Category Archives: Leica

All about the wonderful cameras from Wetzlar.

The Leica X1 and street snaps

Cameras, Leica

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.

Signs of intelligence at Leica

Cameras, Leica

A medium format DSLR.

With all the money wasted in making the underwhelming Leica M8, a dated and obsolete 35mm format SLR and the silly rebadging of Panasonic point-and-shoots, you would think it was all over at Leica. With its modest resources the company is foolishly trying to compete against the vast capital of Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax, etc. all of whom make cameras far superior to anything from Leica at a fraction of the price.

Well, finally, Leica has taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and is Thinking Different.

The Leica S2. A 30 x 45mm 38 megapixel sensor and a new range of lenses.

Clearly a premium product which should appeal to many professionals, this camera would seem to compete directly with the Hasselblad H range of digital cameras and, I would guess, would be priced similarly, meaning $30,000+ for the body alone. The DSLR format (much like the Pentax 6×7 in concept, but digital) makes for a far easier to use camera than the more tripod oriented Hasselblads and the lens range promised is impressive.

The sensor is made by Fujitsu, and unknown quantity, so it will be interesting to see how it performs. Much of the design work seems to have been done by Phase One, an established presence in larger format digital cameras. That’s encouraging.

Of special note is the fact that all the lenses will have leaf shutters which are ideal for flash sync, as they will properly expose the whole frame with flash at any shutter speed. Of course, the inclusion of a shutter in each lens makes the lenses costlier and Leica lenses are already very expensive, thanks to an overpaid, lazy, unionized German workforce. In fairness to Leica, the many Leica lenses I have used over the years have, without exception (OK, the 1930s 50mm f/2 Summar was a real dog above f/4) been superior to just about anything out there. The Apo-Macro Summarit f/2.5 120mm (equivalent to 85mm on a full frame camera) looks especially mouthwatering. And, joy of joys, Leica has finally discovered autofocus, some 20 years after Japanese SLR makers added this great technology to their interchangeable lenses. I would guess the lenses will retail well north of $5,000 each though who knows what the dollar price will be once the kindergarten known as the US Congress gets through with destroying our currency.

Promised for the summer of 2009, if the company survives that long, you can read more at Leica’s poorly designed, lugubrious web site – if you have the patience to get through all the mindless and time wasting flash videos.

If the camera ever gets into volume manufacture, it could fairty be said that this is truly the first innovative camera design from Leica since the M3, which I used for some 30 years. That game changer first sold in 1954 ….

Marketing and choice

Leica, Photography

America’s strong suit.

As an American resident for some 55% of my life now, I’m permitted to make value judgments about what we do well and not so well. Note the “we”. I may still affect an English accent but 20 years of American citizenship and a disproportionate tax burden grudgingly paid over those years very much entitles me to say ‘we’.

So America does lots of things very poorly. Since 1955 our foreign policy has varied from criminally incompetent to disgraceful. It is nothing less than a history of failure. Our secret services probably couldn’t find bin Laden if he had a permanent suite in the Holiday Inn behind the White House, and we continue to think that waging hostile, aggressive foreign wars is the solution to what ails us. We guzzle oil like there’s no tomorrow – not surprising in the absence of an energy policy – and continue our migration to adoption of the worst of the nanny state policies of a dying Europe. Our fiscal and taxation policies make some sub-Saharan dictatorships look the model of common sense and our insane greed translates into bubbles of excess more or less twice each decade. We have a public schooling system that is a criminal conspiracy against our children and one of our main political parties derives its funding from shake down artists – trades unions and class action lawyers.

That’s some pretty bad stuff. But the other side of the coin continues to surprise and delight, for we do so many things right.

Whether by accident or design we are exceptionally welcoming to immigrants, despite all the hatred we engender abroad. We are, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most generous and open-hearted nation the world has seen. We are, for the most part, supremely powerful and exceptionally benign in wielding that power. We are brilliant scientists and technologists and, most of all, we are the world’s business leaders. We grow more food than an we can consume. We are the leaders in all aspects of art and entertainment. Anyone can get an education for very little and anyone can get a job. We have the finest private schools the world has ever seen.

But, above all, we are a nation of hustlers, nowhere more evidently so than in our infinite skill at marketing. We can sell anyone anything. Whether it’s a fighter jet for the despot of the day in the Middle East or a newer, better car, boy, do we have a deal for you.

I am always reminded of our marketing prowess when I think about my mother, who passed away a few years ago. No way, she would tell you, was any marketer ever going to direct her thinking away from its independent path. But what did my sister and I find in her closet once she had passed away? Some dozen Coach bags and sufficient numbers of pairs of Evan Picone shoes to give even Imelda Marcos a little frisson. So, like the rest of us, the US marketing machine had got to the old girl.

In my fifty or so year life as a photographer I have always been fascinated by the externalities that affected my choice of equipment. Was I choosing based on need, economics or because the Coach-bag guys had got to me? I would like to tell you it was need, that money did not matter and that, like with my mum, no marketer was going to change my mind. Wrong on all three.

Let’s get specific. Of all the gear I have owned over the years which items mean the most to me? Worked best, took the best snaps, gave me that warm glow that comes with seamless execution?

As I don’t want this journal entry to stretch to book length any more than you do, I narrowed it down to just five. Five pieces of photographic equipment that changed my direction and interests.

In chronological order, with my ownership period shown:

  • Leica M3 – 33 years
  • Epson 1270 printer – 6 years
  • Rollei 6003 – 7 years
  • Apple’s Mac – 8 years
  • Canon 5D – 2 years

Actually a very easy list to make, for each of these machines made a big change in how I work.

What made these special, and how did American marketing affect my choice?

The Leica M3 was the result of viral marketing as we would call it today. A relative had an M2 and once I handled it as a teenager, I had to have one. First there was the world’s best viewfinder. Second was the relative silence. But above all, it just felt right. And it so totally meshed with my interest in street photography that Leica’s marketing can rightfully be said to have been undertaken without pay by Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Kertesz, because it was through their work I knew the rangefinder Leica. Leica’s marketing is, of course, some of the worst on earth. First, they made a device so good and so expensive that most of their market came from resales of used gear. When my last Leica finally saw the insides of the local UPS store last year I couldn’t help reflecting that after all those years of cameras and lenses from Wetzlar only once had I ever bought a new Leica product – the 90mm Apo-Summicron Asph, bought from England when the mighty dollar was well, mighty. Leica has got over its attention to detail and quality since those days so now everyone can own one. Which did nothing to improve Leica’s bottom line. Anyway, with that M3 the marketing feed was like that of a fellow painter recommending a brush. Word of mouth or eye, in this case.

By the time the Epson 1270 came around in the mid-90s, not only was I well and truly an American, but computer processing had sounded the death knell of traditional processing methods. And the dyes in Epson’s inks were so well made that great prints were limited solely by your ability to tune your hardware just so. The only reason this machine moved on was that I wanted to make larger prints, something the HP DJ90 readily offered in its 18″ x 24″ capacity, compared to the more limiting 13″ x 19″ of the Epson. Unusually for modern technology, the Espon truly is a Ten year digital device. Suddenly my default print size was no longer 8″ x 10″. The marketing input here was simple. I used to subscribe to an advertising magazine for photo gear named Shutterbug. It had started as a classified ad rag and then tried to migrate up market with the inclusion of content. The fact that said content reflected some of the worst writing ever put out by flacks dependent on free gear (“Sure you can keep it, if you like it”) was lost on me. They said the Espon was great, I bought it and, well, I bought it. I was lucky. Their lies were my truth. I lucked out as it really was that good.

In a roundabout way, the Epson reacquainted me with medium format photography. I had long owned a little used Rollei 3.5F TLR but never got on with the reversed waist level image. My brain had become lazy after all those years with Leica’s ne plus ultra viewfinders. But the Epson had opened my eyes to larger prints and, frankly, only rarely was the resolution/grain/whatever of my Leica snaps equal to the occasion. Epson had done Rollei’s marketing and the wonderfully ergonomically correct Rollei 6003 SLR, with a prism viewfinder, made for one very happy camper. Pretty much fully automated, the lenses beyond reproach, it made medium format as easy and as approachable as banging away with that Leica. Too bad it weighed about as much as a Mack truck. Not only was Rollei’s marketing nowhere to be seen – they don’t even bother advertising their medium format gear here and had they done so I would likely have avoided the product. Have you ever studied the sheer ineptitude of German marketing in the US? They just don’t get it. We don’t want things that last forever and get handed down to the next generation (only Patek Philippe gets that one right, and they are Swiss). We want the here and now.

Apple’s Mac was a no brainer and viral marketing was again at work. For the last five years of my life which saw me as other than my own boss, I ran an investment firm. We ran all our technology on Windows NT and had no fewer than six people (out of 50) running IT to make sure the daily failures by Windows would not show their ugly head in the front office. I was shooting the breeze with the head of IT one day and he mentioned he had just bought a roll sheet feeder to go with his Epson 1270. I chance to ask which computer he used at home and the surprise answer was “I use a Mac”. Now this is a fairly limp-wristed admission in the machismo world of Wall Street which regards Mac users to this day as a bunch of artsy-fartsy Nancy boys. Now because my CTO was a very capable person, I paid attention. Add the fact that my home PC ran Windows 98 (want to know how to cure world air traffic problems? Run the Civil Aeronautics Board on Windows and, after the first two mid-air crashes, traffic will disappear) and crashed daily, you can imagine I was more than a bit receptive to some good marketing. Even if it was for a fag product. OS X had just arrived and the machines looked like nothing I had ever seen. I own my original G4 iMac with the screen on a stick to this day, even if it is relegated to back-up duty. The machine worked, it did not lock up, the awful Photoshop ran nicely on it (Apple’s Aperture was not to become available until years later) and it looked great. As has every Mac since. And while I only work for one asshole now (me) I can still run Gates’s version of organized theft in Parallels, where Windows’s virusphilia is neatly contained in its own little incubated tent. I still need that for stock market applications – hardly Apple’s forte.

By the time I found out about the Canon 5D the Shutterbug subscription had been cancelled. Any number of web sites now published equipment tests and whenever you doubted the independence of the writers you could always jump over to comment boards. Even the smart marketers in camera-land couldn’t pollute all of those with purportedly independent emails extolling their products. Like any rigorous stock analyst I was approaching every piece of gear with the question “Where’s the money?” uppermost in my mind. So the decision to try a 5D was the result of word of mouth, too. People who used it loved it, I was getting increasingly irate with the amount of time wasted on the back-office functions related to film (all that non-creative processing and error correction) and people who splash out $3k on a camera body should, you would like to think, be pretty critical. After all, you could get a couple nice used film Leicas and a few of Wetzlar’s magical lenses for that kind of cash. The 5D made a huge difference to what I did photographically. The street stuff of Leica days-yore no longer interested me, the bulk and weight of medium format displeased me and I had grown to love the outdoors and the landscapes it offered. Plus I now hated, just hated, processing pictures. Just show me which button to press for a huge print, please. The 5D made all that possible – my migration to the front office of photography was complete.

And many thanks to all those anonymous, unpaid marketers who made it possible.

More censorship from Leica

Cameras, Leica

Censorhip is simply much tougher than in day’s past.

I wrote of Michael Reichmann’s appalling behavior regarding his review of a faulty camera from Leica (the M8) here.

Now an erudite posting, addressing the M8’s problems that Reichmann struck from his ‘review’, was censored by one of the moderators on the Leica User Forum. Not so fast, Mr. Censor – you can erase the message on the forum, but you cannot remove it from my news reader:

Now I do not know the poster, but the message seems rational and well argued. Why then was it struck soon after posting?

Leica’s Watergate

Hall of Shame, Leica

Just another case of a lack of journalistic integrity?.

When I trashed the Panasonic L1 I wrote positively about Michael Reichmann’s objectivity when he wrote about this camera on his web site.

I now have no reason to any longer think that Reichmann is an objective writer.

He has admitted (after clicking the link go to the bottom) that, in ‘reviewing’ the Leica M8 he pulled critical comments from his piece as requested by the Leica Company who had loaned him the camera. It is possible that many who based their purchase decision on his purportedly objective review would have refrained from buying the camera had these comments not been censored.

While he has since bought an M8, I assume using his own money, the reality is he allowed his objectivity to be irrevocably compromised, in this writer’s eyes, by the provision of a free loaner, trading it for self aggrandisement that comes from being one of the favored few to be graced with a pre-production M8. “Look how important I am. Leica gave me a free loaner.” Psychic payola, and good value, had it worked for Leica. They didn’t even have to write a check. In the event, collusion between manufacturer and ‘reviewer’ has, in this case, hurt both.

Had Mr. Recihmann published his adverse findings, explaining that Leica told him they had fixed the problem (they have not) that would have been quite different. In that case he could have stated that he would verify such claims in a follow-up to his review.

As long time readers of this journal know, there is no earthly chance that Yours Truly would ever be given anything free by any manufacturer to ‘review’, as a manufacturer’s publicity machine is not intended to spread truth, justice and the American Way. Rather, its sole intent, which is fine with me, is to sell products. Just don’t expect me to write manufacturer-censored reviews under the guise of objectivity.

You may check my ethics policy by clicking ‘Author and ethics’, below.

The closing three sentences of Reichmann’s apologia are breathtaking and I quote – my underscore. I quote, in case they should one day disappear from his site – please read his whole piece to put these in perspective by clicking on the link in the third paragraph above:

“But, in the end I would do what I did again, simply because I felt that potential owners needed to know what I had learned in my testing, without delay. And, I would have held back again on the issues that I was requested to because that’s the proper way to deal with manufacturers, who one assumes will take their responsibilities to journalists seriously. Enough said.”

If you can reconcile the first and second sentences, please educate me by leaving a comment, below.

So now that you understand Mr. Reichmann’s “….proper way of dealing with manufacturers….” you will know better than to believe anything he ever writes again on his Luminous Landscape web site.

Mr. Reichmann, let me put you out of your naïveté. A manufacturer’s goal in a capitalist system is to get journalists to write what is best for the profitability of the manufacturer. A journalist’s goal is to write unconflicted truth as he sees it, pulling no punches with regard to material facts.

And here is what you really meant to write, and do feel free to copy and paste it into your column – no attribution needed:

“Dear Luminous Landscape readers – I made a serious ethical and journalistic error in withholding information regarding product defects in the new Leica M8. I did this at the request of the Leica Company who had given me a free loan of the camera. In doing so, I made a material misrepresentation to you, my readers. I have seriously compromised my journalistic integrity and accept full responsibility to all of you who bought the camera on my recommendation and now find that, had my findings been uncensored, they would have changed your purchase decision.”

Trust, once lost, Mr. Reichmann, is seldom regained. Print a proper retraction on the lines of the above and I will be happy to publish it here.

As for Leica, the company may have knowingly released a faulty product. If that is the case, the class action lawyers will take care of them, assuming there’s enough money left there to make the suit worthwhile. Why, even Mr. Reichmann would collect something in the settlement.