http://www.seriouscompacts.com/2008/10/panasonic-lx3-lens-distortion.html
The lens of the Panasonic LX3 camera (I own one) produces quite a lot of distortion at the wide end (24mm), which is transparently corrected in by both the in-camera software, and by the supplied raw conversion software. Panasonic isn’t very upfront about this. (A print ad claims the lens produces “minimal distortion.”) I think correcting distortion in software is sensible and justifiable from a technical point of view (it’s the results that matter), and will probably become more common in future, but the deceptive advertising has got to go! (I’m guessing the reason the negative has always been a miniature version of the final image in the past (sometimes this has involved quite a lot of effort and expense) is that it was too difficult to correct distortion at the point in time when prints were made—you’d need to know exactly which lens was used to take the picture, and be able to correct it optically. But since everything is digital now, and photos are “processed” on-camera the moment they’re taken, these things are less of an issue, and funky lens designs will become more common, at least on compact cameras.)