Ranma13
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 Leica SL observations compared to Q and M240 | |
I rented a Leica SL from lensrentals.com and just received it today. I\'ve been playing around with it for a few hours now, and since I have the M240 and Leica Q as well, I figured that I\'d do a preliminary compare and contrast between the 3 cameras.
I rented the Leica SL because I\'ve been having issues getting critical focus with the M240, especially on people\'s eyes. Even after calibrating the rangefinder and getting both the 1.2x and 1.4x magnifier, it\'s still sometimes difficult for me to make out the rangefinder patch (a symptom of getting older, perhaps?). I\'ve also had issues holding the M240 steady enough to get sharp shots at 1/60 sec, which is normally my go-to shutter speed for the best compromise between shutter speed and ISO. I\'ve been having a much easier time getting sharp shots with the Leica Q, but I love the M lenses. This made me wonder: how would the Leica SL do with M lenses? Here\'s my observations:
- For tripod work, the SL is by far the easiest to work with because the SD card slot is on the side of the camera, not the bottom. This means that you can remove the card without having to un-tripod the camera. Leica Q comes in 2nd because the card slot is on the bottom, and you need to un-tripod the camera to get to the card. Fortunately, it\'s possible to offset the tripod plate so that it doesn\'t block the door. M240 comes in a distant last place because not only do you have to un-tripod the camera, but you also have to remove the plate as well. This really, really sucks for any kind of tripod work where you need to remove the SD card frequently:
- For all 3 cameras, there\'s no way to disable noise reduction, and they all start using NR at 1-second exposures and higher. This may or may not affect you; it affected me pretty badly this past New Year\'s when I was trying to take pictures of fireworks in bulb mode. I had to wait for NR to complete before taking the next shot, which lead to a lot of missed shots, especially towards the end of the show when the fireworks are going off in rapid succession.
- The SL in aperture priority, unlike the <s>Q</s> and M240, will not drop the shutter speed below the minimum amount set in the auto ISO settings. This means that if your auto-ISO settings are 6400 with a minimum shutter of 1/60 sec, whereas the Q and M240 will drop the shutter speed below the minimum if it detects an under-exposure, the SL will cap it at 1/60, even if it means underexposing. This is an interesting design choice, as every other camera I\'ve used will drop the shutter speed. Correction: the Q will also cap the shutter speed, like the SL:
- The Leica Q makes a soft, constant noise that sounds like water boiling. This is the OIS in action, and turning off OIS will reduce the sound, but not eliminate it entirely. The M240 and SL do not make any noise when using them (aside from the typical shutter noise, of course).
- The 6 buttons on the SL (4 on the back, 1 on top, and 1 in front) are configurable, but only for what they do when you long press them. There doesn\'t seem to be a way to configure their short press behavior, which is what I\'d think that most photographers would want to do.
- The Leica Q\'s absolute (absolute meaning in there\'s no way to go any higher, no matter what you do) max shutter speed is 30 seconds. M240 is 60 sec. I\'ve only tested the Leica SL for 2 minutes because I had to hold down the shutter manually, but it\'s definitely much longer. Keep in mind though that the noise reduction runs for the same amount of time as the exposure, so a 2-minute shutter will require 2 minutes of NR. Assuming that the SL can do 30-minute exposures, you will likely also have to wait 30 minutes for NR to finish. The shutter settings on the SL only allows you to set a max of 60 seconds before it goes into bulb mode.
- The noise reduction message screen for all 3 cameras does not allow you to do anything else with the camera. Even turning them off will wait for NR to finish before shutting down. The Q and SL only displays a message that noise reduction is in progress, whereas the M240 shows the time remaining before it\'s complete. Not sure why the timer was removed in the Q and SL, as this is pretty useful info:
- The Q\'s bulb mode is press-to-start, press-to-finish; it doesn\'t allow you to hold the button down. The SL and M240 use the standard hold-until-finish shutter press. On the Q and SL, there\'s no indication that the exposure is happening; the LCD screen displays a black image (like what you\'d see if you covered up the lens), but there\'s no timer that counts up or an icon to indicate that an exposure is taking place. This is especially problematic on the Q because of the press-to-start shutter and lack of shutter sound due to the electronic first curtain (unless you enable the fake shutter sound effect); if you\'re taking a shot in a very dark setting, it\'s impossible to tell if the camera actually exposing or not. The SL doesn\'t have an electronic first curtain, so you still get the shutter sound at least, <s>but same behavior with just the black screen, but no indication otherwise</s>. The M240 is the best of the bunch; it will show you the exposure timer counting up in the rangefinder. Correction: The SL will show a timer counting down on the top OLED panel (\"16\" above the 50):
- The 2-stage shutter on the SL feels mushy for the first stage, and has a lot of travel before you reach the point where any additional pressure will trigger a full press. The M240 and Q are sharp with short travel. I prefer the shorter and sharper travel; the SL\'s shutter feels too mushy for my liking.
- When you half-press the shutter on the SL, the button labels that describe what the 4 buttons on the back are for, go away. If you want to activate any of the 4 buttons, you have to press the button first to bring back the labels, then press it again for the button to perform its action. You can change this behavior so that you don\'t have to do the double-press by setting Display Shortcut Icons to Off, but then you lose the labels completely. There\'s no way to get the opposite behavior, where the labels always show.
- When it comes to weight, the SL is the heaviest of the bunch, but feels decently-balanced thanks to the grip, although the bottom right hand corner digs into your hand. The M240 is heavy and unbalanced, and the handgrip didn\'t help much for me because you have to stretch your index finger to press the shutter, a very uncomfortable action. The Q has the same basic shape as the M240, but it feels decent because it\'s light. Unfortunately, none of the 3 cameras feel ergonomically great to me. The Q is forgettable and light, the SL is heavy but tolerable, and I actively dislike the M240\'s ergonomics.
- There are two ways to magnify the image for manual focusing M lenses: the lower left button on the back, and by pressing in the joystick to the right of the EVF. The lower left button doesn\'t pair well with M lenses because you have to keep your hand on the focus ring, which means you can\'t press the lower left button with your left hand. This means that you either have to stretch your hand a bit to press in the joystick, or use your nose to press the lower left button. Neither is really ideal, though the joystick is not too badly positioned where you\'d have to stretch very far to press it.
- The rear LCD for the Q and SL stays on when doing a long exposure. Both cameras also \'freeze\' as this is happening (dials and buttons do nothing, EVF sensor is unresponsive).
- The EVF in the SL shows a larger image than the Q, and fills the eye more. Whereas the Q feels like you\'re looking through a window with an EVF behind it, the SL is bigger and feels closer to the eye. Refresh rate for both feel about the same (120hz). I will update later with more info on dim lighting performance.
- The Q\'s focus peaking can be displayed at the same time along with the histogram and clipping, but only after the focus ring is moved. This means that, if you half-press the shutter, the focus peaking will go away until you move the focus ring again. For the SL, you can only view the histogram and clipping, or focus peaking, but not both at the same time (they are different \'pages\' as you cycle through the display modes).
- Focus peaking is a bit thin on all 3 cameras, only displaying the peaking for very high contrast stuff (black on white). Anything with moderate contrast and below (white on dark gray, yellow on blue) tend not to show the focus peaking color. Luckily, the EVF on the Q and SL are good enough that you can achieve critical focus only using magnification. See picture below, where black and white shows good focus peaking, silver on gray shows thin peaking, and red on yellow shows almost nothing, despite having a well-defined edge:
- There appears to be a very small difference in flange distances between the SL (using the Leica M to T adapter) and the M240. With the M240, infinity on my 2 lenses converges exactly on infinity (right-most position on the focus ring), whereas on the SL, the lenses will extend a tiny bit past infinity:
- Shooting in DNG only mode on the SL does a weird thing with the image playback. Zooming into a taken photo when you shoot only DNG shows a very, very blurry image, which is pretty useless for anything. 1:1 looks fine, but you can\'t check focus that well with it. In order to get the zoom working normally, you must shoot DNG+JPG. See image below, where left is JPG+DNG, and right is DNG only.
- Focus magnification for all 3 cameras are:
Leica Q: 3x, 6x
Leica SL: 4x, 6x
Leica M240: 5x, 10x
I will update this post with more information as I play around with the camera more (I have it until Friday), along with some images.
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