[Leica] New 35mm cropped

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2010-01-13-05:19:06 Mark Rabiner:
> To early to tell but I'm predicting the M9 will be a very well thought of
> camera and by Spring you'll see all kinds of articles in magazine about top
> shoots done with them by top photographers who never want to put them down.

Top, top, top.  Sounds like somebody's obsessed with some notional
ranking of topness.

But yeah, the M9 is a thoroughly spiffy camera.  It oughta be, it's
probably a good 15-20% better than another world-class camera, the M8.

Here's a crazy secret: an M9 is seven grand.  The M8, well over 2/3
as good, can be stolen for around 1/3 that price these days.

If you have the dosh lying around to grab an M9, you should do so.  If
not, doing without a digital Leica and theorizing about why an M8 is
unworthy for... reasons which still make no coherent sense... is just
like shooting yourself in the eye.

> The best camera is always going to be the one you have to work with.
> And especially the one you have with you. In hand. Out of the case. Turned
> on.
> If its at home or just something your dreaming about the pictures you're
> going  to get with it are going to be quite invisible.
> 
> I look back at my work from 2009 this week rating them and its all 1.5 crop
> and the best year of photography I've ever had by far. Far better than the
> years I shot Hasselblad and my M6's.

You make my point.  I'm not nearly up to your volume, but Lightroom
tells me I shot 8976 M8 pictures during the pre-M9 era.  I'm really
glad I did, especially the good ones.  In 2009, I only show 3171
pictures with an M8.  Crumbs by your standards.  But these yielded a
few hundred I genuinely like, which is swell, and 30-40 I like a whole
bunch (these I even posted for you kids).  Few of these would have
existed in anything as nice as their current form had I tried to crank
them out with any other camera.  I have a Canon 5D (full 35mm frame!)
which is intrinsically a far crappier camera for my purposes than an
M8.

I just don't understand your weird, ironbound anti-M8 prejudice.

It's like... well, I really enjoy good music, reproduced well.  There
are many ways to design stereo equipment.  You can do the electronics
with vacuum tubes or transistors or a hybrid of both;  you can do
speakers as planars or drivers-in-boxes, and if the latter as one, or
two, or three, or more drivers.  The thing is... brilliant, talented
designers will take the incredibly many factors into account and and
cme up with brilliant results (whatever technology or number of
drivers they happen to end up choosing).  Hacks will come up with
crap, whichever of the above choices they make.  Your obsession with
"full-frame" cameras is like someone shopping for stereo speakers and
insisting on something "with three drivers".  It's nonsensical.  Far
more competent people balance those detailed decisions and come up
with a final whole.  You should shop based on the overall performance
of the system, rather than second-guessing particular engineering
details.  The M8 (whatever its sensor size) is a system which performs
well.  Yes, the M9 is a system which seems to perform even better --
but I think it naive to attribute that solely to sensor acreage;  and
to write the M8 off as a failed evolutionary branch when it still
out-performs large swaths of giant and not-so-giant SLRs under many
real-world circumstances just seems silly.

 -Jeff