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New Firmware for M8 and M9???


Kyler.

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Not useless - when I use the camera for wildlife, the animals are showing all kinds of behaviour - which means you have hundreds of shots and you only want to keep a few - and you are out in the bush and need to preserve card space and dont want to be sitting deleting and missing shots. So instead of wasting time, you protect the shots you need to keep and then hit "delete all". It is less pressing now that the M8 supports SDHC.Before you ask - in the film days I took a bag with maybe 100-200 films and kept one or two slides from each film...:o

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Guest Linsengericht
I seem to recall that all reviews praise the M8 and M9 for the simplicity of the menus...:rolleyes:

 

Leica fanboys praise whatever Leica decides to do :D

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I am sure someone somewhere finds the M8.2 "snapshot mode" useful as well :rolleyes:

 

The argument is not about the menus but about a button whose function perhaps could be programmed to act in one of two ways by user choice to ISO or protect by a firmware change. I think that is the only option, it would be unfair to merely reprogram the function to one not "labelled" on the camera and remove the choice of some users to retain the original function. (however few of them there are :D )

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Obviously a user selectable function for the button, so the original "protection" could be preserved.

 

In general Leica is praised for its straightforward menus. I think this is somewhat of a red herring. What you want is:

(i) a straightforward to use camera with

(ii) a simple menu slection of the things you change the most often.

(iii) a more complex menu providing detailed changes for those who need them

 

I have no objection to many menu screens if they allow you useful control of the camera. For example the Canon DSLR menus I find are very good once you know where things are.

 

I would "love" Leica to add a physical "ISO Dial" and "Exposure compensation" dial to the M10. The ISO dial could be a nice metal one on the top and the exposure compensation could be an "inner dial" just in front of and below the shutter button.

One can dream :)

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Remember, the button function was changed on the M9. Once again, isn't it a fixed function?

 

See Mark's Anatomy. The buttons can't be programmed. They are hard-wired to do one thing.

 

The other half of this is clear: If Leica could reprogram the M8's buttons, they'd have made that possible. Instead, as Jaap reminded us, making a change required a new camera.

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A mate of mine that works for Leica says that for the M8 it will add Full Frame capability, a Manual Shutter Advance Lever, a Cartier-Bresson Mode (??), 2000 Shots per Battery Charge option and an exclusive Press Pass Mode for ALL M8 owners to Top Social Gatherings.

 

Oh and some boring software updates as well.

 

No doubt it will be issued on April 1st.

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A mate of mine that works for Leica says that for the M8 it will add Full Frame capability, a Manual Shutter Advance Lever, a Cartier-Bresson Mode (??), 2000 Shots per Battery Charge option and an exclusive Press Pass Mode for ALL M8 owners to Top Social Gatherings.

 

Oh and some boring software updates as well.

 

How realistic is Full Frame capability ?

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Remember, the button function was changed on the M9. Once again, isn't it a fixed function?

 

See Mark's Anatomy. The buttons can't be programmed. They are hard-wired to do one thing.

 

.

It is a fixed, labelled, button but cannot be "hardwired" to do one thing as it is controlling a software function.I have read the excellent anatomy and that shows the connections which are hard wired but they lead to a "logic board".

 

It would be nice if it could happen but is just as likely as a fix for the autofocus :D

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There are scarcely any truly hard-wired buttons these days. A button could only be hard-wired to control a particular function if the electronic circuitry was factorized that way. If there was some isolated circuitry on the logic board that was responsible for protecting image files against deletion and if the Protect button was directly wired to these circuits, then it would be hard-wired indeed. But it has been a long time since electronic circuitry was designed that way. These days the only thing pressing a button does is to inform some processor that a particular button was pressed. It is then up to the processor to decide on how to react and this decision may be hard-coded – but it isn’t hard-wired. In the case of the M8, all the buttons on the left hand side are connected to the same connector on the DSP board.

 

There may be arguments against redefining the Protect button, one being that its label wouldn’t reflect its function anymore and another that making the function user-selectable would require additional code and additional menu options, both taking up flash memory. I guess the best solution would be one that was suggested before, namely to turn the Protect button into an ISO button in shooting mode when there is nothing to protect anyway. No need to make it user-selectable then.

 

Having said that, whether Leica would implement a non-essential change such as this is open to doubt.

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... There may be arguments against redefining the Protect button, one being that its label wouldn’t reflect its function anymore ...

Perhaps Leica could produce a self-adhesive label to stick over the button's name ... :rolleyes:

 

Pete.

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