approx 6MP)
    • 4:3 - 7MP
    • 3:2 - 6.5MP
    • 16:9 - 6MP
  • JPG - biggest possible resolution which allows maximum digital zoom (approx 3MP)
    • 4:3 - 3MP
    • 3:2 - 3MP
    • 16:9 - 2.5MP

So that’s 7 ISO increments available to each of the 3 aspect ratios; Which in turn, gives us 21 profiles for each of the 4 megapixel choices I’ve profiled. That’s a total of 84 profiles! Download links for the profiles are available at the end of the post.

Why only these four MP ranges?

I decided to profile those 4 (out of the myriad of choices) because, for one thing, as you can see from the listing above, each and every aspect ratio has a different set of MP counts, it’d take forever to sort them all out.

Secondly, the only practical reason one would cut back on the res, aside from saving disk space, is to be able to use the Extended Optical Zoom (EZ) or get more Digital Zoom mileage.

Extended Optical Zoom (EZ)

EZ is basically a marketing gimmick, but it has practical uses. It’s really just compensating the frame by cropping (the same way non full-frame DSLRs have a multiplier effect). But unlike digital zoom, the image is not interpolated¹ - so technically it still is an optical zoom. With EZ, you can increase the default 2.5x to as much as 4.5x without any quality loss.

So going back to the issue, RAW/full JPG are obviously the normal settings I’d shoot in, and EZ is unavailable in both of these settings - which is why I included the other resolutions.

Digital Zoom

This is what you should avoid like the plague, however I noticed with the Lumix, there are [digital] zoom ranges that can still be perfectly acceptable if used judiciously - which is why digital zoom as become a factor in my noise profiling choices.

Digital zoom is only unavailable in RAW, but for those resolutions that it does support, its “multiplier” increases dramatically as you cut back. On the larger settings, you have 10x minimum. On 3MP and lower, you have up to 18x

Again, not that I’d ever use it, but it’s nice to know it’s available if you really need it.

Given those conditions, I just simply chose RAW, biggest JPG (normal usage), next biggest JPG (for EZ), and the largest possible MP that will give the largest maximum digital zoom (which happens to be in the 3MP range) as my 4 MP counts.

Downloads

• Panasonic_Lumix_LX3_jpg_raw.zip (RAW)
• Panasonic_Lumix_LX3_jpg_big.zip (JPG - maximum resolution)
• Panasonic_Lumix_LX3_jpg_medium.zip (JPG - next biggest resolution)
• Panasonic_Lumix_LX3_jpg_small.zip (JPG - biggest possible resolution which allows maximum digital zoom)