Panasonic LX7 Performance

Excellent autofocus, shutter lag and burst speeds, though slow startup and buffer clearing.

Slow startup time, though shutdown is not bad. Buffer clearing is sluggish even with a very fast card. The Panasonic LX7 does not appear to be UHS-I compliant so it doesn't take advantage of the faster bus interface mode UHS cards offer.

Mode switching is pretty fast, though displaying a previously captured image is a bit slow.

Full autofocus shutter response is very fast for a compact, at 0.24s using 1-area center AF, and 0.23s using 23-area AF mode. The Quick AF option made little difference in our tests. As expected, enabling the flash did add some delay for the preflash metering, resulting in 0.45s lag. Manual focus wasn't any faster than autofocus, surprisingly, at 0.26s. "Prefocusing" the camera by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure results in a lag time of only 0.010s, very fast.

Shot-to-shot cycle times are good, at 0.77s for LF JPEGs, 0.75s for RAW and 0.79s for RAW+JPEG.

The Lumix LX7 offers very fast continuous modes. The fastest full resolution burst mode is rated at 11 frames per second for 12 frames, and that's what we measured. Focus, exposure and white balance are locked at the first frame, though. The fastest rate with autofocus, exposure and white balance is 5 frames per second, however we didn't test that mode. We also didn't test the 40 and 60 fps modes which capture lower resolution images (5 and 2 megapixels respectively).

Buffer depths are good, set a 12 frames in the 11 fps mode. Lower speed burst modes (5 and 2 fps) claim up to 100 frame bursts. Buffer clearing is quite slow, though, taking 7 seconds after a burst of 12 JPEGs, 20 seconds after 12 RAWs and 32 seconds after RAW+JPEG. As mentioned previously, the Panasonic LX7 does not appear to take advantage of faster UHS-I cards.

Flash recycle after a full-power discharge is good, at 3.1 seconds.

Connected to a computer or printer with USB 2.0, download speeds pretty good.

Bottom line, the Panasonic LX7's performance is generally very fast, with a few slow areas. Startup is slow, autofocus speeds and shutter lag are faster than average, burst modes are very fast, but buffer clearing is slow.

Battery Life
About average battery life for a lithium-ion design.

The Panasonic LX7 uses a custom rechargeable lithium-ion battery for power, and ships with a charger. Battery life isn't as good as the LX5 which managed 400 shots per change, but fairly typical for its class these days. We recommend you pick up a spare battery and keep it freshly charged and on-hand for extended outings.

The table above shows the number of shots the camera is capable of (on a fully-charged rechargeable battery as appropriate), based on CIPA battery-life and/or manufacturer standard test conditions.

(Interested readers can find an English translation of the CIPA DC-002 standards document here. (180K PDF document))