[Leica] 2500 ISO

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2006-11-07-12:57:11 Walt Johnson:
> Personally, I prefer the M6 and the idea of changing dial designs
> (M6TTL) seemed idiotic. The years I spent shooting professionally
> convinced me of a few "golden rules". One of the most important is to
> keep the equipment I carry the same. Same bodies, different focal
> lengths. I don't even want to look at the settings while shooting but
> dial them by feel.

...and that's what they were trying to achieve, for people who shoot
with both Ms and Rs.  They made the shutter dial rotate the same way for
both.  That, and they made moving the controls in response to the
internal M light-meter LEDs more intuitive -- to follow the suggestions
of the in-camera meter, you rotate the top of the aperture dial (the
side you look at, and think about) or the front of the shutter dial (the
side your index finger fetches up against) in the direction the little
LED arrowhead is pointing.  There's no awkward inverting of directions
for the shutter dial.

I understand resenting the change if you've shot with Ms for decades,
only shoot with Ms, and have the direction inversion programmed
somewhere in your spinal nerves by now;  but I still think it was a step
in the right direction for the reasons suggested above.  I avoided
finger confusion by just switching entirely to post-TTL (TTL and M7) Ms,
which may of course have been Leica's evil master plan;  but with no
classic dials left in the stable, my reflexes changed pretty quickly and
it all worked even a little than before.

This points out a good thing about the reintroduction of the classic
dial with the MP, though -- if you want to add a body to a flock of
pre-TTL Ms you continue to use, you really want to match shutter-dial
directions.