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.

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.