Lens detection firmware upgrade please

[TonyField]

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The M9 is certainly a minimalist camera.... that extends to the implementation of the firmware. My pet peeve with the firmware is how it handles "Lens Detection". Yes, you can automatically sense the lens if you have a coded lens. Yes, you can set the lens type manually for non-coded lense. In the real world, this is not enough .....

 

A photographer may have some coded lenses and some non-coded lenses. Certainly, the coded lenses are nicely selected with the "Auto" detection. However, if you change to non-coded lens, you have to scroll through the very large list of lenses to find the lens you wish to manually assign for lens identification. This is silly.....

 

Why does Lieca not allow you to "tag" a set of lenses that are to be displayed in the manual list. For example, if you have an old 50mm F1, and a 90mm F2, both uncoded, why cannot you have ONLY those two lenses displayed in the manual lens setup. A few minor firmware changes would be needed. The first is to have an option to tag a set of lenses. The lens detection menu setting would need a new option of "manual tagged". If you select this option, only the two lenses you actually have would be displayed. This would eliminate the very annoying need to scroll the long list of lenses.

 

This change would apply (quite probably) to the M8, M9, M9MM, 240, etc. In other words, many M cameras could be updated for this with very minimal firmware coding and benefit the photographer to make easier use of the system.

 

In my case, I would use the auto-detection with the 75mm 2.5 and the 21mm 3.4. My manual tagged selection list would include the 50mm F1, ancient 50mm 1.4, 90mm F2, 135mm F4 and the 35mm 2.0. Since I also have a old 50mm 1.5, I could manually tag this with an alternate 50mm from the actual lens list.

 

Humm, Mr. Leica... please do something like this.

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[otto.f]

A photographer may have some coded lenses and some non-coded lenses. Certainly, the coded lenses are nicely selected with the "Auto" detection. However, if you change to non-coded lens, you have to scroll through the very large list of lenses to find the lens you wish to manually assign for lens identification. This is silly....

 

I have a User Profile for each uncoded lense, no sweat. If you've got more than three, you've got a point. But I bet your 90 and 135 won't give any difference with or without coding

[TonyField]

True Otto, there are "ways around the problem". However, you would think that an over-priced premium camera would have reasonable human engineering in the firmware. It is not rocket science. Adding the features would take the firmware programmer less than a week to implement such a simple concept.

[bocaburger]

None of my lenses is factory coded. I DIY coded the ones that require in-camera color cast correction, including non-Leica lenses of shorter focal lengths. The rest (anything 50mm and up) I left uncoded because aside from identifying them to EXIF, coding does diddly squat. I have lens detection ON, never turned it off. The only thing I ever used the manual lens selection feature for was experimenting to find the best coding for 3rd party lenses.

[250swb]

Perhaps use an EXIF editing tool and add the data later if it is important for the records. For 180 years photographers have been able to remember back to the focal length of the lens they used just by the look of the image, or making notes as they went, along with the exposure data (important to remember for film processing). So a few hours delay, or days, before inputing the data shouldn't cause a problem.

 

Here is a Lightroom plugin EXIF editor, but there are many available

 

Lightroom Plugin Offers and Easy Way to Add EXIF Data for Manual Lenses

 

Steve

[jaapv]

Most of my lens are coded, but I mainly use the EXIF data to add lens data when posting on the forum. That is, in over 90% of the cases I know what lens I took the image with anyway.