M9 Photos in LFI 7/2009 not Sharp

[lieberdavid]

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Hi Everyone,

 

Since I live abroad LFI takes a long time to reach me and I received issue 7/2009 only yesterday. As an M film user considering buying a digital camera I was excited to learn of the new M9. The article about it in the magazine praised the camera to the skies, but I found the photos accompanying the article disappointing.

 

First of all they were not sharp, and second I think I might have seen vignetting in corners of at least two of them (p. 26 right photo left top, and p. 30 top left photo top left). After reading that the "image quality is far superior over anything attained by film" and "the Leica M9 corrects vignetting reliably", I am puzzled.

 

Is the quality of the photos in the article representative of what we can expect from the M9, or are the photos reproduced poorly in the magazine?

 

Would some one care to comment?

 

Cheers!

David

[jonoslack]

Hi Everyone,

 

Since I live abroad LFI takes a long time to reach me and I received issue 7/2009 only yesterday. As an M film user considering buying a digital camera I was excited to learn of the new M9. The article about it in the magazine praised the camera to the skies, but I found the photos accompanying the article disappointing.

 

First of all they were not sharp, and second I think I might have seen vignetting in corners of at least two of them (p. 26 right photo left top, and p. 30 top left photo top left). After reading that the "image quality is far superior over anything attained by film" and "the Leica M9 corrects vignetting reliably", I am puzzled.

 

Is the quality of the photos in the article representative of what we can expect from the M9, or are the photos reproduced poorly in the magazine?

 

Would some one care to comment?

 

Cheers!

David

 

Hi David

Having taken those pictures I can certainly comment!

As far as vignetting is concerned (and generally), it's worth mentioning that these pictures were taken with a very early version of the firmware - whilst Leica were still tweaking the vignetting control.

 

As far as sharpness is concerned, most of those shots are pretty sharp (and those that aren't are the photographer's fault ). I certainly think they might have sharpened them up a little for printing (of course, that was not my remit, and I passed them unsharpened .tiff files).

 

The pictures of the back LCD on page 27 aren't that great either (not me guv!).

 

I suppose I could send you a copy of any of the files you especially wanted to look at.

 

I think that the reproduction in the magazine is probably not designed for critical appraisal.

 

Incidentally, my quotes have been translated from English to German and back again - I don't argue with the sense, but I'm really not that pompous

 

Incidentally, you can see web versions of some of those images (and others) at Jonathan Slack M9