Leica D-Lux 8 Review | Photography Blog

Leica’s new offering is still one of the very few premium compacts to feature a zoom lens, though, the only other contender being the Sony Cyber-shot RX100 VII, which has a smaller 1-inch sensor with 20 megapixels and a 24-200mm lens.

You could also consider the Ricoh GR III, which has a 24.23 megapixel APS-C sensor paired with a 28mm F2.8 lens, but is 5 years old now.

So now we’ve identified its main rivals, let’s take a detailed look at the new D-Lux 8 and the changes that Leica have made.

At first glance from the front, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart. No longer available in silver, the black version has a leatherette finish to aid grip in the absence of a proper handgrip.

The lens is the same, offering an equivalent reach of a wide-angle 24-75mm in 35mm film terms. The maximum lens aperture is an impressively fast/bright f/1.7, with the ability to adjust this manually via a lens ring that offers incremental settings up to f/16. Or, of course, you can just leave the selection up to the camera and shoot on automatic, which has its own dedicated setting too.

The sensor is the same 21.77 megapixel multi-aspect Micro Four Thirds variant used on the D-Lux 7. The camera then crops the image to allow for the multi-aspect shooting (3:2, 16:9, 1:1 and 4:3), set by a switch on the lens barrel, which results in a highest resolution of 17 megapixels in the 4:3 mode.

Sandwiched in-between the aperture ring and aspect ratio switch is a slim manual focus ring, with a simple sliding scale shown on the LCD screen to denote the focusing distance and peaking on-board to help determine critical focus. The MF / AF/Macro / AF switch on the underside of the lens barrel allows you to quickly switch between these three focus modes.

Switching to the top of the camera starts to reveal some of the changes that Leica have made to the user interface.

The flash hotshoe and shutter speed dial are still present and correct, but the On/Off switch has been removed and replaced by an On/Off button, the exposure compensation dial is now an unmarked command dial with a custom button at its centre, and the “4K” and “A” buttons have disappeared.

The command dial controls either the Exposure Compensation, ISO, Off or Auto, depending on which shooting mode you’re using, while the custom button can be configured to one of 38 different settings simply by holding it down for a couple of seconds, as can the two unmarked buttons positioned below the shutter speed dial and the button in the middle of the four-way controller on the rear of the camera.

Which is where Leica have clearly taken inspiration from the Q3 mirrorless camera for the new D-Lux 8, which only has 6 external controls compared with 10 on its predecessor. What’s more, the majority of them are unmarked with the exception of the Play and Menu buttons, indicating that they can be customised to suit your particular way of working.

So if you don’t like the fact that the top two buttons toggle between the EVF/LCD and between the photo and video modes respectively, or the middle button in the navigation wheel toggles between the info levels, you’re free to change them as you wish.

The reduction in the number of external controls undoubtedly makes for a more refined, simpler interface, but it does inevitably lead to a greater reliance on the menu system if you want to access anything outside of the core exposure controls.

Thankfully the D-Lux 8 has an excellent menu system, with one press of the Menu button opening a clear settings panel with touchscreen access to the camera’s most important options for either Photo or Video modes, and a further press of the either the Menu button or the three-line icon accessing the full five page, 29 option Main Menu.

While some fans of the D-Lux/LX100 series will likely lament the reduced number of external controls, for many the more refined interface will prove more beneficial, especially as the camera provides quick, fully configurable access to all of the key photographic settings.

In addition to the new, svelte control layout, we’re also impressed by the OLED viewfinder that Leica have incorporated on the D-Lux 8.

While it offers slightly less resolution than the D-Lux 8, the move from a field-sequential display to an OLED unit provides a more pleasant viewing experience, especially as it also offers a slightly higher magnification of 0.74x and a larger 4:3 aspect ratio (0.7x and 16:9 on the D-Lux 7).

The rear LCD screen has also been significantly improved, offering a 48% increase in resolution thanks to the move from a 1.24M dot panel to a 1.84M dot panel, again something that is noticeable when comparing the two models side-by-side.

The other external change is the shutter button is now threaded to accept a mechanical cable release, again mimicking the recent Leica Q3.

There are several other improvements that are fairly minor, but nevertheless still welcome. This is the first D-Lux camera to output more universal DNG files, rather than the Panasonic RW2 format of its predecessor, and it’s also the first D-Lux camera to feature faster UHS-II SD card support.

There’s also a new USB-C connection, which is preferable in 2024 to the micro-USB port found on the Dlux 7, and Bluetooth now supports the latest 5.0 LE standard.

You can easily transfer your images and also control the camera remotely via the free Leica Fotos app, which, amongst other functions, allows remote setting of the shutter speed and aperture. The app also allows you to send your still images, RAW and video files to a paired mobile device.

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Image Quality

All of the sample images in this review were taken using the 17 megapixel Fine JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 6Mb.

The Leica D-Lux 8 produced images of excellent quality during the review period. It produces noise-free images at ISO 100 to 3200, with limited noise starting to appear at ISO 6400. ISO 12500 exhibits quite visible noise and loss of fine detail, and the fastest setting of ISO 25000 is even noisier, but still usable for small prints and web use.

The Leica D-Lux 8 dealt extremely well with chromatic aberrations, with limited purple fringing effects appearing only in high contrast situations. The built-in anti-shake system works very well when hand-holding the camera in low-light conditions or when using the telephoto end of the zoom range.

Macro performance is very good, allowing you to focus as close as 3cm away from the subject (although it’s difficult to get the lighting correct at such a close distance). The Film Styles allow you to quickly and easily customise the look of the camera’s JPEG images.

Noise

There are 9 ISO settings available on the Leica D-Lux 8 . Here are some 100% crops which show the noise levels for each ISO setting for both JPEG and RAW file formats.