Leica M8

Looks like I've gone Leica mad!

If you've read anything about the Leica M8 on the internet you've undoubtedly heard about all of its "issues," so I won't bother going over them to any great extent, but I will add my thoughts on them.  

The shutter is louder than a film Leica, no doubt about it, but it's not really loud either.  I'd agree with what some people have said about the shutter making a different kind of noise, but honestly it's as loud as pretty much any DSLR these days.  Of course, there are a couple of advantages to the noisier shutter in the M8 versus the quieter one in the M9, M8.2 and so-called M8.1, such as 1/8000th second top shutter speed and 1/250th flash sync.  In a professional-grade camera, I really appreciate the higher flash sync, so I'll put up with a slightly noisier--but not really noisy--shutter.  

One thing that really bothers me:  why no PC-sync port?!  I know a lot of people say, "oh, well a M-rangefinder is about natural light shooting," but that's stupid.  Photography is about controlling light, whether it's existing or not, and sometimes I'd like to be able to plug some studio lights into the camera and still be able to use the shoe for additional viewfinders.  I can't believe the M9 still doesn't have a PC-sync port.

The camera itself is really rather unobtrusive--it's smallish and it looks like something you dug out of your grandpa's closet--unless someone happens to recognize it as a Leica.  It's sort of funny to watch people process why an "antique" camera like this has an LCD on the back, and inevitably they ask, "Is this digital?"  I've always wondered what they'd think if I said no.

I sort of have mixed feelings about removing the bottom plate to change the battery and the SD card, but it's not too much trouble; I know some people think it's a bother, but it is what it is.  Battery life is as you've heard: on the low side.  I usually take my M8 on vacation with me and I'm always careful to charge the battery every night; I'd like to just carry an extra battery pack, but they're stupidly pricey.  I'd guess about 400 shots to a charge when you're not doing a lot of image review.

It has a 1.33x crop factor compared to 35mm film, and that's a little annoying, but to me since it's a rangefinder and you're not actually looking through the lens it seems easier to me to adjust to than the 1.5x or 1.6x common to most DSLRs.  I would still appreciate a full frame sensor, but the M9 is just more than I can honestly justify spending on a camera (and sometimes the M8 is as well).  I sold my Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII and replaced it with their Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 MC, and I'm fairly happy with it as a basic "normal" lens, and it wasn't too outrageously expensive.

The general conclusion on the internet is that the M8 is too noisy regarding higher ISO settings.  And I'd maybe agree, but while it's no D700 or 5D Mark II, it's also an improvement over most APS-C DSLRs out there.  Noise aside, I've worked with files from a lot of different cameras and the M8 files have a crispness that I haven't been able to find in other cameras, and I'd wager that the lack of any anti-alias filter in the camera is the reason.  I've compared the M8 against the Canon 7D, and I'd conclude that, in terms of resolution, the M8 is a match for the 7D.  A camera like the 5D Mark II has an advantage at large print sizes, but I think up to 11x14 or so the M8 is a strong contender.

IR/UV sensitivity is an issue, and the whole black-into-magenta thing shows up pretty easily.  Leica sent me two filters to block it, but even with coded lenses the whole cyan corner shift is still a bit of an issue at times.  I've coded my lenses with markers, but my Zeiss and Leica lenses rub off too easily.  Voigtlander lenses have a nice groove in the mount to prevent the self-coding from wearing off, but I tend to favor Zeiss lenses, and I find myself recoding them every four or five lens changes.  But having an infrared sensitive camera is actually pretty nice, and a simple Hoya R72 visible light blocking filter is all that's needed to take advantage of it.  The best thing is that unlike on an SLR, focusing (and metering even!) is as easy as ever.

I actually sold off nearly all of my Canon kit in order to purchase more M-mount lenses.  I thought I'd keep the Canon stuff for the things that a rangefinder isn't suitable for, but it turned out that for what I was shooting a rangefinder could do 90% of it.  One thing that turned out to be pretty neat was that when I put my Canon ST-E2 wireless controller on my M8, I found out that if I used the 580EX II Speedlights set in manual wireless mode I could fire them off with a maximum sync-speed of 1/90th second!  I just had to make sure that the M8 wasn't set to second curtain sync or it'd miss the flash, but I was surprised that this worked at all.  In the end though, the 580s were sold and I've picked up some Nikon SB-24s that work great with the M8.

Anyway,  I really like the M8, but it's not a camera for everyone, and there's times that I really miss having a DSLR.  Having such an anachronistic camera is always going to be a bit of a struggle unless you're either wealthy enough to not really care about it, or have a specific enough shooting style that you can make the most of it.  I wouldn't really say that I'm either of those things, and I'd probably be better suited with a camera like Sony's new NEX-7, but every now and then everything comes together correctly and the M8 is the greatest camera I've ever used.

Examples (not necessarily of greatness):

Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII

Hey, another M-Mount lens!

This is the Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII; what a nicely built and compact lens!

I had wanted to maybe pick up an older Leitz Summaron 35mm f/2.8 with the goggles, but I just couldn't ever seem to find one in decent shape for a reasonable amount.  Naturally this isn't a Leitz lens, but as a third party alternative I'm very impressed with it.  It's not quite to the same level of build as the Zeiss 50/2.0 ZM Planar that I also have, but it's about right for the cost.

After having used this lens for awhile, I would agree with everything that's normally said about it. It's nice and contrasty, it's fairly sharp even wide open, it has a surprisingly nice out of focus rendering, and it's compact.  It also doesn't really flare that badly, but, as a warning, when it does it is quite ugly and really has the possibility to ruin a shot so I'd recommend getting a hood with it; although, that then reduces the compactness of the lens.

I actually wound up selling this lens after having it for a couple of years, thinking that the 35mm focal length wasn't one I was using much, and boy did I regret it.  I eventually replaced it with the Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm  f/1.4 MC, which is another lens that I like quite a bit, but something about that Skopar still sort of tugs at me.  I think in retrospect, it's easily the best value in the Voigtlander line-up, and if you're shooting mostly out doors in sufficient light, this is the lens for you; don't get suckered by lusting after those ultra-high-speed lenses.  More modest lenses, when done correctly, are some of the best lenses you can buy, and this one is a gem.

Examples:

Plustek OpticFilm 7500i SE

Well with all these posts about film cameras it'd only make sense if I mentioned a film scanner wouldn't it?

I was in the market for a dedicated film scanner to replace the Canoscan 8600F that I had been using for scanning 35mm (I just didn't think a flatbed scanner was doing my Leica justice). The Nikon Coolscan V was my obvious first choice and is still probably a better, if more expensive, option. Unfortunately it is a now discontinued product with no manufacturer support, and worse, Nikon never felt the need to write 64-bit drivers for it (luckily for Coolscan owners SilverFast continues to support it).

After searching around for something in my price range I happened upon the Plustek 7500i, and initially it looked promising. I found a couple reviews online for it, and while the usable resolution seems to really only be about 4000dpi instead of the 7200dpi that they advertise, 4000dpi was still what the Coolscan V offered and seemed like plenty for 35mm. The Dmax is reported to be about 3.8 and not the Coolscan's 4.2, but considering that I had been working with a flatbed, I figured I could live with the difference.

The scanner comes with SilverFast's software version 6.5, which I find a little quirky but fairly full featured. The iSRD dust reduction hardware leaves a little to be desired, and I'm finding my old negatives to be far dustier and far more scratched than I had previously been aware of. Cleaning your negatives beforehand is always the best policy anyway. High res scans take awhile to complete, especially if you turn on multi-scanning or dynamic range optimization. I typically use the multi-scan option as it helps eliminate some of the noise that the scanner generates itself, but I've been surprised by how relatively little shadow noise is present in even a single-pass scan.

The scans I've been able to get with this little machine are very detailed and very sharp. I barely need to sharpen the images at all for most purposes. Comparing the Plustek to the Canoscan, the images from the newer scanner are noticeably better, and even after optimizing sharpening a clear advantage still shows in the Plustek scans, this holds true even at lower resolution settings. If you do want your scans sharpened, I'd recommend turning off the scanner's sharpening options as it tends to overemphasize the grain in an image; you can do a much better job in Photoshop. My usual scanning routine is to run USM at a radius of 0.3 pixels at 240 to 330 percent and follow that with another round of USM at a radius of 40 to 60 pixels at 10 to 15 percent (threshold is 0 in both cases).

I can't say that the Plustek 7500i matches the Nikon Coolscan V because I've never been fortunate enough to work with the latter, but I can say is that I don't think there's much more detail left in a typical 35mm negative that the 7500i isn't able to capture. D-Max, scan time, and many other things might be better on the Coolscan V, but I'm pretty sure that the 7500i is capable of meeting and exceeding my current needs for 35mm use, and I'm quite happy with it. One thing to keep in mind is that when we all shot film and printed on traditional photopaper, most people placed a limit to quality 35mm enlargement at about an 8x10 inch sized print, so don't expect your old Kodak Max 800 negatives to be scannable and printable as crystal clear wall sized poster images.

Here's a few examples with different films, but unfortunately Blogger messes up the high resolution files on here, so these are obviously rescaled.

Fuji Velvia 50, Leica M2, Voigtlander 35mm f/2.5

Kodak E200, Leica M2, Zeiss 50mm f/2.0 Planar

Ilford PanF+, Leica M2, Zeiss 50mm f/2.0 Planar

Fujipress 400, Canon EOS 630, Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM

Leitz Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8

Ooo, what an exotic looking setup!

Leitz Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8 from about 1984 mounted on a 1958 Leica M2 with MR-4 Leica-Meter.

It would seem that despite being a fairly popular and relatively affordable lens, there's not a whole lot of good information out there on the internet about it.  There's a lot of people that say it's way too large and that the slower aperture Leitz lenses are a lot better (which I don't doubt), but that's about all I ever seem to see anyone say about it.

The longer the lens, the more difficult it is to focus on a rangefinder.  Since we're dealing with a lens here that's both relatively fast aperture and fairly long, Leitz compensated for some of the increased difficulty in focusing by building in a set of magnifying goggles.  These goggles turn the 90mm brightline into a 135mm view by giving the viewfinder an extra 1.4x magnification and effectively enhances the accuracy of the rangefinder.  It does darken the viewfinder image a little and I think it also increases the tendency of the rangefinder spot to flare out, but all in all, it's a intriguing solution.

The lens is obviously kind of large, but not really any more so than any other 135mm lens like this would be.  This particular version of the lens was the last version (sometimes denoted by the option for E55 filters as opposed to the earlier Series 7?) and was optically the same as the R-series lens that Leitz made for the now discontinued R-system of SLRs.  There's definitely some heft to it; I'd say that with it mounted to the M2 the whole kit is maybe five pounds, so yeah, it's not exactly lightweight, but what do you really expect from such a solidly built package?  

The person I bought this lens from said that he used it on an Epson RD-1, but I don't see how that's possible as the goggles don't line up with the rangefinder windows, and I can say for certain that the lens does not work with the Voigtlander Bessa series of rangefinders.  It might work with the Konica Hexar RF, but I've never played with one to know what the differences are, and my guess is that it won't work with the new Zeiss Ikon M-mount rangefinder either.  It does, however, work fine on the newer digital-Ms, but on the M8 (at least on an unmodified M8 anyway) the frame lines aren't 100% accurate, but they are usable.

Functionality aside, the lens is quite sharp, no surprise there, but what did surprise me is how prone it is to flare.  Any sufficiently bright light source can lead to a dramatic veiling flare that doesn't necessarily ruin a photo, but does reduce contrast significantly.  I suppose this might be highly desirable in a portrait lens, and certainly 135mm makes for a great portrait focal length, but this still surprised me a bit.  As I said, the lens is very sharp (not uncommon for a 135mm) and doesn't really need to be stopped down to improve.  If you've got one of these lenses and you think it's not quite up to snuff, you might want to calibrate it--sharpness really depends on critical focus.  Fortunately you can do this yourself by loosening (but not removing) the back of the goggles and adjusting the set screws near the goggles' objectives.

All in all, a very nice lens.

Examples:

Olympus E-410

Wow, not a Canon, not from the 1980s, and a digital camera!

I lifted this photo from ephotozine.com since I don't actually own this camera, but I did have the opportunity to use one awhile ago and enjoyed quite a bit really.

It's a fun little camera to use; so tiny, it feels a lot like using the Konica FT-1 Motor that I wrote about the other day. That little kit lens is sharp sharp sharp, no two ways about it; a great value compared to most other kit lenses you'll find these days. And honestly, despite what you'll hear, noise isn't as big of a deal as you might have heard on these Olympus cameras; yes, there's more than you'll find on most of the wonderful cameras currently on the market today, but if you've got a photo that doesn't succeed because of noise, it probably wasn't that successful of a photo to begin with.

So what don't I like about it? Few fixed focal length lenses. Not a big deal from an image quality standpoint; the new Oly zooms are fantastic and fairly fast aperture.  But the E-410's such a small camera, it would be great to have some ultra compact pancake-style fixed focal length lenses to go with it (like some of Pentax's Limited lenses).

I'm also not sold on the whole 4:3rds thing. When they first started out with 4:3rds they said it'd be better from the standpoint of cropping, but in this day and age I don't feel that I need to be bound to the old standard 4:3rd-ish print ratio, and I happen to prefer the more common, and wider, 2:3rd ratio that you find on most other DSLRs. Actually, I'd love to have an SLR with a 16:9 ratio...well maybe, maybe not.  Of course, as Olympus was quick to point out, 4:3rds fit computer screens and TVs much better, so way to be forward thinking Olympus and catch on to the fact that digital display was the way of the future, too bad you didn't think forward enough to realize that 16:9 was the new standard.

So okay, to sum it up. Great camera, great lenses, great image quality, but not really what I look for in a camera.  With today's ILC cameras eating up the market for large sensor compact cameras, I think it'd be safe to say that the E-410 and it's successors were the only 4:3rds bodies to really, and I mean REALLY, deliver on the promise of smaller sensors allowing for smaller bodies.

Example:

Shot at ISO 800 with the Zuiko Digital 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6

Konica FT-1 Motor

It's not a Canon this time, but it is a 1980s film SLR.

This is the Konica FT-1 Motor with a really very nice Hexanon AR 40mm f/1.8 mounted on it.

Plastic exterior, steel interior, electronically controlled, autowinding, autoloading.

It's a full-featured, well-built, reliable, top-of-the-line, professional camera, with a ton of system accessories. Even though it dates to the mid-1980s and has a motor drive, it's still a pretty quiet camera--certainly quieter than any external motor drive I've been around. I would say that it definitely was designed to be a shutter-priority camera; although, it still works fine in manual, but the metering display becomes a little awkward to use.

The FT-1 has a vertical traveling shutter; although, for whatever reason x-sync dropped from 1/125th second on the earlier T-4 to 1/60th second, but it now works with Konica's autoflash system.  Shutter speed is electronically controlled from 2 seconds to 1/1000th second, plus bulb, mirror lockup is unfortunately impossible. The camera can be placed into auto-exposure lock mode by pressing the little orange button next to the shutter speed selector and turning the power switch one more notch (I prefer AE.L, so I don't really like the extra button press). You can select from single framing rate or 2 frames per second continuous shooting. ASA is available from ASA 25 to ASA 3200, and exposure compensation is available in EV+/- 2stops.

Thankfully the FT-1 uses very easy to find AAAs which are housed in the grip, and there was even a little larger grip that you could get that used regular AAs. The only problem is that the battery holder is rather weak and plasticky and tends to fall apart over time, so battery holders can be hard to find for a replacement and you find a lot of FT-1s without them. Mine has started to come apart, but a little superglue patched it up without problem (note, be careful using superglue around optics).

I've only got the 40/1.8 and a 28/3.5 for this camera, but both are really superb optically speaking, and the whole of the Konica Hexanon line was reported quite good.  I've sold off a lot of my film cameras, but I've hung on to this one for some reason.  I guess it's just got that 80s charm in all the right places for me.

Examples:

Canon T80

Another 1980s Canon, although, this time we're talking about a fairly unique, if low end, SLR.

I picked up an old Canon T80 for pretty cheap with the AC 50mm f/1.8, and it's really not a bad little camera.  It's not as big as it looks in all of the pictures you see on the internet, but it's full of 1980s quirk and charm.  But what's so special about this camera, you might be wondering, well, in a word: autofocus, to be specific, Canon's first autofocus SLR.

As you can imagine, being the first means that the AF is somewhat primitive and really requires something with fairly good contrast for it to be able to focus on.  But outdoors in bright light AF is both fast and accurate and not as bad as a lot of reviews on the internet make it sound.  The AF motors in the AC lenses are naturally a far cry from today's silent USM models, but they're not obnoxiously loud either.

The major drawback to the T80 is of course the availability of autofocus lenses for it, not that the selection has bad range, there's just nothing there that's anything more than consumerish.  The AC 50mm f/1.8 is probably the star of the trio of lenses available, but it's optically nothing more than the run-of-the-mill FD 50mm f/1.8 with autofocus added.  Additionally, there was an AC 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 standard zoom and an AC 75-200 f/4.5 telephoto zoom.

The camera is auto-loading and auto-winding, so there's no lever advance.  To look at the film transport mechanism, I'd guess that it's the same system that was used with minor modifications in the later EOS models in the 600 series, and I'd wager fairly robust.  Mercifully, with all this automation requiring power, this camera runs on 4 cheap and easy to find AAA batteries.

Some of you might not be aware, but this camera really doesn't have any manual capability aside from manual focus (which is aided both by an electronic rangefinder and a slightly unique four-way split focusing spot).  You can, in one of the auto modes, select 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, or 1/125 second shutterspeed, but honestly that's about it.  The other auto settings do let you sort of set the camera to the type of picture you want to take, but the more advanced modes that we're used to today like Av, Tv, and M are absent.  Even when you attach another FD lens to the camera, you have to set the lens to A (or O depending on vintage) and use it fully automatically.

To some the lack of manual modes may be a drawback, but honestly, this camera is about point and shoot simplicity with FD-lens quality, and in that regard it definitely delivers.

Canon Sure Shot AF35ML

So here's another Sure Shot from the collection, but a more basic and more sought after one due to it's bright f/1.9 aperture lens.

This is a Canon Sure Shot AF35ML with a fairly nice--and fairly uncommon for this level of camera--40mm f/1.9 lens.  This was the second Sure Shot from Canon so that places it at about 1981 and the same vintage as cameras like the New F-1 and the T-series FD cameras.

I suppose this camera might be thought of as the spiritual sucessor to the Canonet line and something like the QL17 G-III...well, probably it'd be more correct to say something like the QL19, but whatever.

It's autofocus of course, and there's not really any settings that you can control other than the ASA, which only goes up to 400 on the earlier models, however, some later Taiwanese built models went up to 1000.   It's worth mentioning that the ASA 1000 models lack an 800 setting, and since the low-light autofocus isn't improved on these later models, I really question the usefulness of the higher speed setting. 

In the viewfinder you'll find reasonably bright frame lines in addition to little pictograms that light up to sort of let you know the approximate distance that the camera's focused on, and so far I've found it to be pretty accurate (maybe two shots per roll are misfocused, but some of that's surely operator error).

Exposure is generally good, focus is fairly fast, you can even shoot continuously at about 1 frame per second.  It has AF/AE lock as long as you hold the shutter button halfway, so you really do have pretty good control over the final result as long as you take a second to think about what you're doing.

Some comments on the internet say that this is a loud camera, and I'd somewhat have to disagree.  It's not really that much louder than most cameras with a motordrive of the era, and most SLRs aren't much quieter given the sound of the mirror slap.  I suppose if you're used to the near-silent clicking noises of most current digi-pocket cams it is a little loud, but if there's any other ambient noise it's not really that bad.  That said, there is one annoyance that I've found when shooting in low-light without the flash being popped up and that's the warning buzzer telling you that you should use the flash.

The lens is fairly sharp for a point and shoot's lens, but certainly consumerish in its rendering of out of focus areas.  It doesn't seem to flare too badly and does appear to be well coated.  There are filter threads (43mm if I remember right), and the metering cell is located within the lens barrel, so if you wanted to use filters, or maybe a polarizer the camera would automatically compensate exposure.

Here's an (not very good) example showing the out of focus areas:

Anyway, I like the ML a lot.  I think I'd easily say I like to use it more than my Canonet if for no other reason than I like that it uses AA batteries and not those expensive and awkward to use Wien Cells.  Having a built in flash is actually pretty nice as well.

And more examples:

Canon Sure Shot Zoom XL

I have to admit, I've always had a fondness for quirky consumer grade cameras.  After us kids were born my mother bought a Canon Sure Shot AF35M II to replace her aging Kodak Instamatic.  That was my first experience with a 'nice' camera, and it kept working for a long time until my older brother borrowed it.  This is not a review of that camera; this is a review of a much nicer and more unusual camera, the Canon Sure Shot Zoom XL.

Introduced in 1989 this was a fairly expensive premium grade point and shoot.  It featured a 39-85mm f/3.6-7.3 S.C. coated lens composed of 9 elements in 8 groups that supposedly gave results as good as Canon's FD lenses.  I'm not sure how many steps the zoom mechanism has but it's pretty seemless, giving you fairly good control over focal length (although, honestly how much accuracy do you need when your viewfinder only has 84% coverage).  The viewfinder does, of course, zoom along with the lens as does the flash, which is neat.

It has a near infrared AF assist light that lets it focus comparatively quickly even in low light and on low contrast subjects.  Unfortunately the lens isn't faster, but the flash does have a slow sync option so I'm sure you could do some nice things with it.  The metering sensor is a three-zone variety and has a fairly wide working range.

It's possible to take pictures at 2 frames per second, but I assume the camera doesn't have any focus tracking ability to speak of; however, I suppose given enough light, depth of field would be deep enough that it wouldn't matter much.

The remote sitting in front of it in this picture actually stows away at the bottom of the camera.  It of course allows you to get in the picture or to take pictures from a tripod without touching the camera.  It also has an immediate release, a two second delay, and allows you to set three different focal lengths on the zoom.

In it's day, the Zoom XL cost about the same as what an EOS 700 body cost without a lens, or a little more than half what it would have cost for body and a similarly spec'd lens.  It's not really a "compact" camera, but for someone not expecting to buy extra lenses and wanting a high grade camera that they didn't have to know a lot to use, the Sure Shot Zoom XL seems to have been a pretty good option.

Interestingly, I can't seem to find many of these here in the United States, aside from the one that some guy in West Slope is selling on Craigslist (thanks for the links, buddy).  This one came from the United Kingdom, and I actually also won another one on eBay (labeled the Prima F, the typical European name for it) that came from Denmark with an old roll of film still in it.

After shooting a roll of AGFA Vista 400 through the camera I can certainly say that I'm impressed with the lens on this camera.  It's not the sharpest zoom lens I've ever used, but it's certainly capable for being just a point and shoot.  I'd say between this camera and the sought-after Sure Shot AF35ML you loose the f/1.9 aperture of the ML but not the optical quality; you do, however, gain a wealth of flexibility with the zoom and flash modes and even the included remote.  It's also a bit quieter, but definitely somewhat bigger.  Both have their pluses, but the Zoom XL is a pretty solid camera for what it is.

Here's a few pictures that I've shot with it, just for kicks.