Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2015/06/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Congrats on the new MM, can't wait to see you first images. Would love to have one myself. Gene ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Klein" <boulanger.croissant at gmail.com> To: "Leica Users Group" <lug at leica-users.org> Sent: Monday, June 1, 2015 10:52:41 PM Subject: Re: [Leica] IMG: Back from shopping George: I picked up the MM a few days ago. I'm still learning. I'd had a chance to try Jay Burleson's MM last December (thanks, Jay!). Plus I've looked at a lot of pictures and files, and read lots of reviews by people I respect. All of which convinced me that this was the camera for me. Thanks to the release of the M246, people started upgrading, MM prices dropped from [expletive] insane to merely expensive, and it was time for Peter to get one. The image quality is superb. I've made very nice B&W out of M8 files, but this is on a whole different level. The dynamic range is significantly wider than the other CCD digital Ms. The shutter is quieter than my M8. ISO 320 and 640 are virtually grainless. 1250 has a little texture, but less than most films, and even 2500 is less grainy than Tri-X. At 2500 and above, you do see grain, but it's like fine pepper rather than coarse sandpaper. No degradation from Bayer interpolation. 5000 is quite usable, like Tri-X in Accufine. 10,000 is pushing it, but still usable in a pinch. The MM handles just like the M8 or M9. The files are flatter out of the camera, so they usually need some sort of S-curve (or at least a shoulder in the high values). The flexibility is amazing. You can take a picture where the shadow values look almost black out of the camera, then dodge them up to near medium values, and it looks great. The DNG files are big. 34.7 megs big. This is actually a good thing, because they are not compressed. Having seen the difference between uncompressed raw and compressed DNG in my M8, I'll deal with the size. It matters a great deal at higher ISOs. This does mean that if you take four or five shots in quick succession, the buffer fills up, and you can't shoot until it clears sufficiently. I've shot a bit with a yellow filter, and a bit with no filter. Nothing conclusive yet. Other people have reported good results, typical of what we got with film, using green, orange, and red. Some have reported that the MM with no filter is like film with the yellow filter. A big disappointment of both the M8 and M9 was that they were not true available light cameras. A skilled person could make them work that way, but it was a stretch. So half the reason that people historically bought Leicas was missing. The MM doesn't have color, but it has the available light chops as well as the resolution for the Panatomic-X and tripod crowd. It's nice to do available light with some depth of field. All my 50 mm lenses are begging to go out and play. Black-and-white is my first photographic love. I look forward to re-exploring it with such a fine tool. --Peter On Monday, June 1, 2015, George Lottermoser <george.imagist at icloud.com> wrote: > > On May 29, 2015, at 10:43 PM, Peter Klein wrote: > > > <https://www.flickr.com/photos/24844563 at N04/18253781151/> > > > > Leica MM (yeah!), 50/2 tabbed Summicron > > nice snap > > when did the MM land in your hands? > > and > > your thoughts on the camera and image files? > > Regards, > George Lottermoser > > http://www.imagist.com > http://www.imagist.com/blog > http://www.linkedin.com/in/imagist > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > _______________________________________________ Leica Users Group. See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information