This is why I bought an M10R

[Andrew Spackman]

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So I have bought my first Leica in 1979 (An, M2 from 1962 with 50mm Summicron, carrying case and filters for £160) and here I am, many years later, wondering whether to spend thousands on this latest Leica which has just been launched. The reviews are not good. All the early cameras have to be returned for attention. And every lens needs a filter. So I follow the discussion on this forum. And I think it was Jono’s contributions above all that encouraged me to buy the M8 in 2007. That turned out well for me and the M9 and M240 followed in due course, again informed by Jono’s reviews and his readiness to engage in discussions. 

So after five years with the M240 do I change now? Not sure, but whatever I decide will be informed by Jono’s and others’ contributions to the forum. 

Incidentally, I must put a roll of film through the M2...

Andrew

 

 

[Pixeleater]

Quote

The reviews are not good. All the early cameras have to be returned for attention. And every lens needs a filter. 

Andrew, I'm interested in your comment about all the early cameras having to be returned. Can you please elaborate? Thanks.

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[jonoslack]

2 minutes ago, Andrew Spackman said:

So after five years with the M240 do I change now? Not sure, but whatever I decide will be informed by Jono’s and others’ contributions to the forum. 

Incidentally, I must put a roll of film through the M2...

Andrew

 

 

Thank you - and if your M240 is still doing the business . . . . . And you don’t want to take pictures of boats at f1.4 in bright sunlight . . . . 

[jonoslack]

1 minute ago, Pixeleater said:

Andrew, I'm interested in your comment about all the early cameras having to be returned. Can you please elaborate? Thanks.

I think he was talking about the M8, not the M10-R

[Pixeleater]

Thanks Jono. I missed the inference.

[Tailwagger]

7 minutes ago, Andrew Spackman said:

So after five years with the M240 do I change now? Not sure, but whatever I decide will be informed by Jono’s and others’ contributions to the forum. 

And in the context, its important note that not everyone who is contemplating trading up is doing so from a 3 month old M10-P.  For those looking to upgrade to a new model, the current price differential between a new P and R, at least here in the US, is $500, not thousands. 

[Dr No]

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I have been enlightened by a phenomenon I had no idea existed - not cancel culture but "cancel technology" the original and worst social injustice.

 😂

Those pesky masters of the medium are finished now!

Edited August 27, 2020 by Dr No

[dkmoore]

It is a good thing HCB upgraded to the M3 because his earlier works were crap.

I also learned today that I am dumb in the eyes of WD240

Edited August 28, 2020 by dkmoore

[Pixeleater]

5 hours ago, jonoslack said:

I’m perfectly aware of the possibilities of the M11 and I don’t dispute that the M10-R is an interim camera,

Jono, thank you for sharing your insight and experience with the M10R. I find it very interesting and appreciate your tempered replies to this thread. Since you were able to beta test the M10R for a year prior to its official release are you in a similar position with the M11? Are the possibilities of the M11 a year out? 2 years? What does interim mean in terms time frame? Just asking for curiosity sake.

[jmahto]

5 hours ago, jonoslack said:

Thank you - and if your M240 is still doing the business . . . . . And you don’t want to take pictures of boats at f1.4 in bright sunlight . . . . 

Jono, I think your original post was very informative. I have a question on color shift. Does color shift happen if you recover highlights? My M240 does shift colors if I overexpose sky. Reducing exposure in PP doesn’t bring back the same color as in properly exposed color. 

[scott kirkpatrick]

6 hours ago, jonoslack said:

No, it was rude - and you’ve made your point - and I’ve tried to reply in a measured and civil tone (and it really doesn’t seem like you’ve read what I’ve written as you haven’t answered it, but simply gone off on a different version of the same tirade). I’m not casting the work of previous photographers in doubt, perhaps you are? Wonder why I bothered

It was rude.

"Casting the work of previous photographers in doubt" is so completely illogical and ill-informed that I was simply trying to ignore the whole three or four pages of this thread that ensued.  There is a whole literature of pretending to scold famous photographers for the technical inadequacy of their best known prints, which hasn't harmed the pictures one bit.  Koudelka doesn't need an M10-R to go back and reshoot his very wide angle shots of the Wall between Israel and the Palestinian world, as Leica some time ago gave him an S[007] cut down for that exact purpose. And as a naive fanboy being enticed to send their precious Euros to Wetzlar, I have no objection as long as a camera gives me pleasureable results for 5-10 years.  In the case of the M10-R upgrade, I sold an M240 and M10 that had begun to accumulate dust, and came out ahead on the deal.

[LocalHero1953]

I don't think too many people here would disagree with the rational argument you put forward in this last post @250swb. You lost the attention of a good many readers though with the way in which you expressed it in your first post, which I also thought was rude. If you'd posted the last one first, the thread would not have headed down the rabbit hole it did. Having read your posts before, and found them useful, I am surprised that you wrote the first as you did.

Edit. But I do disagree with your last sentence. I don't think that is the overtone of this thread. I write as someone who sold their M240, owns no M now, and has no intention of buying a M10 of any flavour, but still finds it helpful and interesting to read about them.

Edited August 28, 2020 by LocalHero1953

[mike3996]

Why do you keep talking about megapixels when the whole thread was started on another subject matter (highlight headroom; recoverability).

 

Our ancestors in the 40s probable launched similar tirades about new film stocks being developed: "oh no the old ASA 80 isn't good enough for you anymore,  you got to be fancy and shoot that 160 speed film, like that SOLVES the problems of the world!"

[jonoslack]

45 minutes ago, 250swb said:

I can imagine many here having 35mm prints on their walls, but how many still have 6mp prints they once considered 'photography' on their wall and not of children or pets? I don't expect many to answer that because the overtone of this thread is that satisfaction with a new camera and the images it makes will last only as long as the next camera.

 

 

Hi Steve

I’ve read your post, and I don’t have much to take issue with, except perhaps the last sentence above, which I will answer: 

Personally I try to keep ‘gear’ away from ‘photographs’. I have a lot of my photos scattered around on the walls, here and in Emma’s parents house in Cornwall (even on some other peoples walls). I don’t think there are more than a couple of 35mm shots. Most are A2 and A3 sized prints taken in around 2003 with a 5mp Olympus E1 camera (They looked fine then and they still do, and what a lovely camera that was), Then there are quite a few taken a bit later with a 14mp Kodak SLRn. Some with the original Monochrom and a few more with the M8 and M9. I don’t think that there is anything more recent than that (the walls are full - although mostly with paintings by others). I actually think my photography has improved since then, but not because of the cameras but because of practice.

On the other hand, better high ISO, Colour and Dynamic range do give me the opportunity to really forget about the camera and concentrate on the image, and that must surely be a good thing.

[jonoslack]

7 hours ago, Pixeleater said:

Jono, thank you for sharing your insight and experience with the M10R. I find it very interesting and appreciate your tempered replies to this thread. Since you were able to beta test the M10R for a year prior to its official release are you in a similar position with the M11? Are the possibilities of the M11 a year out? 2 years? What does interim mean in terms time frame? Just asking for curiosity sake.

Hi there

I have a problem here, if I knew the answer to this, then I couldn’t possibly tell you, and if I don’t know the answer then my guess is as good as yours. But I’m not that rich, and I’m not an idiot, so I would be unlikely to have just bought an M10-R if I thought it was going to be superseded in a month or so! (But I could be wrong!!!)

[jonoslack]

4 hours ago, jmahto said:

Jono, I think your original post was very informative. I have a question on color shift. Does color shift happen if you recover highlights? My M240 does shift colors if I overexpose sky. Reducing exposure in PP doesn’t bring back the same color as in properly exposed color. 

The M10 did that as well - usually pinkish. The M10=R seems to be pretty good about this (that’s in Lightroom, I can’t vouch for C1). 

[250swb]

3 hours ago, jonoslack said:

Hi Steve

I’ve read your post, and I don’t have much to take issue with, except perhaps the last sentence above, which I will answer: 

Personally I try to keep ‘gear’ away from ‘photographs’. I have a lot of my photos scattered around on the walls, here and in Emma’s parents house in Cornwall (even on some other peoples walls). I don’t think there are more than a couple of 35mm shots. Most are A2 and A3 sized prints taken in around 2003 with a 5mp Olympus E1 camera (They looked fine then and they still do, and what a lovely camera that was), Then there are quite a few taken a bit later with a 14mp Kodak SLRn. Some with the original Monochrom and a few more with the M8 and M9. I don’t think that there is anything more recent than that (the walls are full - although mostly with paintings by others). I actually think my photography has improved since then, but not because of the cameras but because of practice.

On the other hand, better high ISO, Colour and Dynamic range do give me the opportunity to really forget about the camera and concentrate on the image, and that must surely be a good thing.

But it comes down to what you want your photography to do for you, and for many photographers the camera now dictates what that is.

As an example, if anybody mentions 'HDR' on the forum it is often met with at the very least 'I don't like it' or 'it's fake'. Of course you know as well as me that an M10 can record more dynamic range than the human eye in one pass. So it's an HDR camera without all the weirdness, how ironic. So what is it photographers are photographing? In effect as headroom increases they are photographing more and more of what they can't see, yet say it gives them the photographs they want. That can be nice surprise seeing something you never saw, but it doesn't record squinting into the sun or not being able to see into dark shadows, it exceeds the human eye, so becomes as 'fake' as HDR.

OK so I'm a traditionalist and like to use a camera to record only what I see, blinding light, dark shadows and all. So a few thousand dollars for 'a bit more headroom' will undoubtedly be a red rag to a bull while photography generally is becoming increasingly bland and thoughtless. There are people making an effort at expressing themselves through photography, like in the olden days choosing a film to suit their vision, but then there are people who look at the latitude of the latest camera while kidding themselves the image is more real because it has more pixels and more dynamic range. The ultimate cosh is pressing 'Auto' in Lightroom or Photoshop which will re-arrange your high latitude image all over again into something even more unreal. So I see 'a bit more headroom' as the tip of the crisis because photographers are encouraged to accept it without also thinking about where it takes them. It's the creation of a fantasy world and maybe that's what people need, it's still photography after all, but the limited DR of a 6mp camera may be the point when digital was at it's most honest.

Edited August 28, 2020 by 250swb

[mike3996]

We all know how recent cameras (and some older cameras too -- Sonys and Nikons have had a vast DR for a decade now) can pull the (pretty tasteless IMO) overprocessed HDR look, but I think for every tasteless HDR shot we see dozens of neat and tasteful  shots that don't scream "HDR" at our faces.

Besides, even for traditionalists, there's always been HDR involved. Prints are 6-7 bits of DR; computer screens for the most part are 8 bit (technical limitation of JPEGs) and only recently has the march for more bit depth started in mobile phones and new picture formats like HEIF.

Print film has always had huge DR and it's commonly applied that you'd meter for shadows because you can pull the highlights down via development choices. Digital cameras have definitely had more than 8 bits of DR for the last 2 decades.

If you are satisfied with the bog-standard "guns don't kill people" argument, I like to think that it's not the camera that ruins the shot by HDR processing, it's the photog behind the camera. 

Edited August 28, 2020 by mike3996

[scott kirkpatrick]

I took a quick look around our walls (or at least the fraction of them that I claim).  One 35 mm film print, from the 1960s, two M8 prints that I cared enough about to frame, some small travel P&S shots from the 1990s, in cheap frames.   Several prints (ink-jet and Pt-Pd) by others.  Two large corkboards, covered with a steadily changing set of what you might call work prints, run off after rendering for digital viewing, but on a high quality office printer at A4 size.  Stuff taped up on my office door and walls, which also changes.  So of course  prints by the latest and greatest cameras do displace the work of the older cameras.  That's how I get to see them for more than a day at a time.  I do go back and redo an older shot if there is an occasion for it (this happens with pictures of kids surprisingly often), and I find the enhancements due to better raw file rendering software can be more surprising than what a new camera would provide.

Edited August 28, 2020 by scott kirkpatrick

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[scott kirkpatrick]

5 hours ago, mike3996 said:

Our ancestors in the 40s probable launched similar tirades about new film stocks being developed: "oh no the old ASA 80 isn't good enough for you anymore,  you got to be fancy and shoot that 160 speed film, like that SOLVES the problems of the world!"

Actually, back when cameras were almost unchanging and film plus chemicals were the source of novelty we probably did a better job of understanding how the extremes of highlights and shadows were rendered, because we had to work with the full response curve.  Reducing the performance of a sensor as a function of ISO to a single number, dynamic range, doesn't say where the highlights and shadow noise limits fall with respect to "Zone 5" or the value that a center-weighted exposure meter gives you, or anything about how they are handled.  When digital sensors (CCD's in particular) were just bags for collecting electrons and ISO changes amounted to shifting the output up by factors of 2, that was fine.  Maybe it is time to ask for more details from PhotonstoPixels and DXO.