Good points Kent. I suspect there are some divergent priorities among those participating here. Some are definitely interested in taking advantage of the small sized RF lenses. For me it\'s a matter of already owning a fairly substantial RF lens collection and not wanting to buy yet another set of lenses for a specific platform (I already have a lot of Canon EF in addition to the RF lenses). A couple reasons I added the Leica M system to my Canon kit was for the size reduction without compromising image quality. The lenses on the M9 definitely perform very well. I\'m not sure the more recent RF lenses (mostly from Leica and a couple from Voigtlander) are compromised by digital and are most certainly designed for it. I\'m perfectly happy with these on the M9. I can\'t imagine there being any improvement on film. While Leica\'s M system is definitely a holdover from the analog era (as are DSLRs), Leica have shown it\'s not enough to compromise image quality while retaining the physical proportions established in that era.
It will be interesting to see what combination of features and performance Zeiss conjures up for their upcoming line of manual focus lenses for this platform... Will they lean more towards their historical tendency of \'lens relaxation\' through somewhat larger optical formulas, or will they aim to take advantage of the lack of AF components and truly shrink lens size (length) down to something akin to RF lenses? (I suspect girth will remain constant with the lens mount size.)
If these new lenses do rival RF lenses for size and offer optical performance along the lines of the two FE lenses we\'ve seen thus far, I suspect it will make RF lenses on this platform much less relevant. There seems to be a big opportunity here if Zeiss can find the magical combination of size and performance to satisfy a large enough segment of this fairly niche market.
douglasf13 wrote:
From what understand, it\'s the microlenses that help/hurt with noise, vignetting and color shift, but the sensor toppings like the IR, AA etc, that influence smearing. The oblong microlenses of the m240 might actually be doing a bit better job than the M9\'s microlenses, since the camera actually has more colorshift than the M9 (better tuned microlenses equals better reception of light rays but worse color shift at the edges,) but Leica must have changed the whole IR and cover glass setup for the worse. TheSuede had a post about microlens design recently talked about this.
Of course, there also must be differences in the pixel designs of the CCD vs CMOS, so that could be part of it.
IIRC TheSuede slammed Leica/Kodak for their use of a very cheap quality cover glass/IR filter on the M9\'s sensor and that apparently the M240\'s sensor has a much higher quality one. This, combined with the redesigned microlenses, may correlate to the reports from early M240 users of better edge sharpness with various wide angle lenses. Therefore my interpretation is the opposite - Leica changed the M240\'s sensor topping stack for the better.
Nov 13, 2013 at 12:35 PM
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