Category Archives: Cameras

Things that go ‘Click’

The Leica M9 and the Viewfinder Revolution

The last face lift.

I wish Leica well with its new M9. There’s always a market, however small, for the dowager on her third face lift and no shortage of insecure, wealthy buyers with weak egos craving fame by association. I think of the M9 as the Joan Collins of cameras. Neither is cheap.

The Joan Collins of cameras – the Leica M9.

The best thing to be learned from the M9’s tired makeover of a design that peaked in 1959 with the M2 is that the viewfinder is key. It is the window to the soul of the photographer’s subject, and the less it imposes itself between subject and snap, the better it serves its purpose.

The first twenty years or so of digital camera design will, I believe, go down as the period during which manufacturers’ disregard of the needs of consumers was at an all time high. So enamored did they become of digital this, and LCD that, their design results were some of the slowest, least responsive and unusable cameras ever made. You hardly need me to tell you that. Go to any crowded place on a sunny day and enjoy watching their owners squinting at silly little screens held two feet away from their eyes while taking pictures far worse than their parents managed on the Brownies and Instamatics of yore. Those at least were properly framed and action shots were the order of the day.

At the other extreme from the point-and-shoot set were the ‘professional’ DSLRs which made matters even worse. Like the Leica M9 these depended on fifty year old technology, this time in the guise of flapping mirrors and bulky glass prisms to get the image to the snapper’s eye. But as this is the digital age, these cameras started to sprout dozens of excrescences in the guise of control buttons and yet more ergonomic noise on their miserable LCD screens and ever more cluttered viewfinders. The only significant change in appearance was that the shapes became more organic and free flowing as modern plastics and manufacturing technologies took the sharp edges off. Just look at the original Nikon F for comparison, if you want to see what I’m talking about.

But the innovators in camera design, the Japanese, have woken up. First, they need a new idea to sell more gear to all those current digital owners, be they amateurs or pros. Second, some of them actually use the gear they make and grew up adulating the Leica M as the touchstone of camera and industrial design for, in 1959 when Mr. Yamamoto was knee high to a grasshopper, the Leica M2 was the unique blend of form and function. Small, fast and with decent lenses, it was the traveling companion of choice not just for well heeled amateurs but for pros wanting the best there was. And Yamamoto san, when he finally migrated to longer pants, found that the M2 was his snapper of choice, surrounded as he was by flashing LEDs and beeping buzzers galore.

To cut a long story short, the example set by the Leica M has placed camera design on the cusp of the next revolution. The changes that will bring will be nowhere near as earth shaking as the invention of digital sensors but they will finally make the digital camera the practical tool it has so far largely failed to be. And the most significant of those changes will, simply stated, be in the area where the Leica M once excelled. The viewfinder. The window to the subject’s soul.

I doubt it matters what the sensor size or format will be, for the new crop of digital cameras will come in any size you want. Medium format, full frame 35mm, APS-C, Micro four thirds, microdot – whatever. But what all of these designs will boast will be an absence of the ridiculous pentaprism, flapping mirror and LCD screen, all obsoleted by the growing availability of fast, noise free, bright-in-any-light and superbly compact electronic viewfinders. And they will focus fast with no shutter lag. A whole new selling proposition, rediscovered from those halcyon Leica days.

The maker at the cusp of what I call the Viewfinder Revolution is, of course, Panasonic, with their ground breaking G1/GH1 designs. That will not last long and you can bet that the basements of Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax/Samsung, Olympus et alia are a beehive of activity, filled with engineers and lawyers finding workarounds to Panny’s patents.

And their new designs will boldly drop the faux pentaprism hump that Panny felt was needed to introduce users to a new design ethic, will delete all the silly little buttons and will relegate the LCD screen to its rightful place as nothing more than a rarely used configuration display for favored settings. The EVF, whether eye level, waist level or both, will move modern camera design to a place where the wonderful digital sensors of today and tomorrow will finally be wrapped in a body with a viewfinder which can do them justice.

So thanks, Leica, for pointing the way. It’s just too bad that, like our heroine in the first paragraph, you refuse to age gracefully and pass to the museum which is your well deserved resting place.

The Leica M of women – Joan in 1960 and in 2007

Note: The writer used Leica M2/3/6 cameras and lenses almost exclusively in the period 1973-2008 (doubtless all now owned by Yamamoto san) and can assure the reader that the only ‘Leica glow’ he ever felt from all those wonderful lenses was from the red ink on his bank statement. Only those who have paid the asking price of the M9 and its glass will feel that glow, and they will spare no effort telling you about it.

The Leica X1 and street snaps

Some thoughts.

It’s 9/9/09 and Leica finally introduced its full frame digital M9. I won’t be dwelling on it here as I doubt there’s much need for, or interest in, a $10,000 camera (with lens) which comes with almost no automation, bulky lenses and a near total lack of weatherproofing. For that sort of money there are several rugged and capable DSLRs available from other makers and the specific situations in which a rangefinder camera excels are few and far between. Street snapping is probably the main genre where the r/f is most at home. A good reality check may be found here.

Leica has also introduced the X1, a fixed lens (35mm equivalent) APS-C body with a very appealing design. They deserve hearty congratulations on this as it’s not yet another rebadged Panasonic, though the premium price of $2,000 is hard to swallow. Plus you will need to add an optical viewfinder to make the thing workable in street situations which adds more cost. With v/f and with its non-detachable lens extended it’s much the same size as the G1 or GF1:


Leica X1

Note the full manual operation afforded by separate shutter and aperture dials.

So who needs this? Well, my perspective has altered significantly in the two short months during which I have owned the Panasonic G1. Having been a street snapper since childhood and having given up on film when the Canon 5D came along, I have been waiting for the ‘digital Leica’ a long time. And the G1 has changed how I think about street cameras.

In days of yore you would load up your little shoulder bag with a 35 and 90mm Leica lens, leave the 50mm on the M2 or M3 slung over your shoulder, and cram in a few rolls of film wherever you could stash them. After decades of use all the manual adjustments required became second nature – aperture, shutter speed, focus and the endless tedious changing of film in fair weather or foul (mostly foul in my London days). The results of those early efforts can be seen in all their monochrome splendor here. You didn’t complain because there not only was no alternative, no one saw digital coming. And SLRs were too loud and bulky and noisy to be an alternative for the truly unobtrusive and relatively quiet Leica M. You just learned to pre-visualize the image and would change lenses on the run to make sure the right one was in place by the time you pressed the button. And it made sense to have the right lens in place as film could only handle so much enlarging.

When the 5D came along you suddenly had medium format film quality at an affordable price with full automation thrown in. The bulk seemed modest compared to my Rollei 6003 and the ergonomics superior, but no one could accuse the 5D of being a street snapper. Landscapes, macro still lifes, portraits, QTVRs, HDR, all well and good, but unobtrusiveness is not that camera’s strong point.

So along came the Panasonic LX-1 with its host of compromises. Shutter lag, slow autofocus, an awful LCD screen replaced with a glued-on optical finder and too small to handle easily in a hurry, yet it was the best this street snapper could find at the time.

But the digital Leica did finally come along and the logo said ‘Lumix G1’.

After the first few hundred street exposures you realized that the craving for the rumored 20mm f/1.7 (now available) pancake lens was gone. I don’t need f/1.7 but I do occasionally like 35, 50 and 90mm focal lengths, much as I did in the M2/M3 film days. And the G1 went one better at the wide end, stretching to 28mm.

But it’s the total automation and that revolutionary Electronic View Finder which make the G1 the digital Leica. No need to change lenses. No need to excuse the quality of the kit lens or sensor, both small and superb. No need to wait for autofocus – in 1,200 exposures I have ‘beaten’ the AF just once. It’s that good. And as for the sensor, you may not want to make 30″ prints (who any longer makes these regularly?) but 13″ x 19″ is par for the course. And no need to set anything other than the aperture or squint into a dark finder trying to figure out what the camera is doing. The automation is outstanding and the EVF even better. In fact it’s pretty close to my wish list. Best of all, you can set the frame aspect ratio to 3:2, just like in that Leica of yore, and that’s how I use my G1.

So while Leica has done a fine aesthetic job (let’s just hope the shutter and focus delays are low) in designing the X1, I really question who needs a fixed focal length camera at such a price when you can have a more versatile tool with the same bulk for under one third of the cost? The only thing the G1 has which I have realized that I do not need is the interchangeable lens. The kit lens is this street snapper’s ideal.


Distraught. G1, kit lens, 14mm, f/5.6, 1/400, ISO100.

So yes, the digital Leica is here. It just happens to be made by someone else.

Olympus EP-1 …. woof!

A real dog

Coming from David Pogue, the New York Times’s technology writer with a knack for making the technical understandable, is a review of the new Olympus EP-1.



Click the picture for the review

Well, sorry to say, the camera is an awful disappointment, and an expensive one at that. No viewfinder, horribly slow focusing (Panasonic refused to share its superbly fast focus technology from the G1 with Olympus) and, yes, you guessed it, miserable shutter lag. Hard to understand why anyone would waste the development budget on a camera which, while adding interchangeable lenses to a small body, otherwise does absolutely nothing to conquer the three bugbears of compact point-and-shoots.

An LCD screen passing as a ‘viewfinder’, slow focus and shutter lag.

And, at $800, considerably more than the G1 which, for a little more bulk, has none of these problems.

A real dog.

And thank you, Mr. Pogue, for pulling no punches.

Where is the genius of the company that gave us the stunningly original Pen F half frame SLR or the ‘better mousetrap’ of the Olympus OM1 full frame film SLR under designer Maitani?

Elitism

Guilty as charged!

I am an unashamed elitist, a status too often mistaken for snobbery. The two are unrelated. To misquote Wilde, the snob knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The elitist, by contrast, focuses solely on value. Scratch an elitist and you will find an engineer.

I was struck by this realization when thinking of the choices I have made in machines over the years. Before we get to cameras, let’s look at some other daily possessions and the brands involved.

In the kitchen you simply cannot beat GE appliances. Not some fancy marque name, just your basic GE (and still made by GE as their disaster passing for a CEO failed to sell the home appliance division). Bog reliable, no instruction book needed and parts easily available when they do eventually break. But let’s face it, they rarely do. The GE fridge is the very touchstone of reliability.

With the mundane behind us, let’s focus on the essential. Motorcycles. For as long as I can remember I have ridden BMW motorcycles. Air cooled twins, water cooled flat threes and fours, oil cooled twins, faired, naked (the bike, not me), carburetted, injected, with or without sidecar, fast, slow, I loved them all, but only my first – a 1975 R90/6 air cooled boxer – remains, and is much loved. It had style where the others had function. Riding that old BMW reminds me that it’s the journey, not the destination, which matters.

In watches, I would love to tell you that I have always worn a Patek, but that would require that I had done a far better job of choosing my parents. Let’s face it, Polish refugees who had the poor sense to choose England over America as the land of the future – we are talking 1947 here – for their kids aren’t going to be troubling the Nobel Committee any time soon. Econ. 101 was plainly not on my parents’ curriculum. Add a curious predisposition for keeping their wealth in a Polish bank despite six – 1933-1939 – years’ warning that maybe moving the lot to Switzerland might make sense, their belief in the League of Nations and in the power and goodness of America saw them lose the lot to the invading hordes. So, to cut a long story short, I can claim to have worn nothing but a Patek since 1996. For nigh on twenty years, every time I was about to get one, the price had risen that bit faster than my disposable income. Well, it inspired me to try harder, I suppose.

I was a long time woodworker. Relaxing like nothing else, very challenging (metalwork is child’s play by comparison) and a perennial source of dissatisfaction. You can always do better. And I say ‘was’ because the onset of tendonitis – meaning my wrists hurt like hell when stressed – dictated disposal of my tools and conversion of the woodshop to a home theater. But I did keep one or two for the odd occasion and they all say Makita or Panasonic on the body. The Japanese make lovely, well adjusted and light tools which take an incredible beating and remain in perfect order. By contrast American tools – they used to be made here – try to impress with weight and the heck with the fit and finish. De Walt and Porter Cable have a lot to answer for when you look at just how shoddily the average American home is put together. As for the cheap and cheerful Chinese imports, whether from Taiwan or PRC, well you get a kit which has to be repaired and tuned before it works. Not a great use of valuable time.

Though I’m lousy at it, I do enjoy cooking and the pots and pans have always said All Clad. You can bury me with those. Good weapons too, in the event of a burglary. The chef’s knife is a Sabattier because if you want to cut well, use what the world’s most food obsessed nation swears by. Leave the guns to the Germans.

And speaking of Germans, when it comes to cars, few would disagree that the best cars made from 1975 through 1990 came from Stuttgart. Mercedes had the market cornered in execution, quality, longevity, resale value and safety, and Americans – me included – were happy to pay a premium for the three pointed star. Sure, the budding Andrettis swore by Porsche, the gold chain set by BMWs and techies by Audis, but Mercedes was the car for the rest of us. Masochists, by the way, opted for Jaguars. Then, two momentous events changed everything in 1990. The accountants took over Mercedes Benz and dictated that cars need only last two years. Greedy, over-leveraged Americans no longer bought cars, they leased them for two years then traded in for the latest variant. So, as leases were only 2 years long, no one cared if the knobs, dials and button failed on Day 731. It was someone else’s problem. The other event, which the dumb Germans made light of, was Toyota’s entry with a new luxury brand aimed directly at Mercedes. The Lexus LS400 introduce in 1990 cost 25% less than the top of the line Mercedes and outperformed it in every regard. My last Mercedes was the 560SEL, maybe their most glorious sedan creation and my first Lexus which I drive to this day is a 2000 LS400. MPG? How about 14 vs. 27 on the freeway. Horsepower? 238/290. Comfort? Identical. Noise? Lots/none. Repairs: Constant/none. So Lexus was this elitist’s choice.

Computers? Apple. If you have to ask, you just don’t get it.

Home electronics? It really doesn’t matter. Nearly everything made is dead reliable and dirt cheap – premium prices generally add never-used features. So brand no longer matters. No one buys a Sony because it’s a Sony any more, as Sony is finally learning. This is the Era of Price.

Furniture? Unless you are into antiques, see ‘Home electronics’ above. I despair at how good cheap imported furniture is (as do the last two remaining US manufacturers in North Carolina) and how much better than even my best woodworking efforts.

Long time readers will experience no surprises when it (finally!) comes to photography.

Cameras :

Ultra small: Then nothing, now Panasonic LX1
Small: Then – Leica M, now Panasonic G1
Medium: Then Rollei, now Canon 5D
Large: Then Crown Graphic 4×5, now fughedaboutit

Printers:

Then Epson, now HP – because it does big prints using dyes, which I love and they don’t fade like the old Epson’s dyes.

Tripods:

Then Gandolfi, now Linhof

Lenses:

Then Leica and Zeiss, now Canon (how I wish Leica would fully automate their wides in a Canon DSLR mount!)

Studio light: Then Novatron, now Novatron (proudly and very well made in Dallas, Texas – at least mine was)

So, there you have one elitist’s choices. Notice how the photographic ones need no explaining, telling their own story. It’s when you get to kitchen tools that you are forced to expound at length, it seems.

Tomorrow’s viewfinder

Well overdue

Take any consumer or better DSLR and you will find it comes with a more than decent lens. Computer design and mass manufacture has made these multi-element wonders but distant relatives of their generally awful forbears.

So worrying about the lens is not the primary matter of concern for the buyer of a good camera.

Ease of use is the decider, I suspect.

And as Apple testifies with its ghastly glossy monitors, first impressions are key to a sale, be it of computers, cars or cameras. No matter that the thing appalls you after a week of ownership. Like that over bright AV system, it looked good in the store.

With cameras, as with people, the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and for a photographer that means the first real feel he gets for a camera is by peering through the viewfinder. Mercifully, with full frame DSLRs, the view is every bit as big and bright as it was through your Nikon F of yore. However, the tradeoff for the (D)SLRs excellent viewfinding is greatly increased bulk, weight and noise, the latter due to the flapping mirror mandated by the design.

This user is cursed with mediocre eyesight. Thus it’s hardly any wonder that some 30 years of my life were spent pressing the button on a Leica M. All it took was one look through the magnificent finder of the M3, or even better, the M2, and you were sold. And the only place you can enjoy a like experience in today’s world is with the M8, at egregious cost. Even if you are Bill Gates, the thought of dropping a $7k camera+lens is going to inhibit your use. It’s the same reason no one drives his Ferrari in anger. So these jewels get little use in the real world.

That’s why I think whoever gets the viewfinder right – the sharp end of the user’s decision process – will be on to a good thing. It will not be Leica – they lack both the electronic skills and the necessary money.

I do think that company will be Panasonic. Recall the press release I referenced here. You have to realize that the Japanese, those masters of modern design, adulate the Leica rangefinder camera. They are leading collectors of the marque and it’s no wonder that a nation with such a refined sense of style and design would find the Leica M as something to look up to. And the Japanese are too smart to deny that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As much is obvious to a between-the-lines reading of that Panasonic spokesman’s quote.

So, Panasonic, make that electronic viewfinder bright, blur free and with that fabulous suspended frame defining the field of view floating freely in space. And leave a bit of room around the frame so that the user can literally see what’s coming. Then we will have the best of all worlds. A zoom EVF with suspended brightlines, a slim and small mirror-free body, an offset eyepiece for added stability, no viewfinder hump and nothing more than a whisper when the button is pressed. Then the M2’s sublime design will have come full circle, though its replacement will be a mere fraction of the cost. Heck, give the thing a manual wind-on lever. That will stop gratuitous snapping if nothing else will.


The Leica M2 finder – Panasonic’s design brief. The best yet