Panasonic includes their LUMIX Simple Viewer software with the LX2, and that lives up to the name. It is fine for basic downloading and sorting of photos, but it isn’t capable of anything more complex. ArcSoft PhotoImpression and ArcSoft PanoramaBuilder are also included.

Two ports connect the LX2 to the outside world: a power port and a combined USB and AV-out port. Both are located under the panel on the right side of the camera, out of the way. The camera can run in USB Mass Storage or PictBridge modes, but the AV cable is a bit of a disappointment: for a camera that proclaims its ability to take hi-res photos and video in 16:9 mode, it’s a big disappointment that the only video output is a low quality composite. We would have liked to have seen a higher quality component video or a digital HDMI port, but that’s nowhere to be seen.

The usual suspects are here: DPOF and PictBridge are supported for flagging images for printing and for connecting to a printer directly. Print orders can be created from the playback mode.

The battery is a small lithium-ion model that holds around 1150mAh of charge. Panasonic claims a battery life of around 300 shots, but we weren’t able to test this claim on the show floor. This battery life is improved from the LX1’s life of 240 shots.

A rather small 13MB of memory is built into the camera, with the primary storage method being SD or SDHC cards. A 2GB SD card will cost you about $50 these days, so it’s a good, cheap storage method to use.

O.I.S. – Panasonic refers to their optical image stabilization system as O.I.S. The system moves an element of the lens in response to movement caused by shaky hands, and it seems to be pretty effective in our limited tests so far. We will, however, have to do more testing before we draw any final conclusions on this.

Voice Memos – 5 second audio clips can be attached to photos, either at the time of shooting or later. This could be useful if you want to narrate who is in the photos. But keep in mind that you have to keep it very brief.