[Leica] New 35mm cropped

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

> 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
> 


The fact that cropped format digital photography is not longer  taken
seriously by photographers and their art directors and editors is a fact not
my quirky opinion.
Its a fact and a well known one. And for quite some time.

Mark William Rabiner