thighslapper

Fuji manage 40mpx in a BSI CMOS APS-C sensor with good dynamic range and excellent IBIS. If the will is there Leica can do it. Both the 40mpx Fujis are chunky compared to the CL but they do have tilt/swivel screens, a biggish EVF and bigger battery. Fuji admits that many of it's lenses don't come up to 40mpx standard, but I assume Leica have built in some headroom in the TL lens range. The image quality from the XH-2 is astonishingly good considering the sensor size.

Another UK based institution cashing in and selling out to an overseas company (again, as it happens). I'm still using Pageplus under Parallels on my Mac and have never needed to upgrade as it does everything I need. Viewranger (by far the best mapping software) sold out to Outdooractive and despite promising to honour perpetual licences for previous maps dumped the software and their own replacement made things unusable. It was obvious Viewranger knew this as signing up to transfer everything you had to Outdooractive included a clause waiving any legal claim against Viewranger. Cynically Viewranger also updated their app the year before and after the change it became inactive, whether ypu agreed to the transfer or not. Luckily I had the old version on another iPad and everything still works fine and I still have access to the £200+ worth of maps I downloaded. I'm also not optimistic .... once someone else has full control they can cite all manner of 'market or financial pressures ' that allow them to renege on 'promises'.

I moved from a well spec'd 2021 iMac to a studio M2 Max with 64Gb and 4Tb ...... and assumed it would handle everything I could throw at it. LR regularly causes an 'out of memory' warning which NEVER happened with any of my previous Mac's. Everything was copied over from my original Mac so all the LR settings and how things are cached is the same...... and I thought the whole point of the later versions of the OS on these machines was to dynamically manage memory anyway and they boast it can run multiple applications on 16Gb with ease. Otherwise it's exceptionally zippy, silent and never runs hot.

I think you misunderstood ..... there is no noise in the scene you saw so if you want a true representation of it then removing noise ... either inherent due to high ISO or through processing ..... gives you a more faithful image. Some like noise because it gives an old style 'film look', which is ok by me. I just prefer as little noise as possible. The current AI NR in LR comes with minimal processing penalty unless you are into highish ISO's or are very heavy handed. The one thing that is hard to avoid however in raising shadows is muddy colours as the colour data is lacking to start with and no amount of NR or AI trickery seems able to avoid that. You did pick a particularly problematic image where processing is going to involve a lot of compromises anyway .... it just depends what's most important in what you want to achieve and portray. Apart from some minor differences in Dynamic Range and basic colour balance the sensor output from most recent cameras is essentially the same so there should be no real need to change your processing ..... unless the camera has changed what you are actually taking photos of and how you do it, that is .....

Being a bit of a purist ....... noise wasn't present in the scene you photographed so why accept it in the image if you can get rid of it. No doubt the 'nostalgia' forum members will like the pseudo grain film look ..... but unless you deliberately want to make faux analogue images it's not for me.

Quite the reverse ...... making small high quality lenses and adjusting them to work perfectly to the close tolerances required for the M's mechanical rangefinder mechanism is not cheap. The M is designed to work with the original form factor so that old lenses function well. The L mount bodies are free of these constraints and it's easier to make larger lenses and incorporate modern electronics and focussing. The price differentials are not that great ..... until you get to the more exotic faster and better corrected M lenses, where they are made to a critical specification and then priced accordingly.

I'd suspect one of the read-out channels on the sensor ...... or more likely the bus that sends data to the card is knackered which explains the regularity and what looks roughly like a 1:8 periodicity.

The first image I have shot on film since may 1999 ....... Ektar 100. A whole new experience after a quarter of a century of digital photography ......

Presumably LR is adding something to the metadata that Leicas firmware cannot deal with when it comes to rendering the file. I can imagine what the reply from Leica would be ...... this is hardly what they would anticipate users doing.

the V850 came bundled with Xrite i1Scanner software and both transparent and reflective targets ..... the disk was unreadable and the software download page missing but customer support sent me a link. (You need the reg codes from the supplied disk to activate it). You basically scan the target with any scanner modifying settings off .... load scan into the software and it compares it to the profile it has for that target and creates the ICC profile that you can load into the scanner software (Vuescan in my case). In fact only 5% of the target was out of gamut so the default rendering from the scanner is already very good. Like almost everything to with scanning the documentation is crap, the software unintuitive and it takes some head scratching to get everything working as intended.

I thought long and hard about scanner versus the macro lens/photographing option. As I have mostly old slides, negatives and prints that I wanted to digitise for posterity and also to compile a book of photos for our 45 year University reunion I opted for the Epson V850. The original image quality is often suboptimal (probably inebriate) and there is only so much you can get out of 35mm even if finely grained and well exposed so I feel the marginal quality benefits of other methods for these are not worth it. The great advantage is than once set up, you can load 12 slides, press a button and go and do something else. Getting optimum quality has been a week of research, testing and fine tuning .... and as you say setting the right height adjustment is critical .... and that varies slightly between thicker Gepe glass mounted slides and cheapo card ones. So does calibrating the scanner to get a correct ICC profile which makes a difference to the final scan colours. After a fair bit of testing I also found 4200dpi to be the best resolution ..... I suspect this has something to do with the higher res lens changeover after 3200 and is in fact better than 6400dpi. Double sampling the scan and Multiexposure (available using Vuescan) also improves the output and as it's all automated the extra time involved isn't a burden. Dust removal works very well, even for the cruddiest slide ..... which is one less task in processing later if I was to do it all manually with a macro lens. All in all, the end results are more than adequate for my needs and the odd A3 print I have done so far looks perfectly acceptable. I'm currently running through a few rolls of 35mm negative and transparency film in a Nikon F after a nearly 35 year break from 'proper' photography and will see whether I can get results which I am satisfied with ..... if not I may have to try the other options.....

The build quality of the current GFX100 ii is first class and with the option of the tiltable very high res EVF would make it a good studio camera. Can't speak for the tethering functionality and reliability though as I have never tried it. Camera and lenses offer good value for MF compared to the competition.

It's this user variability that most owners find so frustrating. The problems are clearly related to specific settings, conditions and the way photographers use their particular camera. My personal view is that all this results from Leica porting code from one camera model to the next and just tinkering with it to make it usable and incorporate new technology. As a result you get cumulative potential problems with suboptimal coding. Ideally they should do a bottom up re-write, which unfortunately is more expensive and time consuming. In my time I have reported many glitches to Leica ...... only to get the reply that they couldn't replicate them .... or they didn't regard them as an issue with the camera ..... so as far as they were concerned they didn't exist.

I'm afraid all these issues ....... and if you look through the forum you will see they go back to M8 days .... are just a reflection of the fact that Leica is a camera company and not a computer company. In the past I believe it has outsourced a lot of the firmware writing and it's own in-house Software Department (as Kirk mentions) is tiny in comparison to the likes of Panasonic, Sony, Nikon et al. Having been a Beta Tester for a good number of Leica Digitals the number of folk involved and the time period just don't allow for every combination of settings and variables, so things inevitably slip through. Yes, dropping 9k on a camera that isn't 100% reliable 100% of the time is no laughing matter ..... but if you are going to buy into Leica you just have to accept you will not get the same level of rigorous testing that Fuji might use ..... and that issues are just not going to be fixed quickly. You do get a camera that is lovely to use and hold though .... when it's working, that is.....

The Q series are compactish carry anywhere general photography cameras so I'm not convinced absolute pixel count is a priority anyway. Leicas Q3 crop options are just a sales gimmick ..... given the ranges we are talking about you can get all that by not being bone idle and just get closer or further away. I got a used Q2 reporter.... which actually appears unused ..... at a significant saving and I can't see that the Q3 gives you a lot more for what it was designed to do. The q2 has well de-bugged firmware that is now pretty glitch free ..... unlike Leica's usual latest releases where you are basically a beta tester for the first couple of years .... I'd get the camera you know and love rather than a punt on something with new features that you can live without. If you are thinking a couple of years hence the price differentials may have closed a fair bit and the choice may then be a lot less of a financial concern.