Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/12/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]2009-12-28-14:33:39 Mark Rabiner: > My main street shooting film in the 90's was Neopan 1600 in Xtol 1:3 and I > shot it at 1600. Coincided with my bourgeoning Leica m use. And the M8 makes darned nice pictures in daylight at ISO 1250 (which tests show is about the same sensitivity Canon bills as 1600). It's a little more obviously noisy if you shoot in tungsten light, because once you've balanced for the color temperature the blue channel has been cranked up, and the blue channel seems like the noisiest to begin with. But if you got on with Neopan 1600, I think the M8 is at least as good as that was once you've converted to B&W. The M8 at ISO 2500... is pretty messy. I wouldn't go there unless I were absolutely desperate. Although I'm not sure it isn't still better than any 3200-speed film available on the '90s. The M9, now... I feel (with the same target resolutions/print sizes) that ISO 1250 is a practical working sensitivity I don't need to feel bad about using, and 2500 is around the same as, or only a touch worse than, 1250 on the M8. So 2500 is no longer a crash-and-burn emergency-only thing, but something you might even get a nice photo (grainy, sure, but has potential) out of. And that "with the same target resolutions/print sizes" thing is important. Because, looking at other people's (I think dpreview, but might be misremembering) sample pictures from the Canon 5D Mk II and the Nikon D700, you see something interesting: Yep, the D700 in low light has less noise per pixel, of which it has fewer than the Canon; but when you scale them both down to the same lower resolution, by the time the Canon's more but slightly noisier pixels have been averaged together, the Canon ends up less noisy than the Nikon. You may argue that the Canon (or the M9) would do better if they started with fewer pixels, but I'm not sure it's actually true. In the M9's case, you get beautiful noise-free 18 megapixel captures in brightish sunlight, and if, after taking pictures in low light, you scale the pictures down to a Rabinery 10-12 megapixels or less, you have your lower-light camera too. -J