How sharp should the M8 be?

[Borna]

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I am curious in this question. My friend has an M9, uses a Summilux 50mm and often gets extremely sharp pictures, like for instance, the eye is tack-sharp, you can zoom in to see all the details. Similar experience I cannot get with my M8.

Its of course a big difference in the technological aspect, but I was wondering, what can I expect in sharpness or is it me that has a misaligned viewfinder that cannot properly get 100% sharp photos around the eye? In a general sense my photos are good and sharp. 

No examples to show, asking if you have experienced similar thoughts. Please share a photo if you have.

Thanks!!

[Alberti]

I have had similar experiences with the M8 as you describe for the M9. Extremely sharp. But it is of course more difficult to achieve because I had to ‘magnify’ the picture more when you are looking at it. That meant for me that I saw a larger failure rate in sharpness (20%?). But oh my, the pictures were beautiful!
Also a second aspect played a role: the M8 is so fast in rendering a result (small files) that I immediately could check the result and then quickly made a second picture. My 3 or 4 lenses were also fit for very fast focus changes.

-with higher resolution, like my equivalent M9M, I just go ahead. ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’

On my M10R it is ‘worse again’, and I myself have compared it a bit to my M8 times - as a reason (rationalization) I have that again I ‘magnify’ the picture more in viewing a detail.

Edited February 11 by Alberti

[pippy]

1 hour ago, Borna said:

...My friend has an M9, uses a Summilux 50mm and often gets extremely sharp pictures, like for instance, the eye is tack-sharp, you can zoom in to see all the details. Similar experience I cannot get with my M8.

...I was wondering, what can I expect in sharpness...

...asking if you have experienced similar thoughts. Please share a photo if you have...

It's many years since I had my much-loved M8.2 but I never had the feeling that the camera was lacking in any way in terms of sharpness.

Having just had a very brief look at my back-up drive I will post something which might be useful. This pic is merely a family snapshot and was originally taken as a JPEG quality (I was on holiday and wanted to save 'memory' space) so there will be a bit of IQ loss compared with a DNG / TIFF but, even so, I think it serves its purpose. Lens would have been my Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 Nokton.

Whole pic for reference;

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100% crop. You will need to do the 'Double-Click' thing to see it in full-scale;

 

Bearing in mind that images posted here always look to be slightly softer than they really are I'm still quite happy with the way the fine details have been captured.

Are your images of a similar quality to this? If so then my opinion would be that your camera is working fine.

Philip.

Edited February 11 by pippy

[martin]

indeed the M8 in those days was very sharp but all my lenses had to be adjusted at Leica,

after that you could count all the hair

[Alberti]

My M8.2 was always super sharp. To witness, a picture with 50mm Summicron V wide open at F/2:

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And one with 90mm just to show the hair splitting results the M8 gives, with a Elmar-M 90mm lens also wide open at F/4--> so that is like a 120mm, hand held! And at 1/125th of a sec. Modern sensors would require 1/500th of a sec in these circumstances we are brought to believe.

No artifice. No post processing. 

The M8 also 'nudged me' to have some lenses get a CLA at Leica and I bought others. The camera was just that much more evident in showing quality. 

Edited February 11 by Alberti

[tommonego@gmail.com]

I just did a group of photos of people in my church, M8 with a 1953 50mm Summicron V1. This was a fast go through, mostly the eyes were very sharp. the ones that weren't were folks who were figiting. I don'r have permission to show the photos.  I find it is more the lens than the camera, second user erroe, camera or subject movement. Lens wise I had a 35 Summilux pre asph sent out and cleaned, it wasn't put back together correctly, the repair person refused toi acknowledge the mistake. I had to send it to another repair place who commented on the poor reassembly. The lens came back and was very good, but it took me 6 months to figure every thing out, finally tested the lens on my digital CL which showed the problem. Not all older Leica lenses will give an sharp result. If they don't have the lens checked out. Most of my M lenses I can pixel peep to 200 or 300% before noticing defects. Either with my M8 or CL. My best lens on an M8 is a Zeiss 35mm f2.8 C-Biogon, just a terrific match.   

M8 with 35 Zeiss

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Edited February 11 by tommonego@gmail.com

[costa43]

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Tack sharp for me, the worlds best ever digital camera for image quality 🙃 Heres one of my wife holding some snow as she does now and again...

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[evikne]

I didn't even know that a camera could be “unsharp”. Isn't that a property of lenses only?

[pop]

58 minutes ago, evikne said:

I didn't even know that a camera could be “unsharp”. Isn't that a property of lenses only?

You can produce "unsharp" pictures with every camera.

[Olaf_ZG]

It might be that the m8 renders softer than the m9. Less applied sharpness in software somewhere in camera? The m8 is not for pixel peeking. You have to look at the whole picture.

 

[pop]

8 hours ago, Borna said:

No examples to show

No advice to give.

[costa43]

No such thing as an unsharp camera imo, the lens does all the work in that regard. In fact I’d go as far to say that acutance is higher in the m8 than in other Ms due to the thinner filter glass. It just resolves less detail due to lower mp. My guess is that the rangefinder may be slightly out on many m8 cameras due to their age and people have not had them adjusted. 
 

Edited February 11 by costa43

[pippy]

15 hours ago, Borna said:

...My friend has an M9, uses a Summilux 50mm and often gets extremely sharp pictures...Similar experience I cannot get with my M8.

...is it me that has a misaligned viewfinder that cannot properly get 100% sharp photos around the eye?...

Ask your friend if you can borrow their M9 and lens to see whether you can capture extremely sharp pictures with their camera and lens.

Let your friend use your camera and lens to see whether they can capture extremely sharp pictures with your camera and lens.

Depending on the results the next stage would be to put your lens on their body; their lens on your body and repeat the experiment.

If something is amiss then it will show up.

Philip.

[pippy]

6 hours ago, pop said:

You can produce "unsharp" pictures with every camera.

Unfortunately I know that I can...

Philip.

[farnz]

Oh dear, the "sharpness" term again.  This term leads to many discussions because it's subjective, ie what appears "sharp" to your neighbour might not appear "sharp" to you for a variety of reasons and becomes opinion rather than fact.  Since there are no measures for "sharpness" there's no way to measure it and compare between images to prove conclusively that objects in one image are "sharper" than another.

It's preferable, in my view, to talk about resolution and contrast when talking about how well a lens or camera 'separates' consecutive objects, which is what I suspect "sharpness" is getting at because resolution can be measured in, say, pixels or sensels per inch, and contrast can be measured in, say, shades of grey between pure white (0) and pure black (255) in digital terms.

When comparing the separation of in-focus objects ("sharpness" if one must) between a M8 and a M9 it's important to remember that the M8 uses a Kodak KAF-10500 10 MP CCD sensor whereas the M9 uses a Kodak KAF-18500 18 MP CCD sensor so the M9 already has greater resolution (sensels per inch) than the M8, which is likely to make the M9's pictures seem "sharper", particularly when zooming in to see the detail.

My apologies if the above sounds a bit like lecturing; my withered, old engineering brain has been trained to think in these terms over decades.

Pete.

 

[chris_livsey]

Perceived sharpness is a result of an amalgam of hardware, software and technique.

I think you can only begin compare across digital cameras and lenses if the same post processing is applied, even OOC jpegs with the same in camera settings will differ between M8 and M9 due to the fundamental pixel count difference, the UV/IR external filter presence or absence can also affect the M8 "sharpness" due to wavelength light differences, different frequencies will "smear" across adjacent pixel wells on the sensor. The f stop used may also differ between the cameras compared, even with the same lens, as the diffraction limit will differ resulting in micro contrast differences with perceived "sharpness" varying, the limit is not a brick wall it is progressive. Let's not forget the fundamental shutter speed effect, motion blur, I am assuming this was not "matched" across the comparisons, I don't want to criticise the handling of the camera but really unless you are going to extreme lengths to compare, locking down on the same tripod etc etc  good enough is good enough.

Unless pretty extreme a brilliant capture will not be rejected because on extreme magnification it is "not sharp" I plead Capa's  "Face in the surf" as an example of a sharpness failure that transcends that to be one of the iconic frames of all time.

omaha-beach-un-cliche-entre-dans-l-histoire-sour-le-titre-de-quot-face-in-the-surf-quot-1433506900.jpg (1600×1193)

I have added as a link for copyright reasons although "fair use" may apply in this context.

Finally do we need to repeat the alleged HCB quote  "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept", alleged as it was only verbally reported by another and not in print by his hand.

 

 

[lct]

What is objective is the thickness of the sensor stack. The M8 has one of the thinner if not the thinnest one (0.5mm IIRC) so aside from user error your pics have no reason to be soft if the RF is well calibrated. Here M8.2 and Macro-Elmar 90/4.

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[3D-Kraft.com]

Am 16.2.2025 um 02:21 schrieb lct:

What is objective is the thickness of the sensor stack. The M8 has one of the thinner if not the thinnest one (0.5mm IIRC) so aside from user error your pics have no reason to be soft if the RF is well calibrated.

Indeed the M8 renders details very good, but I see no advantage of the M8 over the M9. Both seem to have 0.7mm filter thickness (this is, what I found), but on the M8 you usually have the additional IR-cut front-filter in the path.

[lct]

3 hours ago, 3D-Kraft.com said:

[...] I see no advantage of the M8 over the M9. Both seem to have 0.7mm filter thickness [...]

0.5mm here. The M8 could well be the winner.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[farnz]

3 hours ago, 3D-Kraft.com said:

but on the M8 you usually have the additional IR-cut front-filter in the path.

I'm struggling to understand what this has to do with the sensor stack since, if used, an IR-cut filter is screwed to the front of the lens, where of course all the lens elements are 'in the path' too.

I can only speak for myself but I don't use IR-cut filters when I'm using my M8 anyway.  Ymmv.

Pete.