Interesting blog posting: Leica M8 Pro and Con: Pro

[pascal_meheut]

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What I find the most astonishing in Mike's "review" is his obsession with speed. Less than 10 years ago, it tooks hours or days to check the images.

No we can do it in real time and having to wait 1 sec more than on another camera is a major flaw ?

Same for motor drive speed. 2 or 3 i/s is seen as slow these days.

 

SInce when did we became filmmakers, shooting at 10i/s instead of photographers ?

[Guest malland]

Sean:

 

Mike's writing, starting back in the hey-day of the old CompuServe Photo Forum, has always been a personal view, and, if you knew his predilections, was usually useful and always entertaining. His two articles on the M8 are in the same mould. What I don't understand is why he should not want you to give another view, based on much more extensive use and testing. I don't think he has anything to lose; on the contrary, I would have thought that he had only something to gain.

 

—Mitch/Paris

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/

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[sdai]

Less than 10 years ago, it tooks hours or days to check the images.

 

Exactly. Now with LCD everyone seems to forget how pictures were taken. LOL

[waterlenz]

. I've offered to write a short counter-point article for his site, if he wants.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

 

Hopefully we will see this ;->

[sean_reid]

Hopefully we will see this ;->

 

He doesn't want to do it. We talked about it today.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[sean_reid]

Sean:

 

Mike's writing, starting back in the hey-day of the old CompuServe Photo Forum, has always been a personal view, and, if you knew his predilections, was usually useful and always entertaining. His two articles on the M8 are in the same mould. What I don't understand is why he should not want you to give another view, based on much more extensive use and testing. I don't think he has anything to lose; on the contrary, I would have thought that he had only something to gain.

 

—Mitch/Paris

Flickr: Photos from Mitch Alland

 

If one reads Mike's two M8 articles for entertainment, they'll likely be entertained. If one plans to make a purchase decisions based on those two articles...that's more problematic. When one reads the comments following the articles its clear that some are reading them as a real review.

 

Again, I like Mike and enjoy his site very much. He's an interesting and often perceptive writer. But, as a review, those two M8 articles aren't what they could be.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[waterlenz]

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What I find the most astonishing in Mike's "review" is his obsession with speed. Less than 10 years ago, it tooks hours or days to check the images.

No we can do it in real time and having to wait 1 sec more than on another camera is a major flaw ?

Same for motor drive speed. 2 or 3 i/s is seen as slow these days.

 

SInce when did we became filmmakers, shooting at 10i/s instead of photographers ?

 

One gets accustomed to being able to rapidly chimp shots with some of the other cameras so the lack of speed is noticable. A bit like driving a gutless car when one is familar with having more power.

 

Soon after updating the FW I took some shots with the 24 and 486 filter with full decoding on - I did a quick series of shots as I got to work on a foggy morning. When I looked through them I saw that the corners were cyan and my heart sank. It was only later that day that I chimped them again and noticed the delay as each pic got 'fixed' - maybe a faster CPU will be in the first HW upgrade?

[waterlenz]

Exactly. Now with LCD everyone seems to forget how pictures were taken. LOL

 

Techniques change with technology. Chimping is a new technique enabled by the new technology. In the past many took Polaroids to do part of what chimping enables. One can really 'nail' an exposure today with far less bother such as bringing out a Polaroid back - just one example of the usefulness of chimping.

[pascal_meheut]

Techniques change with technology. Chimping is a new technique enabled by the new technology. In the past many took Polaroids to do part of what chimping enables. One can really 'nail' an exposure today with far less bother such as bringing out a Polaroid back - just one example of the usefulness of chimping.

 

Sure but this is all a matter of degree... The M8 review mode is not the fastest on earth but it is not painfully slow.

The M8 is a unique offer on the market. Why not judging it for what it does ? This means spending more time with it.

 

Because if we go Mike's route, one can also say that AF is fast, useful, that this technology changed the technique and that the M8 has only a RF...

[DaveEP]

Because if we go Mike's route, one can also say that AF is fast, useful, that this technology changed the technique and that the M8 has only a RF...

 

....and let's face it, many of us have tried/tested the new fangled AF things, and while they are indeed fast, and 'can' get you shots that you can't get with MF or RF (I proved that point yesterday with some shots I took with a DSLR and failed to take with an M8), most of us have come back to RF, and to the M8 because 'technology' was actually 'getting in the way', not only because it took away much of the control, but because it added size and weight.

 

Image quality out of consumer cameras is coming up fast, but it's not yet meeting Leica M, at least in part because of the glass.

[rosuna]

I agree with Pascal.

 

I do not review photographs automatically! Never.

 

I would have preferred a wind lever for cocking the shutter (more silent, less battery consumption), so speed is of not interest for me (I only want a big enough buffer for taking 3 or 4 DNG files in a continuous sucession).

 

A rangefinder camera is not a reflex camera. It is not the same. There are some overlap, of course, but rangefinders make things just different.

 

See the lenses. Compare the 35mm f/1.4 of the Leica M with the 35mm f/1.4 of the Canon L series. Size and handling, DoF marks... Image quality is very high on the Canon lens as well, of course (they are really good designing lenses).

 

You cannot compare a manual focus and an autofocus lens. Materials are different, the manual focus mechanism is different... You cannot get a Leica M experience using a DSLR (a Nikon D200 with manual focus lenses, Nikkor or Zeiss, is more similar, but not the same... compare the relative sizes of the lenses!).

 

The most irritating comment (not by Mike Johnston) is that Leica lenses's quality is a myth. That is not true. Optical and mechanical quality, durability, size, handling, quality control, materials... Where can you find a Summilux-M 50mm or a Summicron-M 75mm?

[pascal_meheut]

The most irritating comment (not by Mike Johnston) is that Leica lenses's quality is a myth. That is not true. Optical and mechanical quality, durability, size, handling, quality control, materials... Where can you find a Summilux-M 50mm or a Summicron-M 75mm?

 

BTW, all the people I know and respect who tested Leica lenses on the M8 were asthonished. I know no other manufacturer who can get such sharp results at f/2 on the whole image. Especially with a wide-angle on a digital camera...

[ddp]

Techniques change with technology. Chimping is a new technique enabled by the new technology. In the past many took Polaroids to do part of what chimping enables. One can really 'nail' an exposure today with far less bother such as bringing out a Polaroid back - just one example of the usefulness of chimping.

 

Valid point...chimping is a great thing in place of the delay we dealt with in using Polaroid backs. But I suspect many who chimp today never saw a polaroid back, let alone used one. My primary use of the LCD when shooting digital is to show the AD or PR person what I'm getting so I know we're on the same page.

 

I can understand why one might compare image quality from the M8 to a DSLR....but from a functional standpoint they are different beasts. Honestly, there is room for both in this world and I suspect many of the M8's detractors simply don't understand it's existence in the first place.

[blakley]

I enjoy Mike's writing, and I have no objection to his posting his experience in a format that's not a full review. Furthermore, I'm not bothered by his dislike of the camera. But some things he writes are just absurd.

 

He says "I know some people are crazy about the lenses, but my experience so far is that digital de-emphasizes the importance of optics to the final result." OK. My experience so far is that digital emphasizes lens defects, and I think it's clear that manufacturers think so too; if they didn't, they wouldn't be recomputing all their SLR lenses for digital.

 

And what in the world is Mike's discussion of color accuracy? He makes a claim ("the camera has pinkeye") without showing even one picture, and without telling us if he shot with the filters which are already WIDELY known to be required, and then backs up the unsubstantiated claim with an anecdote from a pseudonymous friend who shot A DOZEN pictures (again with filter status unspecified) and post-processed them without using a system set up (via profiles and workflow) to handle M8 files? ......

 

Am I supposed to learn something from that?

 

Eddie Griffin putting a Ferrari into a concrete barrier doesn't mean the Ferrari is a bad performer; it just means Eddie doesn't know how to drive it.

[sdai]

This is exactly how Ken Rockwell got known by everyone on the Internet.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Let's not go there with Ken Rockwell . What kills me and really makes me swallow my own spit is people actually buy listening to some of this stuff and there so mislead and listen because they have a internet blog. Don't get me started my engines in neutral and going to stay there but just because there looking to make money does NOT make them correct.

 

But what really bugs me is us going 4 pages deep on something we know better of. It's just more s---t thrown into the wind.

[hankg]

Right! Colin was right on the money with that comment.

 

I just read the comments on the review. Lots of people with no real experience of the M8 who praise how correct the review is. How can one know that without knowing the camera very well? I like Mike very much and enjoy his writing but it's unfortunate that the article doesn't paint a more accurate and complete picture. I'd hardly know where to begin in addressing the misinformation that constantly circulates about this camera.

 

It's interesting, on the web, that a negative review is often called "honest" and an "positive" review is attributed to religious tendencies, toadyism, etc. What a muddled world is the world wide web.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

Just about everything online seems to carry the baggage of the writers preconceptions and pregiduce with very little effort at objectivity. I think in your reviews Sean, you make a real effort at an objective overview with practical real world proofs, so the reader can also draw his/her own conclusions. On line comments and reviews make no such effort and like the 'review' of Zeiss ZM lenses on Luminous Landscape and Mike's review they wind up being just the initial subjective first impressions of someone who briefly played with the product followed by comments from people who have not even seen the product.

 

I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said something to the effect of: It's been said that if you gave 10,000 monkeys, 10,000 typewriters and 10,000 years that they would replicate the works of Shakespeare. Well the Internet has proved this theory wrong.

 

Like $40,000 medium format digital systems Leica rangefinders are very good at a narrow range of things for a narrow range of photographers. The truth is I could slap a 135/2 L lens on a sub $1,000 Canon DSLR and produce a full page ad that after the filter of CMYK web printing would stand up to an image produced on a 39MP megabucks medium format back. For someone who is happy with their auto everything DSLR (and they are incredible machines these days) it must look like the hieght of insanity to be paying Leica prices for a manual rangefinder digital camera. However the same could be said for incredibly expensive medium format or large format systems whose technology is also 'inferior' to the latest 135 DSLR. It does not really matter whether the majority of DSLR users understand the usefulness of these niche products and feel that those who use them must have more money then brains. I've got the tool that best suits me, for my money that's all that counts.

[terrycioni]

I was wondering why owners of any camera would care what one person says in his blog. He clearly says that the camera makes good picturees and his remarks are simply his opinions and not the result of any kind of testing or objective analysis.

 

If you are happy with your camera and it works for you, what difference does it make? I still use a 3 1/2 year old 1Ds for a lot of work even though there are "better" cameras now. (I even own some.) The 1Ds has a rather poor LCD, it is very slow to zoom in when reviewng a photo. It is also slow in some other ways such as the time it takes to display an image after it is shot and more. It's big, heavy, etc. There are lots of things about it that can be criticized. But I seem to be able to live with it most of the time and I continue to produce excellent work with it. Just because someone says the 1DsII or something else (an M8 for instance) is better doesn't mean my camera isn't a good choice for me.

 

But then I had a thought: Maybe there is something about general Leica ownership that is different from my Canon ownership. I don't feel any allegiance to Canon at all. And I don't feel any need to defend or promote its products. Oh I might feel an impulse to correct something that is patently wrong, such as when Uschold wrote in the BJP that the Canon 24-105 had 4-5 stops of vignetting. But I might do that for any item I was intimately familiar with. If reviewers or photographers were to pan Canon as their opinion, I wouldn't care.

 

I'm pretty sure Canon, Nikon, and others will keep making new DSLRs and lenses. But Leica is a small company and the M8 is a unique prouduct. I'd suspect that some Leica owners see the potential vulnerability of Leica if there are too many negative comments about the product. So Leica owners have more at stake and surely hope that M8 sales are sufficient to keep the company and product line viable.

 

One person's blog, you have not been following the Internet slop as it relates to the M8 and the FUD which follows. As for Leica ownership versus other brands check the various Canon, Nikon and Other camera forums you might be surprised to find that their version of brand loyalty is equally over stated. You may not suffer this particular "allegiance" affliction but many others do - and religiously at that. The point being made here is not about my particular allegiance, or brand loyalty it is about fact versus fiction nothing more.

 

With all due respect - I assume you own an M8 - that is not usually the case with a vast number of Internet commentators, pundits and so called experts, and 90 frames does not constitute fair comment without allowing a counter response or viewpoint.

 

It is dis-indigenous to say that Mike Johnson blog is 'just a one person blog'. He is extremely well followed and read and as such he needs to be responsible for his journalism Internet or otherwise. The use of the Dante Stella quote without attribution or verification and then no follow-up when it was removed would not be acceptable anywhere else. So much for Internet journalism.

 

Best. Terry.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

I think you hit the bottom line Hank. As most of you know Sean and i are friends but this has no bearing on why i respect his reviews which are from someone that works with something for awhile to get to know the product and becomes involved with everything about it and you just can't do that with 90 frames, sorry it does not work. I've been doing digital almost as long as anyone and there are very few people that actually i use as weight to make a purchase. I'm still evaluating the M8 to this day, I love it but it has to work for me or it is useless. luckily it does but i am still testing it. reason i never even glance at some of these so called reviews is it provides no REAL information for me. Seans i can actually count on.

 

Crap that sounded like a ad but it is true, now he owes me a steak dinner. ROTFLMAO

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[robertwright]

well I let him have it on my own blog...

 

http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/writing/?p=63

 

I think I know why he was not interested in a rebuttal from Sean, it would make his writing look foolish. It is weird, because usually what Mike writes is at least entertaining, but this was way down the rabbit hole. Thought experiments could have functioned as a framework for evaluating some of the mythos of the camera, but as a review, it is not that at all.