Looks like bad news for hopes on CL2

[aksclix]

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8 minutes ago, pocholin said:

Well, then I'll be very happy with a FF CL2, which will also mean AF...and, hopefully, IBIS 

FF CL2 = the SL2 😊 

I guess if they make a 60MP SL3 then even a crop version image on that would be higher in resolution than the CL.. and if they make the SL3 smaller somehow, eve the crop lenses can be used with good balance 

[Enrique Santa]

32 minutes ago, aksclix said:

FF CL2 = the SL2 😊 

No, no , no. The SL is a superb cam but is a huge cam and their lenses heavy. Is a complete diferent kind of camera even in the form factor. If this will be the way Leica pretend manage CL users, don't count with me. I will be looking at Sigma or Fuji.

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[aksclix]

38 minutes ago, Enrique Santa said:

No, no , no. The SL is a superb cam but is a huge cam and their lenses heavy. Is a complete diferent kind of camera even in the form factor. If this will be the way Leica pretend manage CL users, don't count with me. I will be looking at Sigma or Fuji.

I am just simply saying.. have no idea if they’ll go that way.. I love the form factor of CL too! It’s one of the smallest APSc cameras

[ramarren]

16 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

The question was not whether getting every shot in focus is good, bad or indifferent practice - it was whether Cartier-Bresson, as a street photographer, relied on fast focus for his successful shots. As I wrote earlier, I suspect fast focus was not one of his absolute requirements, compared to timing and composition. IIRC he said that with the small boy with wine bottles he prefocused and was ready when the boy came round the corner; the man jumping over the puddle was a matter of timing, not focus; looking at many of his other shots you get a similar impression, that he saw the shot well in advance and was ready for it, waiting for a person to get into the right position. Oddly enough, the famous video of him 'dancing' through the Paris crowds does look as though fast focus would have been critical, but I don't think I've seen any of the shots he actually took that day - I wonder how well focused they were!

I agree that there is no right or wrong here; but it is difficult to hold Cartier-Bresson up as a street photographer who relied on manual fast focus. 

I don't recall anyone asking whether "fast focus" was something that HCB depended upon. Pocholin's question was simply: "Does anyone know how many out of focus pictures HCB might've taken?" and that is irrelevant, IMO, as I suggested. 

Someone who is adept with guessing distance and using a scale focus camera may indeed be faster than any autofocus system, at least for single shot use if not for moving sequence shots, but that's also irrelevant.

G

[ramarren]

5 hours ago, pocholin said:

@ramarren, as mentioned by others, the purpose of the comment was to prove that AF has many advantages on getting a greater number of clear shots, whether they

are good or not, that's a different story. HCB proved that an out of focus image can become iconic, like the man jumping already mentioned, but it still remains that MF has downsides and that even HCB took out of focus photos. Perhaps there are very skilled people in the world that are able to take moving objects in perfect focus (kudos to them) but most of us, mere mortals, rely on the "modernities" of AF and image stabilisation (when available)...otherwise AF wouldn't be as popular nowadays.

In my opinion, this focus on "the number of clear shots" is the transcendence of technical qualities as important vs aesthetic qualities. Just because a photo is clearly focused does not make it good: it makes it sharp. And sharp isn't necessarily even desirable in many cases ... witness the complaints of people who see their faces in even a random photograph and complain about their wrinkles, their mussed hair, the fact that they look older than they think they should look, etc. 

Everyone, whether using MF or AF, gets shots that are out of focus. Not all out of focus shots are failures ... many superb photographs are not at all well-focused. For some subject matter, ultra-sharpness is a boon and adds to the aesthetic, but that's far from true in all subjects. And whether HCB (or Ansel Adams, or Joel Meyereowitz, or any other famous photographer) has a higher hit rate of "sharp" photos, or even great photos, than anyone else is again totally irrelevant. Great photography is not a matter of quantities, it is a matter of aesthetic successes that match the photographers' intents.

IMO, being hooked on numbers is a plague in modern photography ... more megapixels, more sensitivity, more frames per second, faster automatic focusing  ... this is what all these equipment-centric forums have been obsessing about for the past 20 years of the digital era. Isn't it possible that there is enough, that the equipment is good enough, that we don't really need more of any of these things? That what we need is to see better and learn how to consistently capture photos that achieve the vision of our sight?

Perhaps this is part of the reason why there is a film camera renaissance going on at present amongst young photographers...

Back to the CL and its obsolescence ... If all the indications, rumors, and comments are correct, Leica is letting go of the APS-C format. Of course, we can't know for sure since they're not saying. But presuming that to be true, either they'll come up with a similar form factor FF camera with L-mount, or they won't ... they might consider that the SL form factor line is what makes sense now for the AF series interchangeable lens line, and compatible TL series lenses that people have will work on those bodies in a crop mode. Of course, the race to higher and higher pixel resolution in the FF cameras ameliorates that issue a bit as well... if an SL camera hits pixel resolution such that a 16x24mm section of the sensor nets 24Mpixel or higher—happens at around 54Mpixel resolution on the FF sensor—well, your TL lenses are doing what they were designed for so what's to complain about?...

G

[Foxtwo]

The CL is Leica’s “Gateway Drug” to M or SL or Q addiction.  That’s why it will likely be updated in due course.  

[FrozenInTime]

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Slightly off topic - I wonder if there will be a new APS-C camera from Epson/Voigtlander at CP+ in a months time:

Epson have been making noise after many years of quiet

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5292144375/epson-found-30-in-box-r-d1s-rangefinders-in-a-warehouse-and-epson-fans-will-win-them

And now, a new exhibit celebrating 17 years of the RD1

https://dc-watch-impress-co-jp.translate.goog/docs/news/exhibition/1379671.html?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

[pocholin]

17 hours ago, aksclix said:

FF CL2 = the SL2 😊 

I guess if they make a 60MP SL3 then even a crop version image on that would be higher in resolution than the CL.. and if they make the SL3 smaller somehow, eve the crop lenses can be used with good balance 

But the SL2 and SL2-S are big cameras. Pack it into a small body and call it a CL2, then we're talking

[dkCambridgeshire]

1 hour ago, pocholin said:

But the SL2 and SL2-S are big cameras. Pack it into a small body and call it a CL2, then we're talking

And just HOW LONG do you reckon such a camera would take to develop to the prototype stage? Have you any idea? 

 

[pocholin]

12 minutes ago, dkCambridgeshire said:

And just HOW LONG do you reckon such a camera would take to develop to the prototype stage? Have you any idea? 

 

No idea...just wishful thinking

[pocholin]

11 hours ago, ramarren said:

In my opinion, this focus on "the number of clear shots" is the transcendence of technical qualities as important vs aesthetic qualities. Just because a photo is clearly focused does not make it good: it makes it sharp. And sharp isn't necessarily even desirable in many cases ... witness the complaints of people who see their faces in even a random photograph and complain about their wrinkles, their mussed hair, the fact that they look older than they think they should look, etc. 

Everyone, whether using MF or AF, gets shots that are out of focus. Not all out of focus shots are failures ... many superb photographs are not at all well-focused. For some subject matter, ultra-sharpness is a boon and adds to the aesthetic, but that's far from true in all subjects. And whether HCB (or Ansel Adams, or Joel Meyereowitz, or any other famous photographer) has a higher hit rate of "sharp" photos, or even great photos, than anyone else is again totally irrelevant. Great photography is not a matter of quantities, it is a matter of aesthetic successes that match the photographers' intents.

IMO, being hooked on numbers is a plague in modern photography ... more megapixels, more sensitivity, more frames per second, faster automatic focusing  ... this is what all these equipment-centric forums have been obsessing about for the past 20 years of the digital era. Isn't it possible that there is enough, that the equipment is good enough, that we don't really need more of any of these things? That what we need is to see better and learn how to consistently capture photos that achieve the vision of our sight?

Perhaps this is part of the reason why there is a film camera renaissance going on at present amongst young photographers...

Back to the CL and its obsolescence ... If all the indications, rumors, and comments are correct, Leica is letting go of the APS-C format. Of course, we can't know for sure since they're not saying. But presuming that to be true, either they'll come up with a similar form factor FF camera with L-mount, or they won't ... they might consider that the SL form factor line is what makes sense now for the AF series interchangeable lens line, and compatible TL series lenses that people have will work on those bodies in a crop mode. Of course, the race to higher and higher pixel resolution in the FF cameras ameliorates that issue a bit as well... if an SL camera hits pixel resolution such that a 16x24mm section of the sensor nets 24Mpixel or higher—happens at around 54Mpixel resolution on the FF sensor—well, your TL lenses are doing what they were designed for so what's to complain about?...

G

The point of my comment was based on your comment on post #99. Where you mention you take almost all your reportage pictures in MF despite having AF available. Most camera users are looking for an in-focus photograph, thus the popularity of AF lenses. Just because great past photographers used MF and made great pictures it doesn't mean they were happy only MF was available to them or that every photo they took was in perfect focus because they were used to using MF all the time.

I don't disagree with you in this post but, the wanting more this and that is driven by different reasons and specialty photography. For example, I'm not the best at timing when my daughters dives into a pool or makes a jump in her horse, so I rely on burst to catch a picture just at the right moment...the more picture my camera is able to take the greater my chances. Keep in mind I'm a very amateur photographer, not a professional like you, so I do rely on all the technology a camera manufacturer puts in their cameras to snap a decent picture...I'm not alone though. So, when you put down AF you are not only ignoring a huge amount of people that rely on it but also demeaning us. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Foxtwo]

41 minutes ago, dkCambridgeshire said:

And just HOW LONG do you reckon such a camera would take to develop to the prototype stage? Have you any idea? 

Not long, since if they’re going to do something like that, the project was started a year or two ago!

[Le Chef]

7 minutes ago, Foxtwo said:

Not long, since if they’re going to do something like that, the project was started a year or two ago!

How do you know?

[SoarFM]

On 1/20/2022 at 12:33 AM, nicci78 said:

But film is crazy expensive now 

One roll of 35mm Tri-X is 13€ now !! 
Add 28€ for processing and HD scan. 
Add 7€ more for prints  

1.13 to 1.33 euro per shot. 
It will be cheaper to shoot instax wide 😅

I think digital is far more cost efficient than film by a wide margin. And of higher technical quality.

I still have my M6 and when I go on a binge of film shooting, it gets expensive real fast. Surely we shoot less frames with film, but even so the cost and time involved makes one quickly realize that shooting film is not a cost conscious way of making photographs, that’s why we shoot less frames with film…One could easily spend a couple thousand dollars a year on film and processing before you even have a scan—or buy chemicals and equipment to print with. Scanning is time consuming or if you have a service do it, very expensive for middle grade scans, exorbitant for high quality scans.

So, being worried that a (insert camera here) is worth $2000 less than you paid for it 2-3 years after you bought it new does seem like one does not recognize the value it has given. Not to mention, the technical superiority of a digital sensor image vs. that of the film based image is large and indisputed. We shoot film because we want that look, not because it’s cheaper.

[dkCambridgeshire]

1 hour ago, Foxtwo said:

Not long, since if they’re going to do something like that, the project was started a year or two ago!

... might also have been aborted a year or two ... or three ... ago 

Edited January 24, 2022 by dkCambridgeshire

[LocalHero1953]

2 hours ago, dkCambridgeshire said:

And just HOW LONG do you reckon such a camera would take to develop to the prototype stage? Have you any idea? 

 

Exactly the same length of time every other camera takes to develop?

[ramarren]

1 hour ago, pocholin said:

The point of my comment was based on your comment on post #99. Where you mention you take almost all your reportage pictures in MF despite having AF available. Most camera users are looking for an in-focus photograph, thus the popularity of AF lenses. Just because great past photographers used MF and made great pictures it doesn't mean they were happy only MF was available to them or that every photo they took was in perfect focus because they were used to using MF all the time.

I don't disagree with you in this post but, the wanting more this and that is driven by different reasons and specialty photography. For example, I'm not the best at timing when my daughters dives into a pool or makes a jump in her horse, so I rely on burst to catch a picture just at the right moment...the more picture my camera is able to take the greater my chances. Keep in mind I'm a very amateur photographer, not a professional like you, so I do rely on all the technology a camera manufacturer puts in their cameras to snap a decent picture...I'm not alone though. So, when you put down AF you are not only ignoring a huge amount of people that rely on it but also demeaning us. Just my 2 cents.

I was a photographer for years before I considered using a camera to make some money. It was only years and years later that I looked to a camera to make my living, and did that for a time, and then I went back to other career activities. So whether you consider that "being a professional" or not is a matter of opinion. In the course of my career lifetime was when autofocus was invented and became the norm.

I doubt any professional photographers drove its invention at first, as autofocus was first invented to aid photographers (snap shooters) who didn't want to invest time into learning how to focus a camera accurately but complained that their photos were not sharp. Once it existed, of course it was adopted by professionals and then developed to do things that were otherwise difficult for them to achieve. It is very difficult to judge whether people who did photography for a living were happy with MF because it was the only thing available to them and they were hoping, waiting for the convenience of autofocus... 

Autofocus developed for professional shooting purposes has added substantively to the complexity of cameras, with various mode choices that change the camera's operation in various ways. And the defaults operation chosen is always a decision on the part of some engineering team with respect to what will work best for the majority of the buying audience, which is by and large a non-professional audience. 

What I find in my use of various and sundry cameras with AF is that the AF is indeed a great convenience in a lot of average photographic situations, but that it doesn't actually give much advantage in a fairly large percentage of what I photograph, and 'street photography' and 'reportage' are two of the categories where I don't see much benefit. That's all. What I see in reportage and street work is that AF affects the nature of the work being produced ... the scenes captured are often centered around how the AF system can best target focus, with simple dynamics between the elements of the scenes. I sometimes wonder how Robert Frank's seminal book The Americans would be different if he had been using autofocus for most of it. It's an interesting notion to consider.

AF works best on relatively simple scene types where the subject target is easily defined and selected for by a necessarily simple algorithmic discriminator ... a person diving into a pool, a horse running on an open field and about to make a jump are essentially pretty simple scenes and easy to discriminate what the important subject is, but a crowd of people in a street scene with a bunch of cars, lamp posts, windows, etc pose a much much more complex discrimination problem. That is, decide "... which of the 20 mostly static things in the field of view is actually the one that's important to the photograph?" in a fraction of a second. The human eye and brain is really good at that; low powered camera electronics a bit less so, never mind detecting precisely when to make the exposure... 

So I don't put AF down because it is useful for certain things. But I don't make it a priority because I'd rather learn how to do the things that it cannot do well so that I can do those things well, and use AF when it is the sensible mechanism/convenience to get a sharp photo with minimal fuss. The same applies to a lot of the other "more" things ... once you're at the level of camera technology that became the norm in high end cameras as of about a decade or so ago, the rest seems to address edge cases and uses well off the mean or median, and return decreasing levels of advantage for most photographic needs, particularly the average ones. 

To return to the original statement that started this long digression, to say that "AF is an essential for street photography and reportage" just seems so incorrect based on what has been done in these areas of photography—and from what I've seen first hand in my own photographic efforts—that I was moved to comment. I'm sorry if it seemed that I was putting you down, personally, pocholin. My intent is only to correct this mistaken, incorrect notion. 

G

[Foxtwo]

50 minutes ago, dkCambridgeshire said:

... might also have been aborted a year or two ... or three ... ago 

LOL, or, to play the same game in a different manner-

….might have discovered a new 36mp APSC sensor … that outperform’s the 60mp M11… so holding off on release so as to not impact M sales.

There may or may not have been (Pesky NDA’s) breakthrough carbon fiber process facilitates a heretofore unseen strong, light body for half the current price of aluminum (al-yoo-min-eee-yuum for our friends in the UK), but the main reason it’s being held up is chip availability for the new 9.9mp super face OLED EVF that uses less power and has six times the response rate of the Visioflex 2.

Feel better now? 😎

[Le Chef]

9 minutes ago, Foxtwo said:

LOL, or, to play the same game in a different manner-

….might have discovered a new 36mp APSC sensor … that outperform’s the 60mp M11… so holding off on release so as to not impact M sales.

There may or may not have been (Pesky NDA’s) breakthrough carbon fiber process facilitates a heretofore unseen strong, light body for half the current price of aluminum (al-yoo-min-eee-yuum for our friends in the UK), but the main reason it’s being held up is chip availability for the new 9.9mp super face OLED EVF that uses less power and has six times the response rate of the Visioflex 2.

Feel better now? 😎

Keep smoking whatever you’re smoking. What’s it called “Buds of Conjecture” or “Wishful Thinking”? 😂

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica L-Mount

[adan]

3 hours ago, dkCambridgeshire said:

And just HOW LONG do you reckon such a camera would take to develop to the prototype stage? Have you any idea? 

 

Well, Leica says it took 3-4 years to develop the M11.

But that required basically gutting the existing M10 cameras (except for the RF) and starting over everywhere. Not just a raft of new technologies, but a complete rearrangement of where the internal (and some of the external) bits go. Except that obviously the sensor and shutter had to go behind the lens.

(BTW - so much for the theory of "perpetual upgrades" for existing cameras. Such as Steven Lee's suggestion of a "perpetually-upgradable" M8 )

A CL2 will likely take a lot less time, simply because the SL2, SL2-S, Q2 and M11 all constitute "prior research" - Leica has learned a lot by doing them that can now be applied to a CL2.

Better EVF in CL size? - Leica already has that in the new M Visoflex 2.

BSI sensor? Leica already has that in the M11 and SL2-S. Just needs to cover a smaller area - and would still deliver 30 Mpixels (possibly with the same reduced-res or cropped-res options, if desired).

Maestro III? - no need to reinvent that wheel. Just different firmware programming.

Plus Leica has no doubt been thinking - in the background - about what a CL2 would be, and what would change (assuming they are not going to kill it).

I would guess that a CL2 introduction one year from today would be a fairly easy project for Leica. It is a relatively simple camera, and it doesn't have to be the world's "best" camera - just "Best in Class." And that is predicated only on Leica's statement of "no other new camera intros in 2022" - they probably could do it sooner on a crash basis.

Also BTW - Leica's Fiscal Year begins on April 1 (). I would imagine that if the CL is for the chopping block, that is about when the final decision will be made and/or announced.