More sensor: Increasing the number of pixels in a digital camera's sensor without increasing the sensor's size is an underhanded act designed to sell more cameras, and in that regard, Panasonic is as guilty as any compact camera maker. But the Japanese electronics giant is earning early points for parole with its latest compact digital camera.

The DMC-LX3, which will be added to its upmarket Lumix LX series in August, comes equipped with a larger-than-usual sensor — a 1/1.63-inch CCD. Rather than (mostly for marketing reasons) blindly upping the number of pixels on the sensor, Panasonic has kept the LX3 to the 10.1-megapixel quota of its predecessor, the LX2.

A bigger sensor that has the same number of pixels should make for better image quality. This is because the pixels on a digital sensor are like dots of color. The closer that pixels are to each other, the greater the chance they will interfere with each other. So, you might have a red dot of color mixing with a blue one, creating a color that was never meant to be there, a digital picture defect known as "noise." Giving the pixels more room to reside is no guarantee of a good picture, but it helps. The problem has been that the average camera consumer has been market-conditioned to judge a compact camera's quality chiefly by its megapixel number — the higher the number, the better the pictures, right?