A few weeks ago (2009/9/28) Panasonic released a new firmware update for the fantastic LX3 camera. It all looked so promising.

Version 2.0 promised the following updates

1. Improved auto white balance performance.
2. Auto Focus speed-up.
3. Recording function with an aspect ratio of 1:1 has been added.
4. A white balance (WB) bracket function has been added.
5. [HIGH DYNAMIC] has been added to scene mode.
6. [LENS RESUME] has been added to the [SETUP] menu.
7. [MENU RESUME] has been added to the [SETUP] menu.
8. The exposure compensation and the auto bracket compensation can now be set up to ±3EV.
9. Position of the guide line can now be set.
10. It is now possible to display the highlights in playback mode.
11. It is now possible to record the user’s name in the picture.
12. Digital red-eye removal has been modified.
13. Items saved in the custom set have changed.

This firmware update was then withdrawn from the Firmware update service 24 hours after release and the following notice was put up.

We’d like to apologize for the inconvenience as the download had been suspended in order to make sure the reliability of the firmware, more specifically in case of the use of some newly added functions in Ver.2.0 on Custom shooting mode.

Fair enough. We were then told that a new release would be available some time around the 20th of October. That’s always a bad sign, putting your developers under pressure to release a stable release in time. It’s also not entirely useful to the consumer to give a vague release date… you may as well not give one at all unless it’s definite. In the meantime those who had updated to v2.0 were told to reset the camera to factory settings and all would be OK.

Eventually on 009/10/21 the new v2.1 Firmware was released. In the release notes only one fix was outlined;

1. Correction of custom mode.

Great! Finally I can use the 1×1 crop mode with RAW. Wrong. Turns out the RAW is still problematic and won’t open in Photoshop CS4 or Lightroom 2.5 and that’s with the latest release of Adobe Camera RAW. Useless. I shot a days worth and came back to find the RAW files completely unusable. I was using 1×1 Dynamic B&W RAW. I will try other combinations but at the moment it seems as though the problem is restricted to the 1×1 crop setting.

I thought that perhaps it was just me and that something might have gone wrong with the update so I posted on the Flickr group to see if anyone else had similar problems. It turns out I’m not the only one… but as far as I can see Panasonic have not acknowledged the issue.

The frustrating thing about all this is v2.1 was meant to be a fix for v2.0 but is in actually bugged itself. I have to wonder what sort of testing firmware releases go through for this kind of thing to slip through the net.

I think my annoyance is only compounded by the fact that as I am using a Mac Apple don’t support the LX3 RAW file. So you can’t view raw files in iPhoto. I just feel like there are too many obstacles with this camera to truly get 100% out of it if I’m using it on a Mac. Sure, two minor problems would be no big deal. But these are two issues that relate to integral parts of my work flow, and I’m sure many others feel the same way. There are literally thousands of posts on the internet about OSX’s lack of native support for the LX3 camera over the course of the past 12 months and still there’s no breakthrough.

Am I being overly harsh?