WTF Leica X Vario!

I said that I would leave Leica users alone, and I am. But I said nothing about leaving Leica alone, and they just opened themselves up to a world of criticism.

Leica has a history of taking other companies' designs and kinda'/sorta' slapping their name on them and calling it a day. Sometimes, there is actual value in this, you just have to look.

For example, the Leica D-LUX series was just a copy of the Panasonic LX series, for which you paid hundreds extra. Buuuuut you got a copy of Adobe Lightroom included, which at the time was $300. So, you still paid a bit of a Leica premium, but not too much.

Then they went and released the Leica X1 back in 2009. It was $2,000 for an average APS-C sensor attached to an average f/2.8 lens. There was literally nothing special about it save for the Leica name and body, and for that they demanded a huge premium.

On second thought, no. Perhaps I'm being too harsh. This was 2009 and the competitive landscape was very different. There weren't two dozen large-sensor point-&-shoots running around like there are today. All P&S cameras had very small sensors, so while the X1 was a poor camera compared to the world of SLRs, in the world of P&S, it was somewhat unique. I don't think it was ever $2,000 worth of unique, but hey, I'm a cheapskate.

Leica then released the X2 in 2012. This was a simple update to the X1 for the same price. Granted, by now, the landscape was getting more difficult to explain the $2,000 price, what with the Fuji X100, Olympus E-M5, and Sony NEX series running about making things all awesome.

But now, Leica has outdone themselves. They've released the update to the X2 in the form of the X Vario, given it a cheap zoom lens, made it bigger for no apparent reason, and are now charging nearly $2,900 for it!

This cannot stand. I must mock them.

This is an insult to the photographic populace. I see it as an actual insult. This is one of the most arrogant products that I have ever seen (the worst was the Hasselblad Lunar). They are saying that their customer base is stupid enough to fall for this when they could have the already-legendary Sony RX1 for the same price. Or they could have the Olympus E-M1 or Panasonic GX7 and three great lenses. Or they could buy the new A7R and an excellent lens. Or they could buy into Fuji's system and even get a camera that feels similar to a Leica. Or they could go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, once a week for a year. Or they could fucking burn it in a nighttime ceremony to worship the moon ANYTHING IS BETTER!

Imaging Resource tries its damndest to make the camera sound good, and all they can talk about is how nice it is made. Every time they talk about the part where it, ya' know, actually makes pictures come out, they have to qualify every positive statement. They say that the lens is sharp... and? The Canon 18-55mm is also super-sharp across the frame. Same size, too. It also costs $200.

This X Vario is a laughable piece of equipment. It's a slap in the face by Leica. As the market became more competitive, they released an inferior product for more money than they had in the past. I can barely believe it.

I Now Understand Those Who Shoot Leica

I have often made fun of Leica and Leica users. Their products are wildly overpriced and philosophically rooted in the photographic dark ages. That said, as time has gone on, I've begun to understand them more and more. Now, I'm not about to go out and buy Leica — that's likely (Leicaly?) never going to happen — but I am completely stopping my mockery.

In fairness to me, I mostly stopped mocking Leica some time ago. My reasoning for this was that Leica, price and all, was a way for truly serious photogs to differentiate themselves from the Best-Buy-shopping, APS-C shooting, photographic hoi-polloi. The rise of digital, and Instagram, and everything else that has resulted in the majority of photos ever taken having been taken in the past five years, has concomitantly caused a severe drop-off in the work required and the prestigiousness of photography as an art.

Fifty years ago, walk in to a county fair and only a few people had SLR cameras. Go now and half the damned crowd is rocking Nikon or Canon. It's very difficult to feel in the slightest bit special in the face of that. It's hard to feel as though you are doing something that others are not.

How absurdly elitist and pretentious! you may be yelling. And there is a degree of that going on, I'm sure. But who cares!? Of course there is! We all want to feel as though our chosen hobby is something a bit unique. We want to feel as though we're doing something that separates from the crowd enough to be a part of an identity. Otherwise, what the hell will one person have to talk about with another person when they are all doing and thinking the same damned thing?

Moreover, I have heard too many stories of photogs showing up for work with standard gear only to see palpable disappointment on the faces of their employers. This disappointment immediately disappears when the Leica or Hasselblad comes out. Pretentious? Yes. But it's also good business.

This is also the reason why I think that both medium format and Leica have seen huge sales increases in the past few years. Leica went from nearly dead to the best sales of its history. Hell, even wacky, scanning backs have seen sales increases every year for the past ten years!

The second reason for my ceasing Leica-hate, and the reason for this article, is that Leica is the only company out there that doesn't fuck around. No, Mamiya, Phase One, and Leaf aren't fuckin around either, but they are medium format companies aimed and high-end professionals. Of course they aren't fucking around. I'm talking about SLR companies and companies that cater to enthusiasts as well as professionals.

What do I mean by not fucking around. I mean that Leica doesn't release a product and immediately orphan it. Leica doesn't release crap lenses for high prices to protect their higher-end products, or in many cases not release lenses at all! Leica doesn't release crap anything. Leica's design and philosophy is simple and well-known. They never create a bad lens. They never create a bad product for their philosophy. Leica is always good.

You have to pay through the nose for it, yes, but it is always good. It is never bad. Leica's philosophy may not be compatible with what you want or need, but you must admit that vis-a-vis Leica and its history, its products are always good.

No other camera company is doing that. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic, all of them fuck around to no end. They release MOUNDS of garbage: crap lenses, shitty cameras, stupid products; and even if they release a good product, like the EOS 7D or NEX-7, they abandon them! Fuji is the only other company that even comes close, which, again, is why I give them a pass for their failings.

An example that sticks in my mind because it is in the news is lenses for current mirrorless cameras. Digital cameras presented a new opportunity for camera companies: software correction. In camera, previously destructive things such as aberration, distortion, vignetting, and flare could be reduced via software tuned to the characteristics of a particular lens. Olympus and Panasonic have taken this philosophy and run like Forrest Gump with it.

On its face, this sounds great. A poor lens can be made to seem like a better lens. But as Panasonic and Olympus have proven, they take this ability and then try to charge the same amount for their lenses. Go to a website that measures raw distortion of the 12mm, the 12-35mm, the 35-100mm, or any other of their laughably overpriced pieces of shit. The distortion is mind-blowing. I'm talking 6%. Back in the days before software correction, a 6% distortion would be considered a broken lens.

But with software, these companies have completely abandoned fixing these problems via in-lens corrections. They now rely on software. If we received a discount on the lens price, then this would fine. But we don't. They create a shitty lens, hide the shit with software, and then try to charge full price for the lens.

No. Fuck you.

Leica would never do this. Leica would never correct in software. If someone ever even floated the idea, that engineer would be forced to commit seppuku.

Make no mistake, this is a conscious choice on the part of these companies to best rip you off. For example, there are two 12mm prime lenses for the Micro 4/3 system: the SLR Magic f/1.6 and the Olympus f/2.0. The SLR Magic has distortion of 1.26% and costs $500. The Olympus has distortion of 5.4% and costs $800! Moreover, the SLR Magic is nearly a full stop brighter. In fairness, the Olympus is sharper and does correct aberrations in-lens, but in the battle of optical quality, the SLR Magic wins... and does it for cheaper.

This makes me angry and it should make you angry. They are tricking you into buying something of lower-quality. Abandoning systems should make you angry because the value of a lens is at least partially dependent on how much I can sell it for in the future. Crap lenses should make you angry because if other lenses are much better, the value of my purchased lens will drop as better lenses are released. Why do you think Leica lenses frequently increase in value after they are released.

Because, again, Leica has never released a bad product.

So, after all is said and done, I would never buy Leica. I respect Leica and their history, and respect those dedicated enough to deal with the system, but I just could never buy it. They are incompatible with the way I shoot and what I want to shoot. But I will not longer hate on them and those who use them. They may be expensive, but they are also unique.

And how do you put a price on that?

Welcome to the Modern Era, Leica!

Analyses of Leica's new M camera have been posted across the various sites and, well, they look good. As always with Leica, though, the results are odd, verging on bad.

Looking at these results from Focus Numerique, we see a massive and material shift in image quality in the jump from ISO3200 to ISO6400. We saw a similar effect on the Leica Monochrom. Detail retention is good, but the amount of luminance noise is huge. Next to the Sony RX1, there is no competition. The RX1 is superior in every way.

DxOMark shows similar results. Wildly better than the old M, but still not up to the level of other cameras in its segment. And while the old M was unique on the market, the new M faces off against the RX1 and Fuji X Pro 1, making it a tough sell for anyone but the Leica faithful.

Still, the Leica sensor is competitive. That is much more than could be said of the old M, which produced inferior images to every other full-frame camera on the market.

Olympus E-P3 Leica M9 Comparison

Steve Huff has posted a comparison of the Olympus E-P3 with the new 12mm lens against the Leica M9 with the Summilux 24mm lens. I remain terminally unimpressed with Leica. I see it as a toy for people who want to feel self-important. But using Leica as the bar is a great idea since, even though the cameras and lenses are all hilariously overpriced, the quality is certainly excellent.

A few interesting notes. First off, the Olympus 12mm represents itself wonderfully. It is sharper across the frame than the Leica at F2, but while the Leica would likely gain a huge boost from further stopping down, the Oly is performing around its best at this aperture.

Second off, the depth of field differences that make determining sharpness so difficult also provide a great example of the amazing difference between the 2x, Micro 4/3 sensor. The Leica shots have a great deal more texture and complexity, simply because more of them is blurred.

Third... off. The differences between even a bad full-format sensor, like the Leica, and the m4/3 sensor in the Olympus is quite large. One doesn't realize this until presented with full-resolution examples of real world shots. The noise levels out of the Olympus are quite noticeable, especially in the way that they negatively effect the rich colors in the sky.

And finally, I don't understand those who say they never encounter moire in their shots when using cameras without a low-pass filter. Now let it be known that I would always prefer a camera with no low-pass filter. I post-process every photo that I take and removing moire is easy. But still, every medium format picture I see has significant moire somewhere, and the first Leica shot, of the donation bins, has moire dead-center. Look at the sticker just above "RECYCLING CENTER." The letters are very discolored.

So the lens is great. And on an Olympus body, it focuses like crazy. But that THREE-YEAR-OLD sensor wasn't terribly good when it came out, and it's even worse now. And like I said, the Leica's sensor is the worst full-frame sensor on the market. As far as noise levels go at base, the Olympus looks even worse in comparison to the Pentax K5, Nikon D7000, and downright ugly in comparison to other full-frame cameras.

I love the lens, the sensor is needs to be ditched.