I was on the sidelines too, and shall now not proceed. That it is so limited in its implementation of LiveView is, for me, the same as not having any. A deal breaker. Bye-bye the "pure photographic experience".
I just hope that this is not a sign that developping a competitive digital body is beyond Leica's means. The M8 was severely limited in many ways, and so was the M9. That did not mean you couldn't get great pictures from them, but limited them to a market segment narrower than that of customers who could pay the high price.
Boris' cancellation is just that one more time. Technical limitations, very probably for cost reasons, that restrict the Leica market share to less than the people who were willing and able to buy.
Sad for those who wish Leica to succeed, including yours truly.
I wonder if the limited LV functionality is a firmware limitation or an actual hardware limitation. I cannot understand why it takes more processing power to scroll around.
carstenw wrote:
You have to generate a JPG plus possibly histogram for a much larger portion of the image.
Not that I am arguing your point, Carsten, but cheap compacts have been able to do it for quite a few years, so it is very surprising that the M "can't". It smacks much more IMHO of "we shouldn't make LiveView too good, it might attract the wrong people"
Rich, Philippe, I fully understand your disappointment. One would expect a camera with this price tag not to lack any "standard" features. I myself am quite disturbed by the high iso banding and the slow start up time, more than the lack of scrollable magnified view. To me these are serious handicaps for a street camera. I hope Leica will be able to fix these issues in a satisfactory and timely manner. Otherwise, the FF Nex seems to be in progress. The first FF E mount lens patent has been disclosed at SAR yesterday so that is definitely a good sign.
Cannot help but think this is a wanted limitation by Leica. We must talk about less than 1 % more processing power to be able to scroll around. IMO it's simply not a valid argument in a 2013 flagship camera.
Edward, I come back from one week's shooting in the Lofoten with Boris. I checked, I scrolled in LiveView more than 30% of the time. And focus-recompose on a tripod is just not on. Too bad for Leica.
That said, I have no hope that Sony will come up with a FF NEX that will work well with rangefinder wides. That is clearly not in the cards. That they might have a FF NEX that works well with specialised lenses, maybe. Anything more would require major advances in sensor capability.
douglasf13 wrote:
Everything sounds pretty good about the new M's operation, to me, except for the lag during power on, which could be a deal breaker. They must fix that.
ryankarr wrote:
Hopefully the camera is more responsive going from "sleep" mode to shooting. If so the solution might be just to leave it on.
douglasf13 wrote:
That's unfortunately not the impression I got, because he says that you can speed things up by simply leaving the camera on and turning off standby mode (at the cost of battery life.)
It's pretty much what I already do with the M9 (have it set to a very long delay before sleep mode), so don't see it being a serious issue for me, especially considering the much longer battery life. MT reported around 2000 frames without live view use. With the M9 I average about 350 by the time the battery is between 50-25% remaining.
As for when we'll see proper live view with scrolling in an M... considering the rate of development between the M8, M9 and now the M240, I would be surprised to see a refresher model take longer than 2 years. Hopefully Leica skip the pointless cosmetic special edition re-releases this time around and offer something substantial. Already in our small sampling we have two definite non-purchases, accounting for at least three cameras. And as Boris noted, Leica is aware of the disappointment. It would be seriously foolish of them to not take this seriously, especially because the mirrorless landscape is bound to change rapidly in the next couple years. And if the RX1 is a good example, there might be more manufacturers willing to release such cameras, which will undermine some of Leica's market
That said, the M is a considerable improvement over the M9. Much more so than the M9 was over the M8. As someone who got by OK with the M9, these improvements alone will be very welcome. For my needs, live view will be most useful for precise UWA framing. I don't anticipate using live view for action where the slight delay for the shutter to close and then open for actual exposure will be a factor.
mortyb wrote:
Cannot help but think this is a wanted limitation by Leica. We must talk about less than 1 % more processing power to be able to scroll around. IMO it's simply not a valid argument in a 2013 flagship camera.
But okay - this is the way it is. For now.
But, unfortunately for Leica, they have antagonized many of its own M and R, both long and short time users, and may ultimately cost them in loyalty and possibly into the thousands of lost M240 sales.
I've called this desicion braindead, and I still think it is. But - there's really no point complaining more about it. It is how it is. But I won't be surprised if we'll see a firmware update with scrollable LV.
rscheffler wrote:
That said, the M is a considerable improvement over the M9.
The question is: how many M9 owners can Leica convert to M (obviously not 100%, since Boris is already lost), how many non-M9 users can Leica convert to itself. The half-baked LiveView shows that their heart is not on making inroads in the landscape business. Banding and slow start-up, incidentally wouldn't worry landscape shooters, but very much the street shooters who seem to be the core of Leicaland. Ironic in a way.
philber wrote:
The half-baked LiveView shows that their heart is not on making inroads in the landscape business. Banding and slow start-up, incidentally wouldn't worry landscape shooters, but very much the street shooters who seem to be the core of Leicaland. Ironic in a way.
+1
Deeply ironic indeed, as part of the attraction/novelty with Leica R lenses is that the border and corner quality on offer, is a pleasure to check focus with in well implemented live view. Maybe next time, eh?
Bobu wrote:
Today I got the answer from Leica that the restrictions of the lifeview-zoom-function are hardware/construction based (without mentioning further details) and that there will be no quick firmware change to solve this problem.
They are aware that some customers are not really happy with the current lifeview implementation and are looking for a solution of this problem in the future (maybe next generation of the M?).
Therefore I cancelled my order for the 2 M240s today.
Boris
Damn, not an answer you were hoping for!
At least everything is clear now. They decided to use an old processor
with not enough power to support any modern feature. I bet $100 today, there'll be much more things
"discovered" as soon as it's being sold to photographers.
rscheffler wrote:
That said, the M is a considerable improvement over the M9.
philber wrote:
The question is: how many M9 owners can Leica convert to M (obviously not 100%, since Boris is already lost), how many non-M9 users can Leica convert to itself. The half-baked LiveView shows that their heart is not on making inroads in the landscape business. Banding and slow start-up, incidentally wouldn't worry landscape shooters, but very much the street shooters who seem to be the core of Leicaland. Ironic in a way.
That's a good question. If the banding is adequately addressed, I will look to upgrade. My guess is overall there will be enough upgraders and new buyers to fund development of the next model.
I would think banding would affect pretty much any kind of photographer, including those doing landscape, where my impression is many push dynamic range to the limit. The slow start up, as mentioned, can be addressed by not letting the camera sleep. With the much better battery life, this is less of a compromise than it was on the M9. Maybe my view is too myopic, but of all the M240 problems, it's only the banding issue that directly affects image quality in a potentially uncontrollable and undesirable manner.
Jono Slack's write up and gallery is also interesting. Good to see some images with the 28 Cron and WATE, with no evidence of edge color shift. If anything, my concern is the 28 Cron images are too clean. They don't show any indication of vignetting, which for some may be desirable, but at least for me is one of the lens's endearing qualities on the M9...
Besides banding, high ISO seems to be a bit of a let down for me, being possibly limited to ISO2500 to 3200 as what the reviewers say. I might just stay with my M9 for now and wait it out for a M240.1 or M241 or whatever. The IQ does not seem to be a huge jump from the M9 at lower ISOs and I probably can't use the EVF or LCD for wide angle street photography with the mentioned shutter lag delay.
Its somewhat disappointing that given the time Leica had to develop the M240, they underestimated the micro p power needed to drive live view and other power hungry functions.
Looking at Jono's files, it seems that some of the color signature from the M9 is retained which is a good thing though.
