Monday, 6 October 2008

One Year and Six Months with the Leica M8

In a time of unusual circumstances when I found myself with quite a bit of money available, I bought a Leica M8. It is now one year and a half later, I am now poor, and this is my review of the Leica M8 after using it almost every day for one year and half (except when it was away being repaired).

I may expand on each item over time, and am happy to answer any questions you may have in the comments below.

The Rangefinder Allure

• Manual, tactile feel and response. Being able to change the aperture on the lens ring without looking down at the camera and being able to focus without looking through the viewfinder lets you keep your eye on what you are photographing or about to photograph. A photographic tool—a photographic notebook to take with you everywhere you go.
• Smaller size and camera design means less attention from candid subjects.
• Smaller, high-quality metal lenses.
• One of the primary tools used by a couple of generations of my favorite photographers: John Vink, David Alan Harvey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Elliot Erwitt, Sebastião Salgado.

Leica M8 Pros

• Design emphasis on photography fundamentals: aperture, shutter-speed, focus, shutter-release. A camera, not a space shuttle.
• Manual, tactile response of controls inherent in rangefinder cameras.
• Smaller, shallower camera. Classic look. Not imposing. Doesn’t look like a digital camera. A camera you can ‘wear’ without feeling self-conscious.
• Solid weight, sturdy brass construction. Useful when walking into lamp posts or protecting yourself from physical attack.
• Lens selection spanning over 50 years.
• Excellent sensor image quality (microdetail, tonal range) below ISO 1250.
• Simple, uncluttered LCD menu system.

Inherent Camera Type Limitations

(Characteristics of rangefinders and possibly other types of cameras that are consequences of the camera design, and not faults specific to the Leica M8.)

• Long closest focusing distance (usually 70cm, but with the lenses I use—a 50mm f/2 collapsible Summicron from 1956 and a 35mm f/1.4 Summilux from 1983—it is even longer at 100cm).
• Parallax problems at close distances due to off-axis viewfinder (at close distances, the composition you see in the viewfinder is not exactly what the camera captures in the picture). One must learn to compensate.
• Possible back-focus problems. I returned the first Leica M8 I bought from Adorama which showed obvious signs of prior use and suffered from back-focus problems when using a Voigtlander Nokton f/1.4 lens also bought from Adorama (which I subsequently part-exchanged for the old 50mm Summicron). It is best to personally test the Leica M8 and lens combination you intend to buy to make sure there are no back-focus problems (my research made it clear that I was not alone with M8 back focus problems).
• Short telephoto reach (an SLR is the proper tool for telephoto photography).

Inherent Limitations of the Leica M8 Design

(Technical issues that have already been exhaustively explained elsewhere. See Andrew Nemeth’s excellent M8 FAQ. I received the free IR filters from Leica but rarely use them as I shoot almost exclusively in black and white)

• Black = Magenta (See the Inadequate IR filtering section).
• Cyan corners (See the Cyan corner vignetting section in the same).

Hardware Problems

• I sent my second Leica M8 to the Leica factory in Solms, Germany to be repaired when I noticed a thin vertical bright line down middle of images, especially those taken at night, also visible on prints. This, I was informed, was a known problem and the sensor was replaced (at no charge).
• The Leica M8 has poor high ISO (1250-2500) performance, with visible horizontal banding in dark areas in low light.
• There is no hard stop detent in the shutter-speed dial and therefore no way of telling what shutter speed is selected by feel as is possible with aperture and focus (useful when photographing in dark environments).
• Camera freezes at times (rarely, but often enough for me to be annoyed by it), with the only remedy being removing and re-inserting the battery.
• Battery charger is too large and bulky. Can only charge one battery at a time.

Software Problems

• The Leica M8 has a problem where a dark band appears and ruins an image when a strong light-source is on the edge of the frame (perhaps this should go under the hardware heading above?) Here is an example of the M8 dark band, and another example of the M8 dark band.
• Scroll wheel menu selection goes ‘berzerk’ and scrolls very quickly up or down the menu sometimes (not a serious issue, but annoying nonetheless).
• The Leica M8’s auto-white balance is not very good, indeed inferior to that of many other cameras including point-and-shoots costing 1/10^th as much. Yes, even after firmware updates. The availability of the DNG raw file format and my work being chiefly in black and white remedies this somewhat, but this doesn’t diminish the problem.

Missed and Missing Pictures

• Terrible power switch design. The first stop in the Leica M8’s On switch is the most important one: Single Picture. But the first stop is the most difficult to access quickly because the last ‘hard’ switch stop detent is actually, unbelievably, at the Self-Timer setting, in the third (and most easily set in a hurry) switch position. Leica should move both Self-Timer and Continuous Shooting modes off the main power switch and into a settings menu accessible from the LCD.
• The Leica M8 suffers from short battery life and an unsuitable energy management system for a camera which needs to be always on when one is working for candid situations. I have LCD review turned off and do not look at pictures after taking them (the LCD is in fact constantly covered by the back-flap in one of Luigi’s cases), yet I need 3 to 4 batteries to take me through a day of serious work.
• The time it takes for the Leica M8 to be switched on is far too long. It needs to be very close to instant. Together with the bad power switch design and the short battery life, this means the Leica M8 is unsuitable as a tool for taking quick, candid photographs, which is usually a rangefinder’s strength.
• I have lost photographs when using my Leica M8 for no apparent reason on at least three occasions. There was no indication of a problem, the shutter kept firing, and the camera appeared to work normally. Only when I checked the files later did I see that whole sequences of images, as many as thirty, had disappeared from SD Card (or perhaps had never been recorded at all). Recovery programs such as PhotoRescue and Image Rescue were sometimes successful in recovering 1 or two of the missing pictures, but that was it—the large majority were gone. This has happened despite being careful to always format SD cards in-camera and using Lexxar and Sandisk cards recommended by Leica. This has happened both in occasions when I had edited (deleted) pictures from within the camera (something I do not do anymore) and when I had not done any in-camera editing at all.

Conclusions

• Lots of headaches. High cost (though it feels good to buy something from a small company at a high cost rather than buy something for less from a large company that pays a pittance to workers in Asia). I probably wouldn’t buy the M8 again if I knew of all the hurdles I’d have to jump over beforehand. Ultimately, buying the Leica M8 was worth it because it helped me make a commitment to photography and helped me learn more about photography. Leica must concentrate on working photographers when thinking about their M rangefinder camera design. They must not, as they have done with the Leica M8.2, add ‘snapshot’ modes to appease bored dullards always looking for a new toy as a status symbol or as a fix for their addiction to consumption.
• The only option at the time. The only reason I have the M8 at all is because it is the only available digital-format rangefinder on the market (the Epson RD1 performance is not sufficient, especially because of the 1.5x sensor crop factor and the older image sensor’s performance). Any other digital rangefinder with the following minimum specifications would meet my needs:
  • M lens mount with rangefinder-coupled focus,
  • Low crop factor,
  • Sturdy metal construction, reliability, built to last a long time.
    Are you listening Leica, Voigtlander, Zeiss, Pentax, Nikon, Canon? Hell, to make it cheaper to produce (and to save battery life), I would buy a digital rangefinder without a rear display. Or even better, make the camera black and white only.
• Camera case. At the camera price, a hand-made leather case similar to those by Luigi Crescenzi should be included with the camera. Leica would do well to make a deal with Luigi or create their own case design.
• Eberhard Jakob is a most helpful person at Leica who should be commended for his customer relations. If it weren’t for persons like Eberhard I wouldn’t have given the company any second (and third) chances.
• Thanks for the ride so far. I appreciate the difficulties in bringing a digital rangefinder to market and I wish the people working at Leica un bocca lupo for the future. In the meantime, I will of course, continue to photograph using my M8 and any other cameras with which I enjoy working.

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

✒ Simon Griffee

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