[Leica] First pictures from my new Q2

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

The Q2 is a very nice camera, but it has too many options. Basically 
I've been trying to turn it into an M as much as I can. It doesn't just 
have autofocus, it has 5 or 6 kinds of autofocus, including face 
recognition. And then you have to decide whether you want it to focus 
once, when you push the button halfway down, or whether you want it to 
do focus tracking. I'm currently trying to figure out if I can have 
separate control over focus lock and exposure lock (right now pressing 
the shutter button halfway down locks both of them, and I don't always 
want to have focus and exposure on the same spot).

The smartphone app that works with it, "Leica Fotos", is awful beyond 
comprehension. But you can use it, slowly and clumsily, to suck pictures 
out of the camera into a smartphone. That's probably better than having 
the camera itself know how to upload things to the web.

It has a world-class lens, a state-of-the-art sensor, and about 100 
different configuration parameters. The default configuration seems to 
be set for people who take different kinds of pictures than I do. Some 
of them are about video, which I don't care about, and some of them 
control what sort of JPEGs it makes (which I almost don't care about).

But its 47 megapixel sensor means you can crop very very tightly and 
still have more pixels remaining in the image than my M9 sensor could 
give me. It has what they call "digital zoom", but it's basically just a 
viewfinder trick, and I haven't been able to figure out any reason why I 
should use it.

Moving forward I will post more pictures of my friends and family taken 
with the Q2, and you can decide for yourself whether it can be coaxed 
into doing righteous things.