The heck with the crop factor....

[wlaidlaw]

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Wilson, a quick Google came up with this...

 

Minox UK website

 

I'm sure there are others.

 

Steve,

 

Many thanks for that link. I know Steve Britton of MS Hobbies, listed as processing B&W, who has done a couple of repairs on my Minox C and TLX over the years. He had stopped B&W processing but that was before he moved to Scotland. Perhaps the lovely countryside around Nethybridge has inspired him to start again. I will give him a ring. It still works out pretty expensive at £52 for a process and print of a 36 exposure film. I can still get colour processed by 8 x 11 labs in Germany at about 30% of this price but the black and white generally gives better results, with much finer grain on the Minopan 100 ASA.

 

Wilson

[koob]

I don't know anywhere else but if you come to Toronto, NONE of the Leica dealers bother to stock a M8 or dot 2 ... the stock market is full of bargains with extremely high quality and value, who wants to sink their cash with a piece of brick?

 

That is not true. Vistek (in toronto)usually has demos, and M8 always has been back order, always, since its introduction.

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[adan]

BTW - and still somewhat on the topic of field of view:

 

Go over to the Customer forum, where there is "leaquage" from a French Photo store regarding the 18MM SUPER-ELMAR-M f/3.8 lens.

 

Funny it hasn't been noted on this forum yet....

[Olsen]

OK, instread of the term "wasted", I'd say instead that a cropped sensor does not allow users to get full value from their lens investment. The lenses are capable of a performance which M8 users will never see.

 

There are lots of things I'd like to see in an M9, high ISO capability and electronic framelines being just two. But just as the M8.2 skirted the issue of IQ and is more of a fix for bad design decisions in the M8, the M9 has to address IQ first and foremost. For me, that means full frame, live view for focus confirmation, a user adjustable LPF and of course much improved high ISO.

 

Mark,

 

If you had to choose between 'improved high ISO properties' - like practically noiceless files at ISO 1600, and 'a full frame sensor', what would your priority be?

[alex7075]

During many years spent using 35mm (among other formats, 645 and 6x7), I often felt I wanted a lens a bit wider than the 50mm, but longer than the 35mm, and with a short depth of field if needed. Just to have a bit larger 50mm field of view and the "feeling" of a "normal lens", without falling in a wide-angle effect.

I must say today that the M8 with a 35 lux answers perfectly to my wish, thanks to the 1,33 cropped sensor.

 

The same way, a 50mm on the M8 lets explore the interesting possibilities of a 70mm (but again a bit wider), a focal length I always ignored when I worked with film.

 

And with a 75mm, one can find again the pleasure of working with a 105mm, IMO one of the best focal lengths ever imagined for the 35mm format, better than the 85mm.

 

As you can see I am not very fond of wide-angles, and I know that it is not that easy to transpose my sayings on that side. But if Leica unveils a 18mm 3.8, hope is not lost...

[marknorton]

Mark,

 

If you had to choose between 'improved high ISO properties' - like practically noiceless files at ISO 1600, and 'a full frame sensor', what would your priority be?

 

Low noise, high-ISO performance comes from big pixels so it's a straight trade-off between pixel count and pixel size, between image noise and resolution. If Leica were to introduce a larger sensor, they could chose the keep the pixel count the same and reduce the noise (like the Nikon D3) or else keep the pixels the same size and give us more of them (like the D3x).

 

One issue which worries me though is moire and what impact that has on a sensor with a low-ish spatial sampling rate, especially with no LP filter. Nikon D3 images are quite soft unsharpened and I wonder if that's because the LPF needs to be quite aggressive due to the reduced spatial sampling rate to prevent moire.

 

In a Leica M world where there can, sensibly, be no LP filter, I think moire would be more commonly a problem if they provided a larger sensor with larger pixels. With no LP filter, it might just not be possible to increase the pixel pitch in the quest for lower noise.

[SJP]

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Moiré occurs when the wavenumber of some feature in the image matches (more or less) with the wavenumber of the pixel pitch. So having the same number of bigger pixels would shift the Moiré sensitivity by a factor 1.33 in spatial frequency, so not more Moiré but in a different part of the image. I would be surprised if that would be a show stopper & it can be removed in post-processing using suitably smart alogrithms.

 

Having more pixels is a waste of time & disk space + you would not gain much in high ISO performance. Having 1.33x bigger pixels means 1.33^2 more area = roughly 1 stop more sensitivity. Keeping everything else exactly the same as on the M8 the max. usable iso would be 2500 instead of 1250, and you get the intended lens signature back. That sounds good to me.

[Olsen]

Moiré occurs when the wavenumber of some feature in the image matches (more or less) with the wavenumber of the pixel pitch. So having the same number of bigger pixels would shift the Moiré sensitivity by a factor 1.33 in spatial frequency, so not more Moiré but in a different part of the image. I would be surprised if that would be a show stopper & it can be removed in post-processing using suitably smart alogrithms.

 

Having more pixels is a waste of time & disk space + you would not gain much in high ISO performance. Having 1.33x bigger pixels means 1.33^2 more area = roughly 1 stop more sensitivity. Keeping everything else exactly the same as on the M8 the max. usable iso would be 2500 instead of 1250, and you get the intended lens signature back. That sounds good to me.

 

Canon has signalled that 'a wast improvement' is imminent on pixel size and high ISO/low noise properties, in a recent photo exhibition interview. What could that mean?

[SJP]

Wasn't there someting about inverted CCD's where the wiring is under the sensors instead of on top? That was supposed to lead to more sensitivity. In fact I think from a physics point of view there is not that much space for improvement beyond some tweaking, pixel size/pixel count optimisation & algorithms. The photon capture efficiency is pretty decent unless I am mistaken?

[coffee]

I think this is great point, I have struggled with trying to recreate the look I got on film with my Leica M8 and I found that I had to throw a lot of logic out the window and just look at the results. Ken Hansen in NYC told me when I bought my M8 that if I shoot B+W, I should set the camera at 1250 iso and it will look like tri-x, in fact this is true and I always do this BUT I found that the digital sensor was so darned sharp, I missed the leica smoothness I used to get so I started experimenting with some of my old lenses and found that some of my old (I mean 1930's) lenses softened up the in-focus part of the image. A lot of those lenses had terrible drop-off and lost contrast on the edges but the M8 effectively crops out the weaknesses. Suddenly, there is new life for these old and excellent lenses! I tried to find a replacement super-wide lens and I just couldn't find anything I liked. My first M lens was an adapted 21mm biogon that was thrown in when I bought my first M2. Imagine the luck! I used to shoot that lens all the time. I put it on the M8 and it is perfect! Who cares if it's cropped, it's back in my life. I still struggle with the over-sharpness of the sensor but the crop factor is not an issue at all and in fact can be very useful if you use older lenses PLUS I subscribe to Robert Capa's perspective, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough" The M8 brings you even closer to the subject than a film leica. Put that in your pipe...