Category Archives: Hall of Shame

The real stinkers

Leica M10 battery life

Hall of Shame, Leica

Not great, but it will do.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

One common criticism of the Leica M10 is that the battery life is poor. When Leica finally slimmed down the M240 predecessor, which used an 1800mAh battery (meaning it could deliver 1.8 amps for one hour) the battery had to be smaller to work with the new svelte body which finally reverted to dimensions close to those of the M3. Battery life dropped a startling 39% to 1100mAh. But that raw statistic fails to tell the whole story as it’s reasonable to think that electrical efficiency of the M10 was improved as new components found their way inside the now once more beautiful body.






The Leica BP-SCL5 battery. Made by Varta in Indonesia.
Or is it Korea? I can find no indication of age.

Leica states “Batteries have only a limited service life. We recommend replacing them after around four years” (Manual p.203). Mine must be between 4-8 years old based on the years the camera was made, but still seem OK. This, especially at $200 a pop, is a ‘run it until it drops’ scenario.

Nonetheless, I confess to having been troubled by the small current capacity of the BP-SCL5 lithium ion battery which is still listed at B&H, though ‘Back ordered’. My mint M10 came with two original batteries and both appear to hold a charge well. There are no aftermarket alternatives currently. At first, to conserve battery life. I set the sleep time to the lowest setting, which is 2 minutes. After this time a first pressure was required on the shutter button to wake the camera, a process that takes some 2 seconds. Not good if you are street snapping and have to let one off – if you know what I mean – from the hip. And the shutter response of any M camera, film or digital, is known to be among the fastest ever made, so you want the camera ready at all times. So I decided too see how quickly a fully charged battery drained if the sleep timer was set to ‘off’, meaning the camera is always instantly ready but is using power to illuminate the finder frames and keep the rest of the electrical system primed for action.

After turning the camera on with sleep ‘off’, I checked the LCD at half hour intervals to see the charge remaining. The charge is displayed in 5% intervals so 50%, say, could well be 46% worst case, but you get a reasonably accurate set of data using this approach. I found that the battery lost 5% of its power every 30 minutes until it was completely drained 5 hours after start-up. The loss rate was linear.

Once the battery is drained the finder displays ‘bc’ when the shutter button is depressed, power being provided by the separate small rechargeable battery used to keep the time and date current. (That internal battery lasts 2 months if no main battery is installed. I shudder to think of the replacement cost, as replacement presumably requires partial dismantling of the camera). Now this is not a real world test as no pictures are being taken during the 5 hour discharge period.

Therefore I took the camera on walkabout, a session which lasted 66 minutes and saw the reported capacity fall to 80%. Worst case that means 76%. Extrapolation of battery life is easy given the linear rate of discharge noted previously. In that time I took 52 pictures which figures to a battery life as follows. I never used the LCD:

  • At 80% displayed, best case = 260 pictures (52/(1-0.80)). 5 hour life.
  • At 76% worst case = 216 pictures (52/(1-0.76)). 4.1 hour life.
  • The average is 238 pictures – or almost 7 rolls of film

So use of the camera compared with just leaving it unused but turned on makes relatively little difference to battery life. That means 5 hours if inactive but not sleeping and at least 4.1 hours in use with no sleep.

With my usage pattern that’s enough for more than a day’s work and with a spare in my pocket you can double those numbers. I do not recall snapping more than 3 rolls of 36 exposure film in one day over the past 50+ years. 7 rolls in a day is unlikely to ever happen, let alone 14 with the spare on hand. Having learned photography as an impecunious student I learned to never waste film and that habit remains in the digital age.

Here’s a perfect example of why the 2 second ‘wake from sleep’ delay is unacceptable in street snapping. This opportunity popped up right in front of me as the owner grabbed a handful of kibble to feed his beautiful golden retriever. I had to swivel and snap from the hip. 2 seconds later the picture was gone:



Feeding the pup. Leica M10, 35mm Canon LTM at f/8.

In conclusion, if you are a 5 images per second shot gunner using the M10 you should probably carry a spare battery or two. For sane photographers the M10’s small battery is just fine. With sleep disabled and taking one picture a minute the battery is good for some 4 hours and 250 snaps. Unless you are seeking to emulate garbage like that put out by the sainted Gary Winogrand in his later years, you should be OK.

In the M11 the battery grew in size again, reverting to the 1800mAh capacity found in the M240, likely attributable to further miniaturization of the innards of the camera. But paying twice the price of a mint M10 for this ‘nice to have’ feature does not solve for this snapper. Plus now instead of having to remove the baseplate to access the SD card you have to remove the battery. As the French would have it, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’

The out of stock situation:

The fact that B&H shows the battery as being out of stock prompted me to check global listings for availability, and there is none. So it appears we have a replay of the M240 battery scandal where Leica has ceased manufacturing the battery four years after discontinuing the camera, essentially bricking an $8,000 piece of hardware. There is no aftermarket in batteries for either the M240 or the M10. And here is a manufacturer telling us that batteries last no more than four years but apparently discontinuing the product in a like timeframe. If the M10 battery is in fact discontinued I think it may be time for a good old-fashioned American class action suit against Leica to stop this disgraceful behavior. Meanwhile, the Leica company is a dishonorable inductee into this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Shocking hypocrisy

Hall of Shame, Mac Pro, Macintosh

Apple’s planned obsolescence.

The other day I sadly took my 2010 Mac Pro to the recyclers. The resale value approximated what it would cost to ship this behemoth and the last six generations of OS X releases saw to it that none would run on the machine, denying me the security fixes announced seemingly monthly.


Can you spell ‘planned obsolescence’?.

While this piece is focused on Apple, like thinking applies to all computer hardware makers. They conspire with the software authors (in Apple’s case they conspire with Apple) to make sure that older machines can no longer run the upgraded operating system and many of the related applications. The conspiracy deepens when you look at the horrendous costs laid on users by ethically challenged businesses like Adobe who, in obsoleting earlier versions of their apps, use the planned obsolescence strategy to force you into a rental payment system, euphemistically known as the ‘subscription model’.

So it was with the memory of that great recycled Mac Pro that I read this well researched article in Macworld magazine. The bottom line is this:

So, in answer to the question: How long do Macs last? We’d say five to eight years, but beware that you may not be able to replace any faulty parts in a Mac when more than five years have passed since Apple last sold it.

Imagine if your house or your car lasted only 5 years. But, the hypocrites in Apple Marketing are the first to tell you about their environmentally friendly packaging for the new Mac Mini. It’s cardboard for heaven’s sake. See for yourself:


Hypocrisy redefined.

Any mention of the fact that your new Mac will be toxic landfill 5 years hence because Engineering was told by Marketing to make sure it’s obsolete by then? And because avoiding that required just a few lines of code? You must be joking.

Louche Long

Hall of Shame, Macintosh

Taste and money rarely mix.

Apple has had several justly famous advertising campaigns, from the ‘1984’ ad where an athlete hurls a sledgehammer at a movie screen in a theater filled with automatons, to the ‘Think Different’ series which adulated original thinkers. But maybe the most beloved was the long running ‘I’m a Mac and I’m a PC’ with the comedian John Hodgman as the nerdy and lovable PC-using klutz and, well, Justin Long. Long portrayed the oh! so cool Mac user and his smarmy, condescending, hipster presence did nothing to endear prospects to the Apple brand, for it was Hodgman viewers tuned in to view. One of the best known ads had PC swathed in bandages head to toe, explaining that his multiple crashes were the cause. Another had him on the shrink’s couch relating how unloved he was. Hodgman simply nailed it.


Nerd and hipster.

Before examining the new Intel ads claiming their CPUs are superior to Apple’s new M1 – a CPU which is universally lauded as redefining the realms of possibility in Macs – it bears to relate Apple’s history with CPU makers. The Motorola 68000 family in early Apple ][ computers could not hold it own, Motorola falling behind the performance game, and gave way to the IBM G3/4/5 series. Capable performers, these suffered from high heat output and, when Steve Jobs asked for a cool running successor to the G3 in the fabulous Powerbook notebook, IBM gave him the G4 which did a more than passable imitation of a toaster. It ran that hot. So Steve started the team working on converting the product line to Intel’s CPUs and did so successfully until …. Intel started repeating the errors of Motorola and IBM. Slow development cycles, loss of competitive position, we had seen it all before. But Apple, as always looking down the road, had an answer, having been sub-contracting design and development of its iPhone and iPad CPUs to ARM with whom the company increasingly adopted a tailored approach, not willing to rest on the laurels of a commodity product suitable for all.

This exercise culminated last year in Apple going whole hog and developing its own M1 CPU which not only derived from the state-of-the-art A14 in the iPhone, it also spanked the competition on performance (high) and power use and heat output (low). It was such a success that Apple has started migrating its notebooks and the Mac Mini to the M1 and later this year will do the same for the iMac and Mac Pro.

So Intel, always a day late and an idea short, felt it had to strike back and hired the louche Long, ever willing to prostitute his C-list Hollywood credentials, to talk up the advantages of Intel’s latest (very late) and (not so) greatest CPUs. And they got it so wrong, it’s comical to behold. Not only is Long still smarmy and condescending – characteristics as tied to the actor as the sneer is to Donald Sutherland – it’s really quite unclear what he is going on about.


See what I mean about Long?

For the whole story, capably reported by Apple Insider, click here.

No more identity theft

Hall of Shame, iPad, iPhone, Ramblings

Hasta la vista, Zuck.


No more theft.

iOS 14.5 for the iPhone and iPad will be released shortly. Unlike previous versions of the operating system, apps which would require the user to opt-out of tracking their activity now will require the user to consciously agree to be tracked. The opt-in screen appears above.

Why is this a big deal?

Let me flashback to to my son’s 6th grade year in California. That was in 2014. As we were walking home I noticed that all the kids in the playground were busy staring at their smartphone screens.

“What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked in all innocence.

“Facebook, Dad”.

This set me off on a process of discovery and disclosed what has to be the greatest evil of our time. Not only was Facebook absorbing and wasting huge amounts of time for these fertile young brains, it transpired that it was tracking everything these kids did even if they were not on Facebook. And unless you have been in a nuclear blast-proof bunker the last few weeks with no access to any sort of connectivity, you will also know that Facebook extended its evil ways as an organizing vehicles for traitors, seditionists and insurrectionists. Censorship of hate speech be damned, thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg. The people who stormed the Capitol on their Pig’s orders on January 6, 2021 had organized their meetings on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter.

But it gets even worse. 4 years ago a very close US presidential election awarded that same Pig the Oval Office thanks to the Russkies’ massive campaign of disinformation on …. yup, you guessed it, Facebook. And every time those seditionists clicked on the site of their local guns and ammo supplier, Facebook was there making money off their clicks. Zuckerberg was, simply stated, being paid by the makers of deadly weapons.

Now Zuckerberg is up in arms about Tim Cook’s privacy decision. He argues that the requirement to opt-in to being tracked will make your “….advertising experience worse.” Excuse me? Is there something like a good advertising experience?

Come to think of it, while you are at it, you might as well install an ad blocker on all your devices to cut the noise and disruption ads cause in the reading experience.

So when iOS 14.5 is announced, I advise all iOS users to upgrade immediately and refuse to opt-in to tracking of their activity. If you prefer to be watched, sold, tracked, filed and numbered while enhancing Mr. Zuckerberg’s bloated net worth, then stick with your Samsung cell phone. iOS 14.5 works on iPhone 6S or later.

As for my son, he gave up Facebook shortly after the experience explained above, and has never been happier or more productive.