My dream camera: LX3 but four stops better

Cube, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Lights, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

The title is a bit of a joke, but there is some background to it. During the Finnish winter nights (which currently starts at about 3 pm) I need to use a mini-tripod because the exposures are typically in the range of 4 to 8 seconds (ISO 100 and f/2.0).

To be able to shoot handheld the camera should be able to provide 1/4 to 1/8 second exposures with quality similar to LX3 at ISO 100. Thus, four steps improvement needed: (almost) noise-free ISO 1600.

Panasonic GF1 with the 20 mm f/1.7 pancake lens comes close, but with a problem: the lens does not offer image stabilization (and there is none in the body). Thus, you would need to shoot ISO 3200 and 1/20 second with this camera. And ISO 3200 is not noise-free, at least based on the sample images available.

So, for now, I need to use some kind of support for taking photographs with the LX3. I'm not willing to carry a normal tripod, so a mini-tripod has to do the job, together with whatever local things are available: poles, rocks, heaps of snow etc. And this limits the opporturnities for photography quite a lot. On the other hand, you need to develop ways of coping with this, and that is in itself a quite interesting way of looking at the world.