Auto ISO problem

[tashley]

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Hiya,

A quick question: in the Auto ISO section of the Menu, I select 1/15th as the maximum exposure time when shooting in Aperture Priority mode but I can't get the camera ever to choose a shutter speed of under 1/60th - it merely raises ISO. Is this a bug or am I being stupid? Can someone else who has one kindly try the same thing? I am on FW 1.1...

[lucerne]

We had a lesson in interpretation of maximum exposure time earlier this year.  Take a look here.

i think you'll find it just a question of defining the limits because you may have fallen into the trap of choosing what they have labelled  maximum exposure to the wrong end of the scale.   I set my aperture, and with shutter speed set to A and auto ISO with a high limit of 1600.  The camera took a few hundred images last week and found the optimum combination every time across the whole range of day and nighttime shots.

Im assuming you are set up in PASM mode. 

Edited December 23, 2015 by lucerne

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[bwolfrom]

Yes, this is a bug/quirk with Auto ISO when you have the maximum exposure time set to anything slower than 1/60. The only way the shutter speed will go longer than 1/60, up to your set maximum, is if the light is so low that the camera has already maxed out ISO. It's weird logic that forces us into higher ISOs when we'd rather have longer exposures.

 

I've used Nikon and Fuji cameras in the past, and none have shown this behavior.

 

The workaround is to manually dial in a shutter speed longer than 1/60.

 

Here's another thread about the issue. Maybe more of us should email Leica about this!

[tashley]

Thanks! After much fiddling I worked this one out last night. Not sure if it is a bug or a quirk. It is a serious issue IMHO. With a 28mm lens and 24mp and OIS and a very shock-free shutter, the camera should be useable by many, possibly most people, to a 1/30th and for quite a lot of people to 1/15th. Issues of subject movement aside, a camera with less than market leading noise characteristics at higher ISO should run with the 'normal' algorithm in these situations, which is to drop shutter speed before raising ISO.

 

For me, this is a significant and irritating matter and not the sort of thing I anticipated in the Q. At the very least it should be correctly documented. 

Edited December 24, 2015 by tashley

[Bart van Hofwegen]

I agree with people who are annoyed by this behavior. It had me puzzled for some time, since I also use a Nikon D810 and there it behaves as I see it as making sense: only if the exposure time would get longer than the use defined limit, must ISO be raised. So, if you set 1/30 as limit and use aperture priority, ISO must no be raised until longer exposures than 1/30 would be needed. Currently, the Q uses the rather arbitrary value of 1/60 as longest limit. Faster is possible through the settings. That is more useful than nothing, but I find myself in situations in which I wished I could go as long as 1/15 (or even longer). 

 

That said, I do not use auto ISO that often. It is only handy in some situations in which tight shot timing is required in combination with specific lighting conditions. And part of my annoyance is due to the difference in operation to my other cameras.

 

I have this point on my wish list that I will update after reviewing the 2.0 FW (in which this issue was not changed, it seems), and I will enter that in the appropriate forum topic here as well as emailing it to Leica. I feel that anyone who shares this wish should do the same.

[DrQ]

The terminology leica uses here confuses me too. The Fuji version is straight forward but I'm having trouble with understanding what leica actually means with these max settings.

[quxl]

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The maximum shutter speed refers to the slowest the shutter will go in Auto ISO, not to when the ISO will change. So, if you have it set at 1/8 of a second, the ISO will increase at 1/60, and as the light gets dimmer it will keep increasing until it hits the maximum ISO set. After this, as the light keeps decreasing, the shutter speed will get slower until 1/8 sec (your setting). As the light decreases further, the settings on the camera will stay the same and the image will get darker.

 

This might be useful for... uh, I have no idea. My guess is the engineer who programmed it doesn't take instructions well, nor take photographs.

[Krusty]

I also think that this is a bug. I reported this more than 6 Months ago to the Leica support and they agreed that this is a strange behavior. I also tested this on the leica SL and there it raises ISO only, when the maximum of the allowed exposure time is reached, e.g. ISO 100 until 1/15 and then it goes up.

 

I hoped that they would fix it with the firmware 3.0 but sadly they didn’t.

[Nuggie]

The problem that I have with the Auto ISO with the Q is very different from the M10 (M240 as well) and Dlux 7. 

With the aperture set manually, max ISO 6400, max shutter speed 1/250, what happens with the other cameras is once both limits are reached, the shutter speed would drop until the exposure is correct may it be as low as 1/8. 

However, now the Q just stops dead at the limited shutter speed and as a result the image is under exposed. 

I find this a problem as now I would have to manually adjust the shutter speed each time. 

Not quite sure why they would change the way the auto iso's behaviour from camera to camera. Have written to Leica and they said that they would inform the techs. 

Anyone have multiple Leica cameras who might have noticed this anomaly?