Leica Q2M-43?

[wilfredo]

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Can any of the experts chime in and explain why Leica can’t produce a Q2M-43, with an added flip screen?  That would make my day. 

Edited September 18 by wilfredo

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[adan]

I expect if you asked Stefan Daniel* that question, he would respond, in words he has used before, that the Q2 (M or otherwise) is "a finished product."

Meaning "We are not designing Q2's of any kind anymore, let alone spending money re-engineering them for a different lens (including rewriting the firmware, and changing other electronics to match) and a different back construction. We have moved on."

It's a bit like asking why, once Leica had the technology for an M9 Monochrom, they did not go backwards and produce an M8 Monochrom. Once the M9 was introduced, the M8 was also "a finished product."

The Leica CEO around the time of the M8 (Steven Lee) was fired for, among other things, suggesting that the M8 would be perpetually upgradeable. Just not how digital camera technology works.

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* long-time Leica product manager and now executive VP for technology and operations.

[LocalHero1953]

But you might still get a Q3M-43🙂

[adan]

Possibly.

I think the problem is that the Q3 sensor (from Sony) uses phase-detect autofocus rather than contrast-detect - which means it has paired phase-detect pixels right on the image sensor itself (and the firmware is set up for those).

But the focus-sensing pixels cannot also produce image data (they are feeding their output to the AF system), so they result in two-pixel "dead-pixel pinholes" in the photograph, at each of the focus points.

https://blog.reikanfocal.com/2023/05/how-it-works-on-sensor-phase-detect-autofocus/

Fortunately the pinholes get blurred out of existence by the demosaicing/debayerizing processing of COLOR sensor output, which is how we get full-color images out of only red, green, and blue-filtered pixels anyway.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing

 

But a key selling point of the Monochrom cameras is that they gain extra practical resolution precisely because they do not have a Bayer-pattern filter array, and do not demosaic and blur neighboring pixels together.

So either Leica gets a sharp true-Monochrom image from that sensor - but with intentionally "dead" pixels scattered across the image.

Or Leica blurs out the "dead" AF pixels with otherwise unnecessary demosaicing - which blurs the whole image a bit. Result being it is no sharper than the same image, simply made with the color Q3 and de-saturated.

I suppose one could argue that a little blurring, or a handful of "dead" pixels intentionally supplied right from the factory, with 60 Mpixels to start with, is acceptable. But I'm not sure the dedicated Monochrom users would buy that argument.