[Leica] Lusting for an M9

[roark.paul at gmail.com (Paul Roark)]

Michiel Fokkema <michiel.fokkema at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you think the M9 high iso perfomance is any good?


I find it ironic that Leica uses CCD technology, which excels at its
native ISO, but is not as good at high ISO as CMOS technology.  For a
landscape shooter like me, CCD is ideal.  But for street/available
light shooters or wherever extremely high speed is needed, CMOS might
be a better solution.

CCD must do its amplification after the signal is transferred off  the
sensor, and that transfer is where  lot of noise seems to be acquired.
 So, I wondered how much difference there would be between a neutral
gray that was amplified in camera compared to one that is amplified in
Photoshop.  To explore this, I set the M9 exposure manually for
neutral gray at 2500 ISO and took a shot of an frosted/opal glass over
the lens (totally smooth, out of focus image).  I then moved the ISO
back to 160 and took a shot at the same exposure settings.  The 160
ISO image was near black when initially opened (ACR 3.x, with black
slider all the way to the left).  But when curves were used to take
the 160 ISO gray up to the same level as the 2500 ISO gray, the noise
levels in the images were essentially the same.  See
http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/CCD-iso-v-curves.jpg

While the in-camera amplifier does ultimately help the image quality
with even darker values, the message from the experiment is, I think,
rather important for those of us who shoot M9s.  I don't bracket much
any more.  Rather, I set the exposure for the highlights like I used
to do with slide film.  I manually "expose right", checking the
histogram often, and just let the low values fall where they may.
Amplification in PS is, over the ranges of values I've recently run
into, good enough that HDR is not needed and would not accomplish all
that much anyway.  This is very different than the style than is
needed for CMOS, and I prefer it to HDR and bracketing.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com