I never quite understood Leica. The quality of their products is undoubtedly extremely high, I won't try to deny that and they deserve credit for decades of excellence in the field.
But as the owner of a Voigtländer R4A coupled with a Nokton 35mm f/1.4 (bought for a total of $1200, which was quite the investment for me) I can't help but be amazed by how much it would have cost me to buy the Leica equivalent (5 times that amount). It's quite obvious looking at the results that Leica does not offer that superior a result for that hefty price (and even though I know that it's a tad simplistic to reason in those terms, it certainly wouldn't have bought me 5 times the quality).
Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value. Hats off to them for reaching that lucrative niche market.
If I were wealthy (let us say the 1%) I would probably pay 10 times the price for double the quality, because at that level the value of money is not that great because one is oversupplied with it.
exactly, there are scenarios in which even very small improvements in quality of a product will be worth a great increase in price to the target market.
another situation would be a serious hobbyist, that is to say taking photos is their main enjoyment away from work. They might be willing to spend a lot more even with small benefit.
While I understand the sentiment, the thing is you do NOT get twice the Bessa's quality when purchasing a Leica camera. Hard to quantify, but it's probably more in the 1.2x range.
Yes, definitely not double. In fact, they aren't actually better than other top end competitors, they are just a bit different, which gives enough wiggle room for fanboys to claim something "magical".
That said, I really like the manual focus tabs on the lenses and the mechanism on the Q looks interesting. The Q is also newer so likely has a few improvements, but in general Leica has always been a bit behind the likes of Nikon, Sony, and Fuji in terms of electronics and firmware. Where they win is build quality.
Here in Asia Leica is sold in high end fashion malls, not in the photography equipment or electronics area of town. In fact in Japan there's a Leica counter in the men's fashion accessories area of Mitsukoshi Mens in Ginza. In Hong Kong there's one in Harbour City, a high end fashion mall. In Singapore there's one in ION Orchard, another fashion mall. Where as if you want any other brand of camera in all those cities you go to the electronics area of town. Akihabara or Shinjuku's Yodobashi Camera in Japan, Mong Kok in HK, Sim Lim or Funan Digitallife Mall in SG
In other words, Leica themselves are positioning their cameras as fashion accessories. Something to show you have $$$$$$
If I were Leica and I could sell my camera as accessory in a fashion mall, why not? This tells me more about the people shopping there, than about Leica. It's probably not Leica positioning themselves there, but some smart business people seeing good margins.
I notice the more serious Leica shooters, especially street photogs, tape the lettering. Probably to stay inconspicuous to both their subjects and watchful thieves. IIRC, Leica has a couple of recent models where the red dot has been removed from the face of the camera.
I'm guessing most status shooters leave the face untouched to show the world that they're using a Leica.
Camera's, like many complex to produce object, suffer badly from the effect of economy of scale. This way you end up paying far more for incremental improvements.
Think of the price curve in, say a 50mm prime from 1.8, to 1.4, to 1.2 (and beyond). You can end up with 10x the cost, not because you are getting something objectively 10x better, but because relatively few are made. If the extra couple of stops really buy you something, or you love the optics, and you can pay the 10x, maybe you will (build quality is in there somewhere).
Well, for me Apple is nothing about status nor perceived value. I'm just much more productive using their laptops than others. Cover it in black paint, same result. And once you are looking for high-end laptops, the margin is not such a big thing, really.
But yeah, Leica gear is out of the question for me (and most others I would guess), price-wise.
At least for me, productivity on laptops is very high after a large initial hurdle when using something like Arch Linux, for instance. In my grade school days I spent a good amount of time familiarizing myself with package managers, desktop environments, etc. and now that I have found an ideal setup (i3 WM) I've stuck with it for years. I find my system is faster due to the lighter environment, more consistent on a day-to-day level due to no automatic updates, and more flexible if I ever need to change my workflow. Additionally, with Linux I more feel like I'm working with most developer tooling rather than against. Given the downsides of traveling this road, I wouldn't recommend it to many people, however.
It's absolutely valuable if Mac / OS X is your first and only computing environment. But the hurdle comes when you work in multiple desktop environments, and everything else works similarly enough except for your Mac.
Leica is certainly very expensive. But I have both the Voigtländer 40/1.4 and the Leica 50/1.4. The 40 is a very nice lens and certainly the better bang for the buck. On the other side it is very clear that the 50 is the technical superior lens. It has a lot more contrast, especially wide open, and is the sharper lens. And as some photos in the article show, Leica lenses have a special way of rendering an image. Is this worth the extra you pay for a Leica lens? Everyone has to decide for himself. But when I see people spending more money on a set of fancy rims for their car, I rather have the Leica lens.
> Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value.
For me Apple stands for high quality products that really work. Just recently I sold a 7 year old Macbook for 250 euro. Back then it was the cheapest aluminium Macbook for about 1200 euro. The aluminium body was as new. I don't know any other laptop that looks like new after seven years of heavy use. Let alone that you can get 20% of the value back.
Take a look at the built quality: the body, keyboard, touchpad, power connector - this is design that works. It works for me at least, and I can't imagine that all these people I see nowadays with their really expensive laptops and iphones, that they still buy if for status.
Take my iPods. The first one, first generation touch, is still working as music player. The second broke after five years of living in my jeans with heat and cold, sweat and rain. I've used my first Mac, a G4 desktop, for 9 years.
All these were relatively expensive products, but totally worth the money.
Not the parent, but I've still got a MBP adapter that has to be at least seven years old, and it still get regular use. Out of the four or five MBP/Airs between the wife and I, we've never had a power adapter go bad. We also don't have contests to see who can wrap the wires of the adapter the tightest with the tightest loops, so that might have some bearing on our results.
FWIW, I don't recall ever having to replace a modern-style Mac power adapter. I had one of the early first generation Magsafe ones fail, but the later ones of those have lasted years, and so far all of the second-generation (thin) Magsafe ones are fine too. Pre-magsafe I went through a lot.
Just one. I'm always very careful with it. The cable was still intact. One of the common problems many people have is with breaking cable, especially at the end of the adapter. I always make sure it has enough space.
1. Their digital bodies are garbage (that's how they're different from Apple). I owned an M9 and between its crappy sensor and faux leather peeling off, I was not impressed at all. The only good thing about that camera was the rangefinder.
2. Their lenses, on the other hand, really have no equal in the industry, and as the very best they rightfully command a steep premium. I had two: 50mm and 35mm Summiluxes. They really put everything else to shame, and they most certainly do offer a superior result. What other f/1.4 lenses do you know of that can be actually used at f/1.4 without significant resolution loss or veiling? OK, nowadays there's Zeiss Otus at 55mm, but it's also not cheap and it's three times the size. Add to that also that Leica lenses are extremely well made and compact, and you'll see why people are willing to part with large quantities of cash to own them.
When would you ever want to shoot at f1.4? The low light argument makes less sense in the context of digital cameras with VR lenses, since bumping up the ISO a stop or two, or using a longer shutter speed, would usually degrade the overall quality of the image less than having almost everything out of focus. Nothing wrong with a bit of bokeh, but at the focal lengths typically used with a full frame sensor, f1.4 will almost always give you less than the desired depth of field.
All the time, otherwise you'd buy the 35mm F2 and save about $1.2k.
Depth of Field is a function of Aperture , Focal Length and Distance to plane of focus.
The focal length drives how wide the "scatter" of the blur is, so wide angle lenses like the 35mm have a very "soft" blur as opposed to something like a 400mm F2.8 which just obliterates backgrounds. This is also driven by how close you are focusing so you can shoot a 35mm F1.4 wide open, focusing around ~15ft away and the detail of the scene is very much preserved. It lets you focus on a subject and give them a slight "pop" of focus while keeping the rest of scene coherent.
Can you give an example of the sort of scene you have in mind? I often play around with 4x5 photography, where it would be trivially easy to get that effect for a subject 15ft away with a $100 lens, but I've never actually wanted to do it.
Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF. [edit] If I remember my lens geometry correctly, film size is just the other side of focal length when it comes to bokeh calculations.
I grabbed this random image from the 35L group on Flickr, they didn't include EXIF so I can't be 100% certain they shot it at F1.4 but it looks very close to shots I have at F1.4 from that lens.
>Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF.
It’s only the focal length and aperture that contribute to DoF. With a larger sensor you are typically using longer focal lengths since you need a longer focal length to get the same FoV. That being said, you also have the option of using movements on 4x5, so subject separation can be achieved by changing the plane of focus even when using a narrow aperture. There are some very technically accomplished examples of this at http://www.p1600.com/en/portfolio/london_5x4/ (not my photos), but on balance I think that these are more of a technical tour de force than an artistic success.
There's no way to know what aperture the photo you linked to was shot at, but it doesn't look to me like it would have to be particularly wide. Honestly, I find it a bit depressing that there are flickr groups fetishizing particular lenses.
4x5 is a whole nother beast though. We're talking about SLRs and fixed-lens cameras. Usually you don't get any movements and very little options on that front unless you're using a TS-E.
Don't see any reason why the one I picked wouldn't be shot at F1.4.
Anyway, here's another random one that does have EXIF that shows what I mean. Just because you're shooting at F1.4 doesn't mean that everything is blown away.
Hmm, the second photo is a case where everything is pretty much at infinity, so the only significant consequence of using a very wide aperture is that you’re letting more light in. (Yeah, you can see that the background is very slightly out of focus compared to the bikes, but the defocusing is so slight that it looks more like a mistake than a deliberate effect.)
Plus, look, I know that you didn't choose the photo for it's artistic qualities, but that photo sucks, and the comments on it are like "omg you have a 35L and the photos are sharp". Who the fuck cares if the photos are bad?
The vast majority of the photos in the group either have (i) pretty much everything in the picture in acceptably sharp focus (so that even if they were shot at f1.4, they didn’t have to be) or (ii) a close subject (so that a very wide aperture was not necessary to get good separation). Is it possible to imagine scenarios where you need f1.4 to obtain the desired effect? Yeah, sure. But they’re precisely the scenarios that rarely lead to good compositions. I.e., middle ground in focus and foreground and background out of focus.
Compared to 35mm 'Lux, Canon is a Coke bottle bottom. It's worse than Nikon 35 f/1.4, and it is really an f/2 lens at best, with inflated specs. Rent a Lux if you get a chance. I held Canon/Nikon in much higher regard until I tried Leica.
To a first approximation, $1200 probably sounds like "too much to pay" for a camera to the same number of people that $5000 does. We all have our baseline for what a camera "should" cost...and somewhere, I suspect, someone is thinking "$1200? I can get a DSLR for $500!" and to that "I will just use my phone, thank you very much."
One of the things about Lecia is that it supports it's customers and will repair their cameras. Nobody fixes Coolpix L11's.
Craig Mod's reviews convinced me to get the GF1 many years ago, and I am still very happy with that camera. Though it has interchangeable lenses I often use it with a prime 20mm (film equivalent of 40mm) which, I discovered, are simply a joy to use: the lack of the "feature" of a zoom can free your mind in the moment of exploration.
I should have replied to your comment, instead of posting a new one. I agree with your sense of freeing, but if, as the author talks about, you'll crop many of your shots, it doesn't sound so freeing then.
I was also surprised about the cropping! For my own photographs I never crop, I don't really see the point. But perhaps he is publishing photos, in which case I understand it.
Me too! He's a great photographer and writer. I sold the GF1 because I found it awful to use in daylight, though. Still miss it. And I will never have money for a Leica :)
Yeah, I have a GF1. In fact, hilariously, it's Alex Rainert's old one with Panny 20mm pancake which he was selling on ebay. That camera has been absolutely awesome, and about 2 days after I bought it was used to take the picture of my youngest daughter coming into the World.
m43 cameras in general are a good compromise on image quality and size. GX1's and GF1's in particular are not especially expensive used.
I'd struggle with the idea of shooting at such a wide angle, and relying on cropping later. Theoretically, at least, I like the idea of letting a fixed focal length in the camera guide how I frame images around me.
28mm isn't really so wide on a full frame. In some ways it is more natural than 50mm, in that it frames more like we see with two eyes side by side (50 is closer to the projection we see though) without much in the way of distortion. Once you get used to the frame, you would't need to crop all the time, but I guess it saves you some foot zooming.
WRT to foot zooming, shooting portraits with a 28mm requires some SERIOUS foot zooming. You have to be VERY comfortable getting close to subjects. Fine if you know them; possibly awkward if you don't.
I don't use a 28mm for portraits. And neither would most pros (I'm a hack). But, if you're carrying a fixed prime, your choices are crop, get close, or don't take the shot.
You shouldn't take portraits with a 28mm lens, at least not if you can avoid it. It'll distort your subject's features, making their chin, or nose, or whatever look abnormally large. Better to use an 85mm lens if you can.
It will distort their features if you get in close. For the same distance from the subject, any focal length with give you the same amount of (perspective) distortion. So if you shoot from 10ft away and crop, you'll get the same results (modulo resolution) as you would have gotten if you'd shot from 10ft away with a longer focal length and filled the frame.
Using a long lens has the opposite effect, flattening features (which is why people us 85, 105, even 400!). But there is no "right" answer here, just what works and doesn't. I've seen examples of both from most least types.
They are comparable, in that they are both fairly compact, fixed prime lens cameras that offer high quality (camera build and image).
They are not comparable,as the Leica has a better/faster autofocus system. In theory it has better optics as well, though I haven't seen a side-by-side.
A good friend is a professional photographer. His carry-around fun camera is the X100T. I think his professional-grade stuff is Nikon. I'm sure he'd love the Leica, but it's a lot of money for what is unlikely to be used professionally (at least not by him).
I've used X100T for a while. It does the job well. When it comes to zone focusing, it could not compete with a Leica camera, mainly due to it doing 'focus by wire,' hence not being able to give tactile feedback.
I have an X100T. I love the camera. It's in my bag everyday. I've shot some awesome stuff in the past few months. A friend's wedding last month and Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the past week.
I can't recommend the camera enough. If the form factor is too big for you, go with the newly released X70.
Glad I googled the camera and found out it cost +$4000 before reading are review about it. It should have been the first sentence of the article since most of us will never dream of spending that on a camera.
A camera produces artifacts. To me that makes it a bit different than a car or a watch: Roli tell the same time, Ferrari's pick up the same cartons of milk, but lenses and sensors and firmware capture different images.
I see Leica as of a kind with other multi thousand dollar cameras...it's not as if a Nikon or a Cannon is any more or less reasonable.
I kind of did this same thing. I'm not a photographer, but like my Nikon 1 I got on sale at a deep discount, like the mirrorless-type, and take photos for fun. I started reading and seeing the size and was thinking, "This could be a cool replacement for my Nikon!"
Ahahah, nice, poetic review.
However, peeking into images didn't particularly impressed me, compared to SONY RX1 ( 35mm f2.0 zeiss, half the price ).
Yes, a fixed-lens rangefinder is a great, underestimated photographic tool, but come on: that Leica hype is over, Sony won ( and it DOES charge on usb, still exploitable files @ 102 000 iso, is SMALLER, HAVE a built-in flash )
I could understand the point of leica, in the 40s-60s
it was quiet, well built, had good lenses and was reliable. (it had a fabric shutter, or something similar, which means it didn't click. This allowed people to be "in the moment")
In the digital world, I just don't understand the point of them. Sure yes its a full frame with a decent lens in a similar body size as the old compact rangefinders.
But.
the image quality just isn't worth the $4K. Thats top end SLR price. Under its all its just a panasonic lumix. If it was a separate entity, I could sorta see the point. You are paying for the name, and thats it.
What I'd really like is a leica/fujion style body, but with a nikon sensor and lens adaptor. (Although I suspect that its not really possible because the focal point is much too deep.)
New technology leads to better core function at a fraction of the cost (quartz watches and electric cars), but there's some artistry to the old mechanical way of doing things. Precise analog machines can be cool even with their faults (or because of them) - I think that's the point.
But as the owner of a 5D Mk III and several L lenses, -and- a Lumix DMC-LX100... the Leica is not a Lumix.
This isn't even the best article for image quality (though there are certainly many very good shots). But where the Leica excels is razor sharp images that don't have any hint of "is that sharpened in Photoshop?" (for example: http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2... )
Almost all old rangefinders were quiet, ditto for folders and TLRs - it wasn't in any way Leica specific. SLRs, on the other hand, can be rather noisy because of the mirror slap. Pentax 67 sounds almost like a weapon.
No, it really isn't. While Leica has rebadged Panasonic cameras in the past, and let Panasonic use the Leica brand on some of its lenses, they've always kept their own camera factories and production going and this is a 'real' Leica.
They don't design them from scratch, but they DO participate in sensor design. That's part of the reason why wide angle Leica lenses don't suffer from terrible vignetting, corner smear and peripheral color shifts when used with Leica bodies. Leica uses offset microlenses to counteract those effects.
For reasons one may want full frame, someone else may want a cropped sensor for other equally legitimate reasons.
I love my Fuji X100. Manual Focus is also overrated. As long as you have a quick phase detecting AF solution, you won't miss the tactile mechnical MF. The X100 is not there yet, but future generations will surely provide satisfactory AF speed.
I love how thorough and thoughtful this article is, especially since it's on a personal web site. Reminds me of what the web used to be, before big clickbait sites took over. Just someone writing at length about something they are passionate about.
Um, is the price really $4,000!? Am I the only one that thinks nothing costing that much is a "travel camera"? The one of several cameras I own that I toss in my bag when I don't want or need capabilities of my "expensive" gear.
I wouldn't carry something costing $4000 on me anywhere I wasn't very familiar with / felt safe in.
For anyone looking for the 80/20 alternative here (80% of the experience/results for 20% of the cost), take a look at the Ricoh GR.
It doesn't have a viewfinder, but the ergonomics are superb. APS-C sensor, fixed 28mm lens (a very sharp one at that), and 16mp. Goes with me on every trip.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadThat's it. I love his writing style.
But as the owner of a Voigtländer R4A coupled with a Nokton 35mm f/1.4 (bought for a total of $1200, which was quite the investment for me) I can't help but be amazed by how much it would have cost me to buy the Leica equivalent (5 times that amount). It's quite obvious looking at the results that Leica does not offer that superior a result for that hefty price (and even though I know that it's a tad simplistic to reason in those terms, it certainly wouldn't have bought me 5 times the quality).
Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value. Hats off to them for reaching that lucrative niche market.
Professionals are mostly likely to be more objective about what they need and are buying, if they view it as a tool (in my experience, at least).
another situation would be a serious hobbyist, that is to say taking photos is their main enjoyment away from work. They might be willing to spend a lot more even with small benefit.
http://www.dxomark.com/Reviews/Leica-M-review-How-does-the-n...
That said, I really like the manual focus tabs on the lenses and the mechanism on the Q looks interesting. The Q is also newer so likely has a few improvements, but in general Leica has always been a bit behind the likes of Nikon, Sony, and Fuji in terms of electronics and firmware. Where they win is build quality.
Yet the author of this post taped off the lettering to make it look like a generic camera.
In other words, Leica themselves are positioning their cameras as fashion accessories. Something to show you have $$$$$$
I'm guessing most status shooters leave the face untouched to show the world that they're using a Leica.
Think of the price curve in, say a 50mm prime from 1.8, to 1.4, to 1.2 (and beyond). You can end up with 10x the cost, not because you are getting something objectively 10x better, but because relatively few are made. If the extra couple of stops really buy you something, or you love the optics, and you can pay the 10x, maybe you will (build quality is in there somewhere).
Though, a Canon 50mm 1.2L is ludicrously bigger than a 50mm 1.8. You might actually be paying the same per pound of glass.
(Okay, so one weighs 4oz, and the other 14oz)
But yeah, Leica gear is out of the question for me (and most others I would guess), price-wise.
Edit: No disrespect to dentists intended.
For me Apple stands for high quality products that really work. Just recently I sold a 7 year old Macbook for 250 euro. Back then it was the cheapest aluminium Macbook for about 1200 euro. The aluminium body was as new. I don't know any other laptop that looks like new after seven years of heavy use. Let alone that you can get 20% of the value back.
Take a look at the built quality: the body, keyboard, touchpad, power connector - this is design that works. It works for me at least, and I can't imagine that all these people I see nowadays with their really expensive laptops and iphones, that they still buy if for status.
Take my iPods. The first one, first generation touch, is still working as music player. The second broke after five years of living in my jeans with heat and cold, sweat and rain. I've used my first Mac, a G4 desktop, for 9 years.
All these were relatively expensive products, but totally worth the money.
Then you have never heard of Thinkpads.
> Take my iPods. The first one, first generation touch, is still working as music player.
Lucky if the battery is not dead. If it is, you need to bring it to an Apple Store to replace it. Perfect design.
1. Their digital bodies are garbage (that's how they're different from Apple). I owned an M9 and between its crappy sensor and faux leather peeling off, I was not impressed at all. The only good thing about that camera was the rangefinder.
2. Their lenses, on the other hand, really have no equal in the industry, and as the very best they rightfully command a steep premium. I had two: 50mm and 35mm Summiluxes. They really put everything else to shame, and they most certainly do offer a superior result. What other f/1.4 lenses do you know of that can be actually used at f/1.4 without significant resolution loss or veiling? OK, nowadays there's Zeiss Otus at 55mm, but it's also not cheap and it's three times the size. Add to that also that Leica lenses are extremely well made and compact, and you'll see why people are willing to part with large quantities of cash to own them.
I hear the v2 rev is also very sharp compared to the original. Although I find the rendering of the original quite good enough.
Depth of Field is a function of Aperture , Focal Length and Distance to plane of focus.
The focal length drives how wide the "scatter" of the blur is, so wide angle lenses like the 35mm have a very "soft" blur as opposed to something like a 400mm F2.8 which just obliterates backgrounds. This is also driven by how close you are focusing so you can shoot a 35mm F1.4 wide open, focusing around ~15ft away and the detail of the scene is very much preserved. It lets you focus on a subject and give them a slight "pop" of focus while keeping the rest of scene coherent.
I grabbed this random image from the 35L group on Flickr, they didn't include EXIF so I can't be 100% certain they shot it at F1.4 but it looks very close to shots I have at F1.4 from that lens.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/49830238@N04/25021998886/in/po...
It’s only the focal length and aperture that contribute to DoF. With a larger sensor you are typically using longer focal lengths since you need a longer focal length to get the same FoV. That being said, you also have the option of using movements on 4x5, so subject separation can be achieved by changing the plane of focus even when using a narrow aperture. There are some very technically accomplished examples of this at http://www.p1600.com/en/portfolio/london_5x4/ (not my photos), but on balance I think that these are more of a technical tour de force than an artistic success.
There's no way to know what aperture the photo you linked to was shot at, but it doesn't look to me like it would have to be particularly wide. Honestly, I find it a bit depressing that there are flickr groups fetishizing particular lenses.
Don't see any reason why the one I picked wouldn't be shot at F1.4.
Anyway, here's another random one that does have EXIF that shows what I mean. Just because you're shooting at F1.4 doesn't mean that everything is blown away.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoncowellphoto/5534870906
I guess you can call if "fetishizing" a lens if you want but it's a very popular lens for a reason.
Plus, look, I know that you didn't choose the photo for it's artistic qualities, but that photo sucks, and the comments on it are like "omg you have a 35L and the photos are sharp". Who the fuck cares if the photos are bad?
The vast majority of the photos in the group either have (i) pretty much everything in the picture in acceptably sharp focus (so that even if they were shot at f1.4, they didn’t have to be) or (ii) a close subject (so that a very wide aperture was not necessary to get good separation). Is it possible to imagine scenarios where you need f1.4 to obtain the desired effect? Yeah, sure. But they’re precisely the scenarios that rarely lead to good compositions. I.e., middle ground in focus and foreground and background out of focus.
One of the things about Lecia is that it supports it's customers and will repair their cameras. Nobody fixes Coolpix L11's.
Is that really the case though? The fixed prime is small and compact, and still frees a photographer from carrying a bulkier lens.
That you can crop/digital zoom in a pinch is freeing, provided you've got enough resolution to do so.
m43 cameras in general are a good compromise on image quality and size. GX1's and GF1's in particular are not especially expensive used.
Just saying.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100t.htm
Though that one’s still 75% of the price of the Leica. Also, newer and as such in many ways an unknown quantity.
From what i've seen focus peaking, Sony outperforms it in IQ, and even sharpness.
RX1 features also more: USB charging, built-in flash, 25% smaller size...
You can buy it new for some 2k$
The build quality is outstanding too! ( okay, not leica standards, but close enough )
Sample here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/102221463@N02/10170711924/size...
compare here http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Leica-Q-...
They are comparable, in that they are both fairly compact, fixed prime lens cameras that offer high quality (camera build and image).
They are not comparable,as the Leica has a better/faster autofocus system. In theory it has better optics as well, though I haven't seen a side-by-side.
A good friend is a professional photographer. His carry-around fun camera is the X100T. I think his professional-grade stuff is Nikon. I'm sure he'd love the Leica, but it's a lot of money for what is unlikely to be used professionally (at least not by him).
FYI -- I'm totally in love with the X100T.
I can't recommend the camera enough. If the form factor is too big for you, go with the newly released X70.
> Earlier in 2015 I used the Fuji x100t for three weeks but wasn’t impressed enough to write about it.
I see Leica as of a kind with other multi thousand dollar cameras...it's not as if a Nikon or a Cannon is any more or less reasonable.
Until I Bing'd the price...
it was quiet, well built, had good lenses and was reliable. (it had a fabric shutter, or something similar, which means it didn't click. This allowed people to be "in the moment")
In the digital world, I just don't understand the point of them. Sure yes its a full frame with a decent lens in a similar body size as the old compact rangefinders.
But.
the image quality just isn't worth the $4K. Thats top end SLR price. Under its all its just a panasonic lumix. If it was a separate entity, I could sorta see the point. You are paying for the name, and thats it.
What I'd really like is a leica/fujion style body, but with a nikon sensor and lens adaptor. (Although I suspect that its not really possible because the focal point is much too deep.)
New technology leads to better core function at a fraction of the cost (quartz watches and electric cars), but there's some artistry to the old mechanical way of doing things. Precise analog machines can be cool even with their faults (or because of them) - I think that's the point.
But as the owner of a 5D Mk III and several L lenses, -and- a Lumix DMC-LX100... the Leica is not a Lumix.
This isn't even the best article for image quality (though there are certainly many very good shots). But where the Leica excels is razor sharp images that don't have any hint of "is that sharpened in Photoshop?" (for example: http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2... )
There was/is a cheap Leica digital that was a rebadged Lumix, but that isn't true of these full frame digitals.
one was the viewfinder position, and the other was the silent shutter (I've never used one so I can't comment)
The pentax 67 is a medium format monster, with a solenoid actuator. I have used it and its a wonderful beast.
No, it really isn't. While Leica has rebadged Panasonic cameras in the past, and let Panasonic use the Leica brand on some of its lenses, they've always kept their own camera factories and production going and this is a 'real' Leica.
I strongly doubt that they even design their own CMOS sensors.
For reasons one may want full frame, someone else may want a cropped sensor for other equally legitimate reasons.
I love my Fuji X100. Manual Focus is also overrated. As long as you have a quick phase detecting AF solution, you won't miss the tactile mechnical MF. The X100 is not there yet, but future generations will surely provide satisfactory AF speed.
Do you know the concept of non-shallow DOF and how that is beneficial in many low light/wide-open aperture circumstances?
I recall having heard that either the first or the second generation A7 has the same sensor as the Leica Q but this might be wrong.
I wouldn't carry something costing $4000 on me anywhere I wasn't very familiar with / felt safe in.
It doesn't have a viewfinder, but the ergonomics are superb. APS-C sensor, fixed 28mm lens (a very sharp one at that), and 16mp. Goes with me on every trip.
Ming Thein's review: http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/05/06/review-2013-ricoh-gr-di...