Petition request: bigger buffer, anyone?

[gjames9142]

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I picked up an M9 last night and am still fumbling around, but curious about this limitation, put the dial on C and held my finger down. The camera gave me 9 shots. This is more that I would ever need.

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[Shootist]

I picked up an M9 last night and am still fumbling around, but curious about this limitation, put the dial on C and held my finger down. The camera gave me 9 shots. This is more that I would ever need.

 

You would think, right. The other week I was shooting a dance session and had my M8 on C mode. I ran out of shots, had to wait, Then continued shooting. Then the camera hung, a first that I can remember, red light flashing for ever. Only way to stop it was to take the battery out. Guess what happened, I lost the last 5-7 shots I had taken. This is on a $5000 camera. Just how would you feel if you spent $7000.

 

I love the rangefinder type of photography but.

[Jeff S]

I'd be happy if C mode came off my M8.2, and was replaced by a manual advance lever to eliminate the motor whirr and make the camera as quiet as my film M's. Different strokes (so to speak)...

 

That said, I'm all for more responsive cameras, if they remain simple. So, if Leica can increase buffer and speed...without increasing the cost for folks like me who don't need it...I'm all in favor. But, based on Andy's post (another consistently good one btw), it doesn't seem that simple.

 

Jeff

[3rdtrick]

Count me in on the bigger buffer. I would even pay to have it installed. Last fall our old steam plant (below) was demolished. I took most of the work pictures with my M9 but when it came time for the blast, I knew my M9 would not keep up and had to use my Nikon DSLR. The 2 frames / second would have been fast enough but I would have missed some of the best shots when the stack hit the ground because of the small buffer.

 

 

Here is the slide show with both Leica and Nikon shots. Would have liked to have them all be Leica...

3rd Trick Photography - Slideshow

 

So, where do I sign the petition???

Pete

[AlanG]

I picked up an M9 last night and am still fumbling around, but curious about this limitation, put the dial on C and held my finger down. The camera gave me 9 shots. This is more that I would ever need.

 

 

I am trying to understand how you could know that this is more than you would ever need. What if one day you decided you wanted to shoot a longer or faster sequence? Or right after shooting a 5 shot burst, you needed to shoot a 7 shot burst. The ideal camera is always ready to take a another picture.

 

"During the lead-in sequence of Richard Lester's 1963 film, A Hard Day's Night, an off-screen camera whirs away on motor-drive while a montage of black and white images of the Beatles flash before the audience. Ringo Starr smiles... whirr... Ringo winks... whirr... Ringo covers his eyes with his hands... whirr. The snapshots accumulate into strips, slide in and out of the frame, fragment into pieces."

 

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[Jamie Roberts]

You would think, right. The other week I was shooting a dance session and had my M8 on C mode. I ran out of shots, had to wait, Then continued shooting. Then the camera hung, a first that I can remember, red light flashing for ever. Only way to stop it was to take the battery out. Guess what happened, I lost the last 5-7 shots I had taken. This is on a $5000 camera. Just how would you feel if you spent $7000.

 

I love the rangefinder type of photography but.

 

Reliability is a totally different question, of course, though speed without reliability is sort of useless... And I think there are still rare write timing / speed issues with the M8 as well... but fortunately they *are* rare (and maybe happen mostly when the battery is under 50%?). I hope, though, they get addressed by the next firmware update.

 

Having said that, I'm perfectly happy so far with the M9s reliability. The only time the camera appeared to 'hang' was when I didn't have enough room left on the card for an uncompressed RAW but the camera still let me take the shot, if you know what I mean... it wasn't quite calculating the remaining space correctly (I'd switched from compressed to uncompressed). So not a malfunction but a bug for sure.

[dseelig]

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Bigger buffer yes!!!!!!!!

2 meter framelines yes as well

[mjh]

I believe some general explanations may be in order …

 

There are generally too processes at work, one reading out data from the sensor and applying some initial image processing, and another taking up where the first left off, performing whatever image processing is left to do and writing the image file(s) to the card. In between those two processes is a fast dynamic RAM buffer for decoupling the processes; while the first process writes its intermediate results to the buffer the second process picks up the image data from the buffer and releases the space so it’s free for capturing the next image. In some cameras these processes are executed in strict sequence, i.e. in continuous mode the first process writes to the buffer until it is either full or the photographer lets go of the shutter release button, and only then will the second process start to process and save the image data in the buffer. More usually though the processes are executed concurrently, be it as multitasking processes on the same CPU or actually in parallel on two different CPUs.

 

In an ideal world the bottleneck of the first process would be the sensor’s read-out speed – the sensor data would be read out as fast as possible and the CPU would always keep up with this speed. Likewise the bottleneck of the second process would be the writing speed of the card – the camera would write to the card as fast as the latter allows and the card would never have to wait on the CPU to spit out more data.

 

Current top-of-the-line DSLRs get quite close to that ideal scenario. Sensor read-out speed is usually a limiting factor and while I am not aware of a DSLR that could do justice to the fastest CF cards available, a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV or Nikon D3X aren’t that far off. But how does the M9 fare in this respect? Its buffer memory is probably 256 MB; the top-of-the-line offerings from Canon or Nikon have about twice as much but 256 MB isn’t too shabby either. The limiting factor appears to be the CPU throughput. The first process seems to be about as fast as possible; I guess that with just two read-out channels and a desire not to compromise image quality by increasing the clock speed there isn’t much room for further speed-ups. Unfortunately it looks like Leica (or Jenoptik) could only achive this by releaving the first process of all the time-consuming tasks, shifting the load to the second process. The first process is writing uncompressed raw data to the buffer, so the bulk of the image processing needs to be performed by the second process. It is the second process that optionally compresses the raw data and performs all the internal image processing required for creating JPEG files – and that’s quite a lot. At least this would explain why the second process is so slow; the buffer fills up fast but takes a long time to clear, almost regardless of the card speed.

 

It also explains why the buffer fills up just as fast when only JPEG files are to be saved. A camera with a really fast CPU could do most or all of the image processing in the first process and it would still out-perform the sensor, so if only JPEG files are required then ready-to-be-saved JPEG data would be written to the buffer which could hold many more images then. For example, in my tests with the EOS-1Ds Mark III I could shoot sequences of 12 raw images, but about 56 JPEGs before the camera would start to slow down. As the M9 apparently writes uncompressed raw data to the buffer, no matter what kind of output files are selected, it is limited to 7 JPEGs in sequence even when many more would have fit in the buffer.

 

So while a bigger buffer would certainly be nice (and it may or may not be possible to upgrade the M9 to a larger buffer; only Leica/Jenoptik could say for sure), what the next generation M really needs is a faster CPU. But then of course Leica is well aware of that. It would have been logical to base the M9 on the electronics of the S2, only with the given development schedule this just wasn’t possible. If there was to be an M9 in 2009 (and Leica needed to introduce new models to increase the revenue), it had to be an evolutionary step from the M8. So the electronics of the M9 is just an extension of that of the M8, providing the CPU power to cope with 18.5 MP and uncompressed DNGs, but little more. Not even the buffer size was increased by any considerable amount, probably because of hardware limitations. I take it for granted that the M10 will be quite different and probably share a lot of components with the S2. Time will tell.

[xtoph]

i would be able to make use of a larger buffer--or at least, a buffer that clears much, much faster.

 

i do a lot of documentary and street shooting, and even shooting well below the max continuous shooting speed it is easy to run up against the limit--and then you wait like a dork while missed pictures sail on by.

 

maybe it is all just a plot by leica to get us all to buy a second body, so we can drop one and fill the buffer in the second, then alternate back again.... (and no, that's not really a solution, just a joke).

[wparsonsgisnet]

Yes, please: bigger buffer. However it can be accomplished, 7 frames before locking up the buffer doesn't work for action photog.

 

I don't understand the comments that say:

 

1. I don't shoot continuous or shotgun style photog. It has been explained multiple times by several people that shooting moving targets (in my case dancers performing), is not that type of shooting. To be specific, one cannot safely capture a dancer in a leap by using continuous or shotgun style shooting.

 

I believe that the guys who shoot from the corners of sports arenas are using shotgun capture. If that is analogous to my type of dance photog, I can understand why they don't capture the magic moment. At 15 frames/sec, or 1/15 second between shots, a moving body can cover a lot of space. As you probably know, each week Sports Illustrated reviews more than 1 million images to find one for the cover. It's hard to get the right shot.

 

2. An RF camera isn't made for this get an SLR. This one really confuses me. I only use Leica M cameras. Thus, I need faster capture. And, yes, I could do this with a film M. [How many assistants does it take to cycle 36-load bodies for a dance shoot?]

 

I posted in another thread that I don't use SLR's and a few responders accused me of wasting my time or not being serious about photog.

 

The kind of picture I take works with an RF camera. At $7k the camera ought to work for me. Hell, at $5k (the M8) it should work.

 

If Leica doesn't think a digital M should do as well as someone else's SLR, then they should make a competing SLR that does.

 

Here is a shot I would not have liked to have missed because the buffer was full at the time. It was taken, like all of my shots, One At A Time, Single-Shot mode.

 

I will post some shots from a basketball game as soon as I reboot my stoopid windoze computer that has managed to fry its memory.

 

Hah. the Forum was waiting for an edit. How nice.

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[Jamie Roberts]

Bill--I love that first shot And yeah, you just shouldn't have to think about hitting the buffer IMO; it's not like memory or processors are that expensive.