jhapeman wrote: denoir wrote:
The relevancy of DR depends very much on what you shoot. The DR by numbers are not something that Puts is alone to claim - there are plenty of other tests that confirm it. If it is an issue or not depends on the subject. For landscape photography it is very relevant, but then again the M9 is not exactly the best system for that anyway (no live view, focusing system, form factor, pixel count etc). For those things where it excels - social photography, street photography, portraits etc DR is much less of an issue.
Would you mind pointing me to any other DR tests? I can only find one other test, the one from DxOMark, and it shows that the M9 has a tiny bit MORE DR than the M8, and both it and the M8.2 are not much different than the 5DII:
That\'s total dynamic range, not usable. And even considering that, the M9 is more like the Panasonic GH1 than the 5D2:
As for other DR tests, I seem to recall Lloyd Chambers did one and I think dpreview usually does such tests.
Anyway, if you don\'t trust Erwin Puts in questions of Leica then I don\'t think you\'ll trust anyone. He\'s the top Leica expert in the world. It\'s not a coincidence that he gets to play with all the Leica prototypes and that he has a close cooperation with the company.
As for your assertion about the M9 as a landscape camera, you are sorely mistaken in my opinion. Many people have shown--in this very thread no less--that the M9 is a superb landscape camera. I love using it for landscape shooting. There is a whole thread of images devoted to the M9 for landscapes over on the GetDPI forums:
Of course you can use it for landscape shooting. There are some amazing landscape shots here in this thread, but it doesn\'t mean that it\'s particularly good at it compared to a high end DSLR. The obvious problem is the lack of live view on a 18 megapixel camera. You can\'t get pixel accurate focus. You don\'t have DOF preview - in fact you have no idea of what the sensor is going to see. The camera body is small and not intended for tripod operation. Again - of course you can use it from a tripod but it\'s not a very good solution compared to larger camera. Also composing with frame lines is of course a PITA and there are no long tele lenses.
In short not a camera optimized for landscape photography. It\'s about as optimized for landscape photography as a medium format camera is for street photography. Can it be done? Sure. Is it optimal - no way.
Range finder cameras are not new. The M8/M9 doesn\'t introduce anything conceptually new. The reasons why in the film era photographers turned to medium format cameras and large format cameras for landscapes and not range finders hold just as well today. A (D)SLR has always been a compromise - a jack of all trades that is fairly convenient for any type of photography. A range finder camera, like a large format camera is a specialized tool that is far superior to a (D)SLR in its domain but inferior for other tasks.
