VINTAGE DIGITAL-LEICA DIGILUX 1

I don't have much patience with most photography related blogs/websites and the army of instant, highly opinionated "experts" on the internet but one I really do appreciate is by globetrotting , highly acclaimed Danish photographer ,Thorsten Overgaard .See THORSTEN OVERGAARD .
He takes superb photos,mainly portraits of famous people, and then writes about how he made them . He is a big Leica fan and I appreciate the fact that he still often uses a Digilux 2 camera which most "experts" would dismiss as an outdated clunker.
Reading his blog recently prompted me to take down from my museum shelf the Leica Digilux 1 I purchased s/h from my Leica/Lotus/Jaguar expert and friend Roger Putnam back in 2004 .
 Now the Digilux 1 was introduced in 2002 and is a big,weird, clunky camera with ugly retro styling and appalling control layout .

The period 2002 to 2007 was the period of really rapid advances in digital camera technology so even when I bought the Digilux 1 in 2004 it was seriously out of date in terms of sensor sensitivity etc and by 2006 I felt that I should trade up to the then newly released Canon G7 so I moved it to my museum shelf where it has stayed neglected for the past 5 years.
By today's standards the Digilux 1 is a total anachronism -the highest ISO is 200 and the sensor gets really noisy at ISO above100 .It shoots JPEGS and TIFF-no RAW as such and the shutter release delay is very long and it is only 4 mp--less than a modest smartphone nowadays.
But it has a  Leica F2.0 Summicron zoom lens equivalent to 33mm to 100 mm and a viewfinder and a manual focussing ring around the lens .And it takes beautiful photos with that mellow,clear "Leica" look.
I spent a few hours trying to get any one of the spare three batteries for the camera to accept a charge and succeeded eventually with just one of them. Then to my surprise when I put it into the camera it booted up .I took the two photos ,of Julia and Phoebe-the Himalayan ,with it over the holiday weekend.The AWB seems to be a little askew so I had to do a white balance adjustment in LR but otherwise these are straight TIFF files out of the camera .Just remember this is a 9 year old 4 mp camera .

When I was actively using the Digilux 1 I took it on a number of trips overseas although at that time I still thought of my Leica M6 as my main camera . One trip was to Shanghai in 2004 and below are four photos from that trip . SD cards were still very small capacity at that time ( the camera came with a tiny 64 mp card) so I shot small JPEG files to ensure that I had enough memory for the trip .

 Now that I have revived the Digilux 1 I may be tempted to use it from time to time and as I do so I will reflect on whether many of the digital camera "advances" of the last 9 years are in fact just marketing gimmicks designed to tempt the vast army of pixel peepers anxious to have the latest and greatest .