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New Leica M in September 2016? The speculations.


Paulus

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Hats off to Leica - they're terribly good at keeping their secrets until practically right up to the moment they're officially revealed. Maybe it's because they're a relatively small company. The iPhone 7 is due out around the same time as Photokina and virtually everything, including available colours, has been out there for months.

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I hope I am not alone on this one, but PLEASE have a real bulb mode. No silly 60 second limit (or 8 sec ISO 3200) and ability to disable long exposure noise reduction. I am sure the other improvements are well implemented anyway ;)

 

 

+1. Yes! This the feature I want the most 

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Sensors don't process light the same way as film. If the sensor doesn't cool off, or gets hot from being on too long, you get very undesirable results.

 

And yet somehow every other camera manufacturer on the market manages to make a long exposure that's multiples of what the M offers. Even the CCD based M9 is better. I've done exposures lasting 10 minutes on a Sony and 15 on my Pentax. No problems at all.

 

Most perplexing is that the M, with it's compact size, excellent battery life and stellar lenses doesn't. It should be a great landscape camera. With it's metal construction the whole damn camera could be a heat sink for the sensor.

 

Gordon

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Hats off to Leica - they're terribly good at keeping their secrets until practically right up to the moment they're officially revealed. Maybe it's because they're a relatively small company. The iPhone 7 is due out around the same time as Photokina and virtually everything, including available colours, has been out there for months.

 

There are two reasons for this -

1.)  Leica's nondisclosure agreement which all employees and dealers must sign, and

2.) if anyone violates said agreement, the Men In Black will be dispatched from Wetzlar to, uh, "deal with" them.  :o

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I still maintain that (spot) measuring and setting manually is more accurate than taking a blanket compensation that you know is sufficient in most circumstances. Whether such accuracy is necessary in digital or negative film photography is another matter. It was (is) certainly so for slide film.  Whether one chooses the simpler method is of course the choice of the photographer.  But measuring will always be more accurate than an estimate, no matter how skillful one is at estimating.

Just as choosing to zone/scale focus instead of using the rangefinder is the photographer's choice. The discussion would be exactly the same. You would say many choose do so because they know exactly how far their subject is and I would say that the rangefinder is more accurate, if used properly.

 

 

As for speed, we are talking about digital M cameras here. As long as they don't have a more sophisticated system of setting EV compensation, the fastest way is indeed to use manual.

I agree with posters that there might be a better way of implementing the system, but it will always  be a bit of a hassle on a camera that is basically a manual camera with some automation stuck on. That is the reason for my suggestion to use the manual setting instead of EV compensation in my original post, which was a reply o a poster who had legitimate concerns about the EV compensation on his M.

 

That there are faster cameras on the market  is incontestable. That has always been the case. A Robot was certainly faster than a Leica III f. Still the Leica was the preferred camera for reportage. How fast must it be? 

 

I still don't get how you think one method uses measurement and the other doesn't. It's just turning different dials to get the same end result. It could be argued that the 1/3 stops allowed by exposure compensation is more accurate than the 1/2 stops movements allowed by the shutter speed dial. Especially as you note, with film.

 

Since you can set the wheel as direct exposure compensation I can't see how the shutter dial is quicker. If I walk from inside to outside the camera will automatically adapt plus a couple of clicks on the rear wheel. With manual I may have to turn the shutter dial 180 degrees, which is certainly slower.

 

Of course a spot meter is no longer the most accurate way of getting a correct exposure either, with digital cameras. The availability of a histogram in camera is far more accurate and allows exposure techniques, that give the maximum tonal range to work with, that weren't available with film, such as exposing to the right and highlight/shadow clipping choices. I would argue that the way to get the most accurate exposures consistently is to leave the spot meter at home and use the EVF.

 

Dinosaurs, like me, might remember shooting Velvia at ISO32 and calculating multiple spot exposures in my head. But those days are (thankfully for me) gone. If the next M gives me information in the finder about how far I'm over or under beyond a single stop (most modern camera give this information to three stops at least) and the camera finds a better way than centre weighted metering of the shutter, then it might become faster to use manual than EC.

 

Gordon

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And yet somehow every other camera manufacturer on the market manages to make a long exposure that's multiples of what the M offers. Even the CCD based M9 is better. I've done exposures lasting 10 minutes on a Sony and 15 on my Pentax. No problems at all.

 

Most perplexing is that the M, with it's compact size, excellent battery life and stellar lenses doesn't. It should be a great landscape camera. With it's metal construction the whole damn camera could be a heat sink for the sensor.

 

Gordon

Perhaps you should use those other cameras.

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Perhaps you should use those other cameras.

I think the point being made is that long exposure is sensor technology related and not against M concept (film M could do longer). There is a justifiable expectation of best (or one of the best) sensor technology in digital M.

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I think the point being made is that long exposure is sensor technology related and not against M concept (film M could do longer). There is a justifiable expectation of best (or one of the best) sensor technology in digital M.

I think the argument by Leica is that they incorporate the black frame reduction in order to have the best result.

Temperature induced noise has  less to do with sensor technology (apart from the CMos-CCD difference), it is more a question of temperature management, which might be restricted by the cramped space inside the the M.

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The issue with mandatory dark frame is that there are situations where waiting isn't an option. Star trails for example. Multiple exposures are another.

 

In addition, the user can do a dark frame after a sequence and apply that frame in subtraction in post processing. It's not even that hard.

 

I have no issues with dark frame subtractions but it should be up to the user as to if or when it's applied,

 

Gordon

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I think the argument by Leica is that they incorporate the black frame reduction in order to have the best result.

Temperature induced noise has  less to do with sensor technology (apart from the CMos-CCD difference), it is more a question of temperature management, which might be restricted by the cramped space inside the the M.

 

 

In term of long exposures on the M we have gone backward. The CCD allowed for about 4 minutes while the CMOS, that is more prone to long exposures, allows only for 60 seconds. The argument that incorporating the black frame reduction in order to have the best results is shaky, long exposures on the original Sony A7r without dark frame are much much better than those of the SL with the dark frame. 

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