I had the chance to play with the new Leica V-Lux 2 camera for few minutes in my local Leica SIS. The camera is lighter (520 g/18.34 oz) and is smaller than its predecessor, the V-Lux 1. The first thing that caught my attention was the swivel 16:9 LCD display (3.0″ TFT LCD, 460,000 pixels, 100% FOV) – it was way better than the LCD screens on the D-Lux 4 and M9 that I was able to compare it with, very bright and clear (even though the specs show that the D-Lux 4 has the same type of display but with 3:2 dimensions). I was not crazy about the EFV.
The ISO sensitivity did not change since the V-Lux 1- the max ISO is still 1600. Here are few samples at 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600 ISO (100% crop):
and three close-up shots – the minimum shooting distance is 0.4 in / 1 cm (wide angle):
Next is a short video illustrating autofocus and zooming during video recording – the V-Lux 2 has full AF and zoom (24x) capabilities while shooting video and both worked pretty well. The AF was fast enough and I could only hear a “click” when the focus was changing. The V-Lux 2 has also a new dedicated video button:
A small note on the video format – I did not have time to play with all the options, but by default the video was recorded in AVCHD MTS format and my Mac could not read the video files (.mts extension). You can still get around by using VLC media (read more on how to work with .mts files on a Mac here).
The unboxing video:
For more info on the V-Lux 2, visit Leica’s website.
