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Leica M10-R: Review by Jonathan Slack


jonoslack

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7 hours ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

I'm back in the queue for my own 10R, but Jono shot a few quick Cornwall garden shots so that I could see what Capture One does with them.  I just pressed "develop" for each and the results were fine, ,but the light was a little flat, so I gave each a few seconds of fine-tuning:

L1000881 1 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

L1000892 1 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

No problems seen, and very nice colors with little effort.

Sorry for the off-topic, I've never regretted the change from Lightroom to Capture One. I'm much faster to get the results I like in the latter.

Stefan

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I have finally acquired a 100mm/f2,8 APO Macro-Elmarit-R from New Zealand, after the initial one (sadly the ROM one with ELPRO) vanished en route or is sitting unloved in a dusty corner of a hangar at Aukland Airport, gathering cobwebs (the last place it was tracked). I think the 100 APO will work very well with the M10-R. It certainly works well with my SL

Wilson

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3 minutes ago, wlaidlaw said:

I have finally acquired a 100mm/f2,8 APO Macro-Elmarit-R from New Zealand, after the initial one (sadly the ROM one with ELPRO) vanished en route or is sitting unloved in a dusty corner of a hangar at Aukland Airport, gathering cobwebs (the last place it was tracked). I think the 100 APO will work very well with the M10-R. It certainly works well with my SL

Wilson

Excellent Wilson - I bought one a year or so ago - but it had oil on the aperture blades so I sent it back . . but I'm still very fond of my smaller 60 elmarit R macro - which does well on the M10-r (and the SL2 come to that)

 

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Just so everyone is aware in the UK (and most of Europe?) the M10R's well held and not shipped as Leica updated the firmware on all the camera's in stock before sending them out this morning. Mine is now arriving tomorrow by express delivery as a result.

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57 minutes ago, SJH said:

Just so everyone is aware in the UK (and most of Europe?) the M10R's well held and not shipped as Leica updated the firmware on all the camera's in stock before sending them out this morning. Mine is now arriving tomorrow by express delivery as a result.

Fordes had been told to expect their order this morning not updated but said they would install FW 10.20.27.20 for me prior to passing over to DHL (Delivery Hopelessly Lost) for transit to France, hopefully today but dependent upon the DHL van getting to Beauly for the pick up. I downloaded the FW update anyway, as I have a complete library of all the FW updates for the D1, D2, M8, M9, M240, SL601 and CL, for what possible use, I am not sure. 

Wilson

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I was using my recent acquisition of a 100mm Macro APO-Elmarit-R on my M240 today and I was amazed how well the focus peaking was working, even wide open. This must be a lens with very high micro contrast. It certainly is very sharp. I hope it will be even better on the M10-R, with the FW update. 

Wilson

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On 7/16/2020 at 5:09 PM, Tailwagger said:

I'm curious around any thoughts you might have about keeping an M10 as a compliment. 

 I also didn't see any mention of the EVF.  Presumably all is pretty much as it has been...

I''ll answer my own questions.s

1) I dont think there's anything the M10 does the M10-R can't. Not so vice versa. 

2) It seems to me that the black out times are noticeably up, sadly. That said the noise levels seem to be way down. 

Edited by Tailwagger
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On various questions that have come up in this thread:

Is the M10-R chip just an extract of the new S3 chip?  In particular, are the colors the same?

   Well, every DNG file contains two sets of parameters that describe the  mapping of the chip's Bayer data into the Standard LAB color data space, first under low temperature illumination (think "tungsten") and second under standard daylight illumination.  I've compared that data in S3 and M10-R files.  It doesn't vary with the firmware number, so it seems to be just the filter that is characterized.  The M10-R has a bit (~10%) stronger reds than the S3.  All other parameters are within a few per cent, but not identical.

  So Capture One is behind the curve?  I've used C1 since the days of the Olympus E-1 and Leica M8, and generally always give a few tweaks to any file that I care about, starting with either the data that is contained in the DNG (the "DNG neutral" profile, or the camera and lens profiles when C1 provides them).  For S3 and M10-R at present there are only neutral DNG profiles, and they work just fine as starting points.  I haven't had to do anything unusual to them.  (See my post a day or so ago.)

Capture One got blamed for the strange results that the Phoblogger reported not long ago, but I took a look at his article.  He reported on ten different cameras, and seemed to have just one evening in Brooklyn shooting the M10-R, under rather strange illumination -- outdoors under streetlights and indoors in what seems to be an Ikea warehouse under high flourescents.  All at ISO 6400 and above. He was concerned about the "lack of color depth" and the fact that a couch which he described as "nearly Hermes" yellow (that's a very light, bright yellow, you can look it up in Google) went white under his shooting conditions.  I hope he will provide more details on his lighting and how he processes the shots in his review. Sean Reid is expert in this sort of stuff, providing standard color subjects (fruits and vegetables) under even  Tota lite illumination. He doesn't talk about "color depth" but he shows that that with normal exposure these colors are fine up to at least 25,000 ISO.  In Photoshop or LR, which is why the blame baton gets passed to C1.

Jerusalem's municipal illumination is just as ugly as Brooklyn's, so I went out last night and shot at ISO 12500 with my SL2, a camera which nobody is complaining about, an orange shirt and a light yellow towel, and shot these colors against me, red cars and white cars to see what would happen to all of these in C1.  The pictures are too ugly for this forum.  The histograms show that the images have almost no blue intensity.  If I push the exposure slider up a stop or so, the yellow towel goes white.  If I correct with the shadow slider, you can sorta tell that the towel is yellowish.  Either way, white stays white and red cars come out a nice red.  That's all that I can add.

 

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Scott, 

As an experiment, I took a photo of the lurid yellow DHL box that my M10-R arrived in yesterday and opened the DNG as a "Generic" file in C1-20 (the latest pro version 13.1.1.24). I took the photo in subdued daylight inside my house  100 ISO f4/90th with a 50 Summilux III (e46 Special Edition version), a lens noted for its gentle colour rendition. Like you I am not going to post the photo here as colour balance on posted photos is notoriously inaccurate.

Also I would comment that it is some time since I calibrated my screen, as the Spyder Capture Elite 4 puck I have and its attendant software will not run on Catalina and in typical grasping fashion, Datacolor are not going to update the software but force you to buy a whole new expensive Spyder Elite X puck and software, admittedly currently at reduced price of €179. This is the second time I have been caught by this so I am going to look at other screen calibrators. 

In any case what does the colour look like on my screen from the M10-R with generic map? It is quite close but I think to get it spot on, I would need to bring red up a tad and reduce green/blue slightly but it is far from bad. As a quick fix I increased colour temperature from as shot, 5875ºK to 6975ºK and went +1.5 on tint. The yellow of the box then seemed pretty much spot on. I think there is some improvement to be had from a specific ICC profile for the M10-R, as and when Phase One get round to it. Unfortunately I have left my 48 colour swatch card behind in the UK, which I would have liked to have taken and compared and I think it is a bit old anyway at around 7 years, where the colours might have faded in spite of its being kept in its envelope. 

Wilson

PS From a little research it would appear that Colorite the only serious colorimeter competitors for Datacolour, get up to the same slimy tricks of not updating software and making the hardware obsolete at the same time, so I might as well stick with the devil I know. Miss Numerique had a special offer on for the Datacolor Spyder X Photo kit at around €140 off list at €199. This includes their white balance cube and a colour swatch kit. Once the kit arrives, although I don't use LR myself, I would be very happy to make some DCP profiles for the M10-R for those that do use it. W

Edited by wlaidlaw
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Sean Reid is just posting a color comparison of the 10R with the SL2. It's never possible to cut-and-paste material from his amazingly effectively blocked site, but he sent the following in an email, which I imagine he won't mind my posting (good advertisement for his terrific reviews!):

A few readers have let me know that some people, based on comments they have read elsewhere on the web, have expressed concerns about claimed DNG color shifts from the M10-R at high ISO. I have been doing field and studio testing of the M10-R for quite some time now and have not seen high ISO DNG color shifts from that camera. To help demonstrate what M10-R color consistency looks like as ISO levels rise, this new article includes a large table of ISO 100 - 50,000 pictures (made of the same subject, under the same lighting, etc.) seen full frame but at reduced size. Hopefully, this table will give readers a sense of what the M10-R's DNG (in this case converted in a version of Lightroom with color profile support for the M10-R) color looks like at various ISO settings.

Edited by bags27
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Once you have a colour swatch card with numerical values for each swatch, then in Capture One it is relatively easy to make up ISO specific colour correction ICC profiles by taking images of the colour swatches at various ISO's, correcting in the colour editor to the correct colour values and saving as an ICC profile. In LR you can achieve the same result even quicker by again taking DNG's at various ISO's of a standard colour swatch card, then use a DCP profile generation tool to make a profile specific for that ISO. The colour drift at higher ISO's is the sort of thing you would expect to be corrected at some future point by an FW update. It is a question of changing the look up tables for in camera processing of the sensor dump. I wonder if Sean's testing was done with the pre or post release FW.

Wilson

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I've said this before -- but look at the light under which the pictures that concern people were taken,  It appears to be sodium vapor streetlamps outdoors in a world of concrete.  That's quite a challenge for AWB  When I shoot under such light I get "as shot" recommendations like 1600K, and taking a reference shot with a grey card produced really crazy results like 900K and a color shift of 20 units (C1 scale) in the green direction.  You can neutralize things a bit, but I prefer to leave the yellow in since that's how things look to me under streetlights.  It's easy to see how neutralizing the greys and pushing up exposure to bring up shadows will lead to very strange colors.

Edited by scott kirkpatrick
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I was always told that anything other than black and white under sodium lights, particularly the non fluorescent corrected yellow ones, was impossible because its light is effectively monochromatic (see spectrum below)

Wilson

 

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My M10-R (black) arrived today from the Leica SoHo store. It was shipped yesterday.

Eli, the owner, is great to deal with. Highly recommended!

Unboxing any Leica product is a very pleasurable experience. Here it is.

Regards,
Bud James

Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/budjamesphoto.

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vor 12 Stunden schrieb budjames:

My M10-R (black) arrived today from the Leica SoHo store. It was shipped yesterday.

Eli, the owner, is great to deal with. Highly recommended!

Unboxing any Leica product is a very pleasurable experience. Here it is.

Regards,
Bud James

Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/budjamesphoto.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

Box placed on the corner of the table with the flaps protruding from its edges. Someone could inadvertently bump into them and there goes the camera. 

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