Even at this low-ish sensitivity setting the Canon and Nikon have surrendered most, if not all, their resolution advantage. The LX3's output still closely resembles its base ISO quality with a touch more noise and some of the softness that noise reduction tends to bring beginning to creep in. However, the other two cameras are clearly having to resort to extreme measures with much more prominent noise appearing in the Nikon's image and fairly heavy noise reduction smearing the G10's output (and with sharpening artifacts showing an attempt to crisp the image back up). At a consistent output size, the results are likely to look identical but that begs the question - what do those extra megapixels achieve?

It was never going to be pretty but there are some pretty unpleasant results here. The G10's noise reduction has obliterated most of the detail in its image and hammered the contrast too. For fans of watercolors, perhaps? The Nikon has made an even bigger mess of things, peppering its image with white speckling and producing unsightly yellow blotches across other parts of the image.

And, although the LX3's image isn't exactly a paragon of image quality, it's hard not to conclude that it's producing the best results at this point. There's all the noise and noise reduction degradation you'd expect of a compact camera working at this sensitivity setting, but it's balanced the two well and produced a good compromise result, retaining some detail and producing the most accurate color of the three.