Leica Digilux 2

Well, having come from a degree-level background in Photographic design (when film was the ONLY choice), I have been amazed on a personal level as to the unrelenting march of digital imagery. What can I say, the Leica Digilux 2 camera is a work of Art, it is a choice of the heart. Emotion. Admiration. Perhaps a little idolatry if you like. I could go on about size of pixels, colour balance and get technical, but that would be just statistics, they're not relevant here (IMHO). This camera won 2004's DIMA award for best camera in it's class. This camera feels like an analogue instrument apart from the slight gripe that so many have of the display (viewfinder and external) being digitally rendered, rather than a 'true' SLR experience, the times I would agree are when light is low, and there is no assist to focus... but you always have full manual focus using the beautifully and perfectly oiled rings of which aperture and zoom are the others sharing the lens.

There is never going to be dust problems on the sensor as the lens is fixed. The camera shoots in 'RAW'(the digital negative) and 'JPEG'(in-camera processed) formats. When choosing RAW, the camera renders you an equivalent processed JPEG image too, so this helps for speedy review. Also there is the choice of 'HD' format of picture size, for playing on your nice new plasma screen!

Yes there is also the issue of price - Mine was bought from Singapore by my wife, it's worth every penny. An ingenious feature is the flash - this has two settings, normal straight forwards and also bounce flash, which works tremendously well, especially for portraiture. Panasonic made the sensor and electronics inside and their equivalent camera is the DMC-LC1 which you might find at a more economical price. No doubt there are cameras with higher quality in terms of detail (it being 5MP), but I think you are limited by your optics, they come second to none on this class of camera.