[Leica] Leica M8 hands on

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

Well, DPReview has said that Leica has now officially announced the 
M8, posted pictures and spec so there's no point in being quiet any 
more.

Tom Abrahamsson got hold of an M8 about a month ago, and shortly 
after let me use it for about 10 days so that I could evaluate it and 
do a write up.

Firmware version was 0.23 so final image quality and some electronic 
operational items are certainly going to be different than what I got 
to use. Reasonably, I was asked not to post pictures from this 
camera. Various family members have gotten prints from it, but they 
really couldn't care much about which camera they came from. I took 
about 1600 pictures.

I had a couple of interesting moments w.r.t. other people's 
reactions. A couple of times while walking around downtown someone 
came up and said 'nice camera' while sporting their own late model 
Leica's. I slipped my fingers over the 'M8' logo and held the camera 
back against my body, went into grumpy mode, grunted and walked past. 
Then we had a gathering at our house, and among others the neighbours 
were there. A friend of their son came to our door, asking for 
Christoph; I let him in and he saw the M8 on the counter and 
immediately oohed and aahed. Turn's out he's a photographer and while 
born in Vancouver now lives over the LeicaShop in Vienna. After that 
I 'disguised' it, but it still was recognized at times.

So - the camera. It handles like an M, except your hands miss the 
grip that the wind level gave you. The extra thickness is easy to get 
used to, and the responsiveness is very good. Because of the firmware 
issue, the testing I did on it is meaningless, but there was nothing 
negative to my perception. The shutter, while certainly different 
than the rubber-curtained one on the film camera, is not particularly 
loud, either in firing or winding. I think the dampening they did on 
the transplanted R9 shutter had some effect. It doesn't have a high 
frame rate, but neither do the film M's and that's not important to 
me. The shutter travel includes a detent for locking the exposure 
that was a bit hard to find, but a lot better with one of Tom's 
softies.

The covering is fine grained and a bit too slippery, especially since 
I missed the wind lever for holding the camera with the right hand. 
Some kind of molded bump like on the Hexar RF would be nice, but I'm 
not sure right now how that could be implemented in line with the 
desire to retain the 'classic' look.

Frame lines were bright and useable, and came up in the pairs that 
you would expect due to the traditional lens mount activation. The 
frame for the 24 is reasonably visible  with glasses. It works with 
the Visoflex III, and it worked fine on the Aristophot I got 
recently, and I shot some pictures with the various Photars. I also 
put on my 17mm fisheye, and it looks like this:

http://www.archiphoto.com/Various/Incognito.jpg

All lenses that I tried, including 12, 15 and 21 CV; 21, 35/1.4, 50 
and 90 ASPH, and older 35/2, new 50/2.8, 50/1, 75/1.4 and 135/4 
worked, and worked well. I wouldn't hesitate to use any of them and 
there was no vignetting that wasn't visible on film as well. Those 
angled microlenses do their job, and erase one of the main objections 
I had re the RD-1, which was really not useable with lenses beyond 
the range of 24 to (slow) 75. Image quality was outstanding in 
general, the best were easily on a par or, in the case of wideangle 
shots, readily exceeded that of the best on the Canon 5D. My 
favourite lenses on the M8 were the 21 and 35/1.4 ASPH and 75/1.4, 
but I wouldn't hesitate to use any lens.

Menus were fine, and quite direct. There is no 'dedicated' button for 
ISO (full stops from 160 to 2500), but since you can get at two 
different menus by pushing two different buttons, changing ISO's was 
very fast and efficient. There are also good user parameter save 
options, so after you set them up you can go from low ISO with -1/3 
compensation, colour, colour histogram, bright LCD screen, high 
resolution with DNG and fine jpeg with medium sharpening and low 
saturation to high ISO, not compensation, B&W, dim LCD screen and 
regular jpeg with higher sharpening in a very few button pushes. The 
dial that's concentric with the arrow pad is also very nice and works 
well.

The little door to the left of the screen just has a connector for a 
dedicated cable, which I didn't have so don't know whether it's USB2 
or 1394.

Mainly, it felt like an M, and within a couple of minutes of picking 
it up you could shoot with it like an M, and except for the sound, 
lack of winding and having more than 36 shots, it really wasn't 
different than an M.

And that's good.


-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
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