A short trip with the CL

[saptarshi]

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I’ve rented the M10 and fell in love with it the first day. Tired of always manual focussing and wanting my family members to also be able to take photos, i was very excited by the CL and rented it from LensRentals for a trip to India. Here are some of my impressions.

When i took the body out of the box, i was unimpressed by the ‘lightness’ of it. The M10 had just the right heft to it. Moving on, i took out the TL 23mm/f2 lens which felt very light too (so unlike the denseness of the Sonnar which i also used with the M adapter). These initial impressions are quibbles, once you start using it, the lightness is quickly forgotten.

The body is spare with 3 buttons on the back, 4 way direction pad and two knobs on the top. The LCD readout takes it sweet time to appear when turned on, so for it to be useful you need to never turn of the camera. Even then it doesn’t turn on quickly and really isn’t a great substitute for being able to see your ISO and f stop, shutter speed directly from the lens/body.

I mainly used A mode but ultimately moved to M mode for best control. Personally I found the UI to be very nice, many orders simpler than Fuji’s. The touch focus aspect was nice for family members but i didnt use it. Focus was quick but not super fast and less so in darker conditions. I find manual focussing a baby (when not frantic) with focus peaking better than autofocus. White balance was great except under tungsten lights(quite difficult to fix without a wb card). The focus peaking highlights were surprisingly few, in that sometimes i need to see when the image was sharp as opposed to looking for the focus peaking red lines in the appropriate location. Fuji has 3 options for focus peaking. I was surprised how difficult it is lock exposure and refocus. I couldn’t find a way to do it.

 

Image quality is lovely and colors were *beautiful*. I used the embedded profile,medium contrast, and some vibrance/shadow etc adjustments. Personally, I adore Leica colors.

 

Now would i buy this? To justify spending this much money, I have to love the camera (thus allowing me be to irrational . Using the  M10 was exquisite: liberating and took gorgeous pictures. It’s in league of it’s own and doesn’t make sense it to compare any other camera to it. With the CL, i felt it sat in the same realm as Fuji’s and Sonys (from  usability point of view), and i couldn’t justify the price. It wasn’t instant love. That said, I can see a Leica user staying in the same world, but i’m invested in Fuji right now, but will save my way to an M10 and shift over (and yes, always manual focus)

I’ve attached some pictures from my India trip(a lot of baby pictures ...). Taken either with TL 23mm/f2 or the Zeiss Sonnar 50mm/1.5

 

Lightroom couldn't get the file sizes below 500KB, so here is a google photos album link (which i'll delete shortly)

 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/CYdVv2kukCh8OS0U2