The contracted space of the Kodak booth is a sign of the times. At previous kina’s Kodak occupied a full hall for itself, now the company has a small part of a haal in the background. You have to search to find it. Films? A new Portra400 with an emulsion that shares technology with the movie films is news and the pictures made with this film look fantastic. But it is really a trouble to find the film section on the small Kodak stand.

A full hall is now dedicated to inkjet papers and photobook producers. The number of new paper surfaces, all claiming to emulate or surpass the classical baryta film look is exploding. Every manufacturer shows impressive results and if print quality is your goal you can select anyone. Just as it was in old chemical darkroom: it is better to stick to one paper then to switch to other papers every time.

Huge sizes are in. Every camera manufacturer shows images of at least two meters high. It is digital technology is it not? The camera scene itself is quite boring now. We have now the situation that every camera produces image quality that is better than what you need and even a small EOS 550 can create quality that is not that far removed from what you get with a 1Ds.

The new species of cameras (mirrorless system cameras: EVIL or SILK or CSC) are hot: thirty percent of all interchangeable lens cameras in Japan is already MSC. Quite logical! All japanese families own one or more dSLR and compact cameras. So as an addition you buy now an MSC. The claim for these models is the small size of the lenses. Indeed some are compact but many lenses dwarf the body, often the size of a credit card. Quality is excellent. No need to buy the original MSC, the Leica!

Still images are out: every camera has to offer movies in HD quality and when you are really progressive you have 3-D. This might be a hype, but it indicates the trend: classical still photography is on its way to history.

Pentax has the 645D with a 40 Mp sensor and a price tag of 11.000 Euro, half the amount you pay for an S2. The Leica stand showed prominently very large portraits made with S2 and looking like classic Avedon pictures. On previous kina’s the M-style pictures were all over the place. Not this time. The M9T is beautifully finished, but it also shows that design elements that work fine on a car body are ill at place on a camera body.
Photography is out, life style is in, that is the catchword of the kina 2010. Was there really nothing exciting to see or observe? If you have looked at the Canon 60D you have seen all dSLRs. (Sony tries to revive the classical Pellix technique, but that is not shocking). The Samsung MSC uses the lens surface to relocate camera body buttons which is smart but not exciting. Look at one modern MSC and you know them all. Such is the power of current manufacturing technology that you can copy any feature in a month time and have it in production a month later.

The Swiss Seitz camera with 160 Mp sensor delivers breathtaking landscape images of exceedingly fine detail. Really impressive and for 50.000 Euro (set) it is not that expensive if you compare the price with a Hasselblad 60Mp camera.

It seems that image consumers (the new name for digital photographers) buy a new camera every two or three years. If this is true and continues to be true, the world will in one decade have produced more than a thousand million cameras. The mile stone of five billion images has been reached and thousands of pictures are uploaded every minute or second.

More interesting is the fact that the best chess player in the world, a seventeen year old Norwegian boy had a chess tournament against the world: he played alone and every move was analyzed by hundreds of thousands chess players all over the world. The computer would then average all proposals into one counter move. Needless to say that the person won from the world. Cloud intelligence is still in its infancy. This also indicates that trying to design a new camera by collecting wish lists all over the world is the wrong approach. You need a vision, not a list of statistics.

A vision for photography would be nice too. In the past a camera was a tool to implement a photographic vision. Now a camera is a consumer end product that happens to generate images that can be uploaded to facebook or flickr. So be it. The Sony A55 and A33 might be a candidate for this new vision. Read the specs and think about all the options and possibilities.

Leica M9T

M9 standard


Some time ago I discussed issues of Leica design with Mr. Kaufmann and I remarked that the mix of rounded corners and angular and sharp-featured elements of the top-cover were not a designer’s delight. I referred to the III-series which have a more pleasant and homogeneous shape.
The redesigned top-cover of the M9T differs from the standard M9 outline with a more fluent shape that has been made possible because of the deletion of the rangefinder illumination window. The three window configuration has been the visibly prominent make up of the M-series since the M3. Leica has been fine-tuning the silhouette of the rangefinder top-cover since the M2, a process that continues with the M9T. This is the first radical change made possible by modern electronic techniques and a fresh look from an outsider-designer.
The technique consists of the replacement of the ambient light illumination by an LED construct which is a smart solution but makes the operation of the camera even more battery dependent. LED’s are widely used in car design and at this moment in time German car design is world class (some car designers in Germany are Dutch by the way). That Leica refers to Mr Da Silva, chief designer of the Volkwagen group of companies, is the best sign that Leica is slowly abandoning the not-invented-here-attitude that characterized Leica construction, design and philosophy for decades.
Leica’s actual design approach is to stay as close as possible to the classical and familiar shapes as has been amply stressed during the introduction of the X1 model. But modern car design gives a different signal.
Design is for a large part emotion and you cannot argue about feelings. Whether you like the design of the M9T is not a theme that cannot be meaningfully discussed. You like it or you do not.
What is important is the underlying change of strategy. Leica needs innovation to stay in business and the fact that the M9 has been selected as a platform for innovation is heartening for all M-aficionados who were afraid that the M-concept could become a cul-de-sac. The coupled rangefinder (CRF) construct is the heart of the M-series and the incorporation of the AF mechanism in an M-camera (which is technically feasible, see the Contax G series) would effectively kill the camera as a unique camera type. The approach to use LED- technology to illuminate the frame lines electronically from the inside, is a first step, in my view, to a fully electronic rangefinder to assist and speed up the manual focus operation and keep the classical CRF concept alive.
The development cost of new technology incorporated into the M9T will be amortizable by the sales of this special edition. If the concept catches on, it can be incorporated in future models and if the Leica clientele is too staid to accept a new design profile and a new technology there will be no loss for Leica.
The M9T is for 99% a design change and for 1% a slight improvement of the rangefinder mechanism. Technically and functionally it is 100% standard M9 and one will not make different or better pictures with the new camera. If I would be fretful I could even question the possible benefit of the LED projection. When it is too dark to see the framelines, you will also not be able to see the rangefinder spot with enough clarity and contrast to get reliable focus. One might counter that the clear framelines support the photographer in accurate scene framing with zone focusing but I could also guess the scene outline with some experience.
The announcement of the M9T is important for setting a clear picket for future strategic directions for the CRF camera concept. From a purely functional viewpoint the introduction of the M9T has little added value. There are some technical improvements and a new concept for carrying the camera (looks like the M5 construction!), but all these features do not create better pictures.
The suggested retail price is Euro 22000 and if you sell all 500 pieces the total amount will be Euro 11000000!

Fuji Finepix X100

In my comments about the Leica S2, I referred to the industrial link with Fujitsu, a company that provides a major part for the S2 camera. I noted that Fuji, the previous partner of Leica, would be a more natural companion for Leica than Panasonic. If you half close your eyes and look at the new (proposed) X100, you see a clear resemblance with the older Leica CM, one of the last and ill-fated filmloading compacts from Leica. Much of the technology of the X100 (optimized sensor edges, APS-C sensor, hybrid rangefinder, f/2 lens with focal length of 36mm with aspherics , build-in ND filter (a good point for the next M camera)) sounds very much Leica-like. The dimensions of the X100 (74.4 x 126.5 x 33.7) are not far removed from the X1 size (59.5 x 124 x 32). The X100 seems to become the camera that the X1 should want to be.

Leica Summilux-C lens range

The announcement of the new C-range of lenses hardly stirred the Leica community. Erroneously in my view. Still photography is increasingly becoming irrelevant in current image culture. Even high end still-photo cameras now incorporate possibilities for producing movies in HD quality. And there are several C-mount lens ranges introduced by Zeiss and others that can be mounted on actual DSLRs. This is more than a fad. It is a new way of making movies. Those with an historical memory may remember that still-photography was almost killed twice by movie technology, once when super-8 came on the market and even more lethal when VCRs were introduced. The target system for the Summilux-C is of course the Arri-camera with PL mount. This camera has a capture size of Super 35 or about APS-C format. They are huge in size and on average have 17 lens elements and two aspherics. The image quality and the mechanical finish is of the highest calibre. To answer the question immediately: this design technology cannot be transfereed to the Leica M lenses.
The S-C project indicates that Mr. Kaufmann is not betting on the one card of still photography and copies a fair amount of the Zeiss strategy of providing lenses for a wide range of applications.