RE:[Leica] Digital Leica M

[Adam Bridge <abridge@mac.com>]

> I rather believe that Leica could produce a new rangefinder digital body
> that would use the M lenses. I think that Austin Franklin has, many
> times, explained the impossibility of adapting a working digital captor
> to a M body for the angle incidence of the light on the sensor, I think.
> But as one of the big values of the M line are the M lenses, a new body
> could be manufactured from scratch able of using the M lenses and
> keeping the general aspect of the M body. The bigger the sensor the
> better...Just my opinion...

Unfortunately the bigger the sensor the worse the problem will become!

The problem is that the sensors aren't 2D structures - they are 3D - they have
depth. This is going to be a pretty crude analogy (sorry for those who really
work with these puppies) but you can think of each light sensor as a pit with
the actual light sensing element down at the bottom. At the center of the sensor
the light comes directly down into the pit - no problem - but as you move toward
the outer edges the light is coming in at an angle so it no long illuminates the
light-sensative element at the bottom of the pit. And remember there are
anti-aliasing filters over the top of these etc etc.

The M's film plane is much closer to the lens than it is in an R8 or one of the
Canon cameas - so the angle is much more extreme, making the usuable part of the
sensor so small that it isn't worth bothering with.

That's why no M digital.

One can imagine, at some point, being able to fabricate a sensor with slanted
light paths - although how such a fabrication would work I can't imagine. (Image
of little nano-devices with picks and shovels digging holes....)

Changing the design parameters to make a digital M would probably lose the parts
of the M that we like: small, light lenses being the first to go.

This is how I understand the situation. 

Adam Bridge
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