The Nastiest Filter Reflection I've Ever Seen

[Jamie Roberts]

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Daniel, on the 28 Summicron itself, I think it is a wonderful lens, one of the most beautiful, grayscale wise, that I have used and of thankfully modest contrast as Leica lenses go these days. I don't know about its use for color, which I only look at for its implications about the BW conversion.

 

Walt

 

Walt--since you showed the final as BW, have you tried shooting without the filters for all BW?

 

I know a lot of accomplished BW shooters with the M8 who just don't use them. Yes, they may be subject to misfocuses, I suppose, in theory. But in practice, I've seen a lot of great BW from an unfiltered M8.

 

So I'm curious about your thoughts. You don't really need magenta correction provided by the filters for a good BW rendition, do you?

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[Guest Walt]

Jamie-

 

I have posted about this a few times before. I always shoot for BW and always use the filters, for two reasons. The first and most important is blown highlights, the second the grayscale. The blown highlights issue is apparently controversial, but is an obvious problem to me at this point. Highlights that are also infrared emitters or reflectors are much more likely to overload the sensor than their tonal value alone would suggest. The grayscale is a matter of taste, and without the filters, it has a milky Canon-style look that I don't like. It can largely be corrected with a curves layer. The misfocus issue I'm not sure I've seen, though I've seen a lot of fuzzy looking tree leaves and other "blurry" anomalies. I think I see some of these even with filters. In general, unless one is pursuing special effects, I don't think invisible energy should be a component of the image and my experience supports this idea.

 

People have said that Leica has said that an IR filter over the sensor would reduce acutance. I had though that it was a moire filter that would do this. And I don't know that a sensor filter is any more destructive than a flat filter over the front of a lens. In any case, I find the image quality, on the whole, very good and the best I've had from a digital camera. I do hope Leica manages to get a grip on the extremely poor quality control of their lenses and cameras. That would be a big contribution to image quality.

 

Walt

[fotografr]

I do hope Leica manages to get a grip on the extremely poor quality control of their lenses and cameras. That would be a big contribution to image quality.

 

Walt

 

Problem is, there is no incentive for Leica to do this because they are already selling the cameras and lenses faster than they can produce them.

[carstenw]

Sure there is an incentive. These are all being fixed under warranty, which costs them lots of money. They will fix them, but it will take time. They have a lot of projects on the way, and not many employees or much manufacturing capability.

[larry]

Problem is, there is no incentive for Leica to do this because they are already selling the cameras and lenses faster than they can produce them.

 

Brent,

 

Their incentive is to reduce the back-end expense of repair, shipping and dissatisfied customers. The problems they've been having are causing a lot of people to have second thoughts about Leica. They may be getting away with it now, but if Zeiss, for example, introduces an M8 competitor, it will certainly erode Leica's market.

 

Larry

[Guest Walt]

Whether Leica has an "incentive" or not, they ought to be doing much better. I don't understand all the constant forum rationalizing and excuse-making on Leica's behalf. At these prices, one is paying as much for minimal sample-to-sample variation as for "absolute quality." They are not only allowing large variations, they are shipping a lot of out and out defective lenses. These are good lenses, but they aren't that special. If, right now, I wanted to buy a lens with maximum assurance that I would not have problems with it, I'd buy a Zeiss. In many cases I also prefer the imaging of the Zeiss lenses.

 

Walt

[sean_reid]

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Sure there is an incentive. These are all being fixed under warranty, which costs them lots of money. They will fix them, but it will take time. They have a lot of projects on the way, and not many employees or much manufacturing capability.

 

Hi Carsten,

 

Actually, and fortunately, they've expanded both staff and manufacturing capabilities this year. But the demand has been heavy and clearly some cameras and lenses are getting out that aren't as they should be. What percentage is this? I have no idea.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[carstenw]

I don't know either. As much as I love the camera and the lenses, I sometimes have to dispair. I have recently sent my 50 Lux Asph in for the second time, to get its focusing and aperture ring resistance tuned, and I'll be damned if the focusing ring isn't working its way loose! I will have to send it in again. Not only that, but the last time the lens got a little mark on the rear element which I cannot polish away. I hope that they believe me that I didn't do this myself, since I didn't notice it for a while. Sigh.

[Guest Walt]

Hi Sean-

 

On the percentage of defective M8 bodies and lenses? The camera itself is complex and some percentage of defects is expectable, though probably not in some areas they are being experienced (like rangefinder adjustment). The lenses are another matter. They are relatively simple and every single lens can and should be checked on the limited number of relevant parameters (infinity stop, focus mount action, etc.) So if only half the reports of lens problems seen on this forum are true, Leica is shipping way too many bad lenses. These are extremely expensive lenses and every one could and should be perfect.

 

How many prints do you sell with defects in them? None. The same for me.

 

Walt

[guywalder]

Jamie-

The blown highlights issue is apparently controversial, but is an obvious problem to me at this point. Highlights that are also infrared emitters or reflectors are much more likely to overload the sensor than their tonal value alone would suggest. The grayscale is a matter of taste, and without the filters, it has a milky Canon-style look that I don't like. It can largely be corrected with a curves layer.

Walt

 

Walt, do you have some examples / comparisons of blown highlights without filter vs no blown with? I undersand the theory, but given that the IR contamination is relatively modest it sounds rather like the loss of sharpness theory, nice theory, but no one has shown any practical evidence (afaik).

Also I dont really understand how a curves modification can compensate for what is a pretty random effect, which effects some subject content, but not others even though they may have very similar tones??

I'm not criticising, just trying to understand!

 

As for the 'rationalizing and excuse-making on Leica's behalf', well I guess thats just brand infatuation isnt it...

[Guest Walt]

Guy-

 

No, I've never done "experiments" to demonstrate this, just as I've never done experiments to demonstrate that noise gets high in under-exposed high-ISO shots and in certain shadow areas or that UV causes "haze" is distant shots. These phenomena are also inconsistent. It's something I've observed with a lot of photography. The "IR-Blown" highlights do often have a distinctive look though: a kind of surprising posterization, where there is a very sudden transistion from an area that is extremely dense, to one that is absolutely blown out. And this happens in areas that are plausible IR reflectors or emitters. I saw many of these without filters and don't see them with filters. So, over a body of work without filters and one with filters, the problem became clear. When I first bought a 21mm lens, I used it without a filter for a while simply because I didn't have one and the problem started again. So, I became convinced. I would add that I once owned a company that produced materials to reflect IR for use in aircraft applications, so I know something about IR, what reflects it and what doesn't and this isn't entirely intuitive. Many metallic surfaces, as one example, are poor IR reflectors, while titanium-based white paints are usually good IR reflectors. So, if you have an image of a white car with chrome bumpers and the car body is burned out but the bumpers are not, you my be seeing a short-wave IR effect.

 

On the curves issue, I just meant that one can change the general impression of the tonal scale. I was referring to correcting the light shadows one gets without the filter. Since I often photograph people and since people, these days, seem to wear a lot of black clothing, this was something I noticed a lot in portraits. In the photograph at the beginning of this tread I might have seen the problem in the woman's coat, in which I don't want much detail. The difficulty is that in pulling the quarter tones down to darken the coat, I would have aggravated the eye socket shadow problem further, so then there'd be a lot of selective burning. So the filters are a better solution.

 

On the whole, I'd like the tonal scale of the image to look more-or-less like what I saw just for the sake of predictability. Including invisible "light" in the image isn't a good way to do that--it is going to produce unpredicted results, some of which will be unacceptable. Without the filters, I've often been surprised by "white trees," which sometimes doesn't work very well.

 

On "brand infatuation," a friend just sent me a copy of Leica Fotographie International, the one with the interview about the new Summarit lenses, and this will be my first and last exposure to that publication. I was stunned by the nonsense of this interview. The Leica camera has gone from being a good, simple, sturdy camera to being a troublesome cult object. Witness the church called the Leica Forum. The Leica company is making good cameras and lenses, but their quality control and product support, at least in the U.S., is just terrible.

 

Walt

[sean_reid]

Guy-

The Leica camera has gone from being a good, simple, sturdy camera to being a troublesome cult object. Witness the church called the Leica Forum.

 

Walt

 

C'mon Walt, those two comments are neither fair nor accurate.

 

Best,

 

Sean

[ho_co]

... a friend just sent me a copy of Leica Fotographie International, the one with the interview about the new Summarit lenses, and this will be my first and last exposure to that publication. I was stunned by the nonsense of this interview.

Walt--

Don't judge LFI from this issue; IMHO it's their least interesting issue in years.

 

But the interviews do tend to be less substantial than the technical articles which the magazine usually presents.

 

HC

 

ps--Thanks for publishing the vampire effect picture! Almost makes the camera's quirks worthwhile, doesn't it?

[Guest Walt]

C'mon Walt, those two comments are neither fair nor accurate.

 

Best,

 

Sean

Sean-

 

You're my voice of balance and moderation. O.K., I take it all back.

 

Walt

[Alberti]

There are downsides to these IR filters, [-] To the left of the subject's head you can see a pair of automobile lights pointed into the lens, undoubtedly the source of the vampire teeth. ..

 

Walt

__________________________

 

I was sitting in a conference room the other day, as the evening came in, the car lights were for me visible just a few cm's away in the form of a reflection. The windows were Thermopane-types. I could see this in those conditions;

I would not be surprised if similar artifacts appear at other wavelenghts. So my suggestion is: these two false teeth tethering around come from the panes (and might not be visible to us but can be the IR part of the spectrum).

Alberti

[jaapv]

Walt--

Don't judge LFI from this issue; IMHO it's their least interesting issue in years.

 

I'm afraid the newest one tops it...

[BerndReini]

Alberti,

 

sorry to say it but these reflections are definitely not from the window panes. I do a lot of night shooting and these reflections are definitely caused by the IR filter. Their green appearance is another definite sign of reflections caused by the IR filter. I love my M8 and I would love to make excuses for it but these filter reflections are nonsense, in particular on a lens like the Noctilux, which exhibits close to no flare whatsoever on its own. You put on that huge IR filter and it's a different story. Look at this example taken with the Noctilux. It looks like small pox on the lower half of the frame.

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[lct]

...these reflections are definitely caused by the IR filter...

Yes typical ghost images cause by a filter.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[Alberti]

Yes typical ghost images cause by a filter.

Admit, there are ghosts at work!

alberti

[ho_co]

I'm afraid the newest one tops it...

 

Uh-oh. Haven't received mine yet. Thanks for the warning.

 

I hope the magazine isn't regressing to the style of its old days.

 

--HC