I never could fathom this one.

When I was a kid, cameras and stereo gear came in chrome. The engravings were in black and everything could be made out from a distance. Especially useful when trying to make out the settings on your amplifier or what have you.

Then, some time in the 1970s, black was declared cool (that seems to be a renewed trend now, with as little substance as last time) and the sad result for users was that their coolness was accompanied by a general inability to tell what anything was set to without a lot of squinting and eyeglasses on the head.

In their mass market models, some manufacturers bucked the trend and you see all sorts of jolly colors in digital point-and-shoots today and I, for one, love the trend. But there’s little color available in the better gear, a recent exception being the Panasonic G1 which comes in a couple of jolly colors. Now Pentax has joined the movement:

I’ve always liked saddle leather brown. Maybe Canon could be persuaded to do a custom 5D Mark II? Nah!

Amusing writing.

There’s an amusing piece by Anthony Lane on the cult of Leica in the September 2007 issue of The New Yorker, a magazine renowned for using three words where one would do.

Click the picture to read.

The new Leica M?

Call me dated. Say I am out of touch. Ridicule my love of the mechanical age.

I have no problem with any of those accusations as all are true.

So when I wrote a while back, not a little intrigued, of the Panasonic G1, it was for no other reason than that this photographer’s schnozzer sensed a possibility in the making.

Revolution? Why, yes. A modern Leica M for the digital set because, whether you like it or not, we are all members. Meaning small, fast, quiet and with large aperture lenses for low light work.

And we all know who designs the lenses for the best Panny designs, don’t we? Can you say Leica?

These thoughts were brought to the fore when DP Review published its analysis of the Panasonic G1. To cut to the chase, it’s not ready for prime time any more than the L1 (which at least looked like a Leica M) was. But you have to respect where Panny is going with this.

Meaning they are inching closer to the Leica ideal – small, quiet, fast, unobtrusive.

Now all they need to do is throw the design book out of the window and …. take a hard look at the form factor of the Leica M – but 33% smaller this time. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a viewfinder that works in something less than California sunshine.

Still waiting.

Modern DSLRs are superbly competent, have great lens choices, come in a variety of sensor formats and enjoy minimal shutter and focus lag. They come from any number of manufacturers and share two bad features – they are bulky and noisy. The Mark II and Mark III variants do nothing to fix this and are very much in the land of diminishing returns, but it’s nice to see that Canon now has two full frame manufacturers to compete with – Nikon and Sony/Minolta. Best of all, by introducing the 5D Mark II, Canon has done a real number on the resale value of the Mark I and I expect you will be able to find lightly used Mark I bodies in 2009 for under $1,000.

Street and advanced casual snappers want something small, fast and quiet in their pocket when not hauling around the DSLR and they want a decent sized sensor, not one of those ridiculous fingernail sized things found in nearly every compact digital. They want instant on, couldn’t care less about the LCD screen, want an optical viewfinder and auto focus. They want a proper buffer so that snap-to-snap times are very short and they want a semi-wide angle non-zoom lens which suffices for most of the work the camera will be expected to do.

In other words, they want a digital Leica without the antiquated feature set, bulk, dated manual focusing and overpriced lenses of the Leica M8.

Well, we are not much closer to getting that in 2008 than we were in 2007.

Sure, the Sigma DP-1 is a compact with a large APS-C sensor capable of big, noise free enlargements. But everything else about it is wrong. The fixed focus length lens extends and retracts (why, for goodness sake?) making start-up times ridiculous and the whole thing sports what must be one of the worst user interfaces ever. The lens is also ridiculously slow for what you get.

The Panasonic G1 has some promise, dropping the SLR mirror, adding a competent electronic viewfinder for through-the-lens viewing, but pointlessly retaining the SLR form.

And that’s about it. The Panasonic LX-1, now in its third iteration, does some things right (so-so shutter lag, quiet, small, Leica optics) but has a lousy, small sensor and the lens extends and retracts. At least they now include an accessory shoe in the LX-3, meaning you no longer have to glue on your viewfinder the way I did.

Here’s what mystifies me. Given the sheer number of DSLR users, each wanting something small, simple and fast for fun use, why can none of the world’s camera makers get it right and put out a minimally featured digital point-and-shot with a fast 35mm f/2 non-retractable fixed focus lens, a big sensor and no shutter lag. How hard is that? They could sell these for $500 all day long.

So the Camera of the Year award goes to …. no one. The big manufacturers continue to refine their DSLRs to ridiculous extremes and continue to miss a vast, unserved sector – the very users of those DSLRs who no longer need to upgrade to 10 frames per second or 600mm f/2.8 lenses with IS.

The ideal digital snapper has to borrow the best features of these.

Take the lens and lack of shutter lag from the Leica, the electronic viewfinder and mirrorless/prismless design of the G1 and add the Sigma’s big sensor and you have a winner. Come to think of it, make two versions – one with a 35mm f/2 and the other with a 75mm f/2 lens. The size should be somewhere between the Leica M (too bulky) and the LX-1 (too small). Forget about Live View, face detection, wifi, interchangeable lenses, IS and all that other nonsense, sell them stripped and bare and photographers will make a line at your door.

Bigger sensors and cheaper cameras coming.

Right now if you want a step up in sensor size (and dynamic range, resolution, color fidelity, etc.) your choices have been limited to the established Hasselblad (made by Fuji) H3D range which tops out at 50 megapixels from a 48mm x 36mm Kodak sensor and costs more than most new cars. There’s a coming offering from Mamiya, the DL28 at $15,000 and Pentax is rumored to have filed patent papers for a medium format DSLR. The latter makes especial sense given that Pentax already has fine medium format lenses available for both 6x7cm and 6×4.5cm film formats.

Now rumors abound of a medium format offering from Nikon which may be 48x48mm or 48x36mm (like the Leica S2 at $40,000 and counting) and may be a DSLR or a rangefinder along the lines of the great Mamiya 6 and 7. I used a 6 for many years and just loved the compromise of negative size and reasonable bulk in a near-silent rangefinder body.

The significance of these rumors is that Nikon is more than likely to make a working proposition of a medium format digital than most. The Hasselblad relies on the traditional waist level format at a ridiculous price. I haven’t used one but reviews suggest the camera is clunky in the extreme with slow operating controls, a lousy LCD display and limited in-camera adjustments, not to mention seriously compromised metering. So the rumors about Nikon are especially appealing. If Nikon can confer its trade mark ease of use on a medium format body with a 50 megapixel low noise sensor at a price of, say, $10,000, I do believe the floodgates will open. Any number of pros and advanced amateurs will hold their breath at the price, much as they did when Canon started asking $7,000 for its pro full frame 1Ds bodies, but will nevertheless bite the bullet. With so relatively few pixels on such a large sensor the image quality should easily match 4 x 5 film cameras at a fraction of the weight and inconvenience, not to mention an increase of an order of magnitude in productivity. Have you ever tried scanning 4×5 film? I have. Not fun and not fast.

Whatever the rumors, this all spells good news for image quality mavens. More sensors by more manufacturers will mean lower prices and we can expect to see better ergonomics as manufacturers learn from smaller format DSLRs which have largely got the user interface right.

Finally, there’s the Phase One 645 body (looking for all the world like the Mamiya DL28 but with a Phase One back rather than a Leaf), rumored to take all sorts of different lenses from Hasselblad and Pentax. These are exciting times.

Probably costly, but this is all pointing in the right direction.