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Ha! Not that I bought one I hasten to add.
I wandered into the Leica store in London (Mayfair way in a lovely little mews) just out of interest today. Always a dangerous thing. I was primarily there to look at lenses in case I do eventually buy a Panasonic GF1.
However, they had a new M9 there and it would be rude not to really.
So I ended up demoing an M9 (in black, though the dark grey one looked lovely too) and a Noctilux f/0.95 lens. That's about £9,500 of kit.
Firstly, the M9 is beautifully made. I've never really played with a Leica before and it is definitely a solid bit of kit. Quite heavy. The Noctilux f/0.95 lens is a thing to behold. Again beautifully made, with such fine tolerances on the aperture & focus rings. f/0.95 is a bit special too I think.
Never having used a rangefinder, the focusing was a bit wierd, where you look through the viewfinder and line up the main image with a little rectangular ghost of itself which is shown in the centre of the viewfinder. Twiddling the focus ring shifts the ghost image left & right. I can certainly see how you could focus pretty quickly with this setup, though I doubt it would be easy to nail totally precise focus at f/0.95 though! Some LEica expert will probably say it's really easy of course.
The controls were very simple - an aperture ring on the lens, a shutter speed dial on the top, and some very simple and intuitive buttons on the back to set up white balance, ISO etc etc. Very user friendly.
Metering is slightly wierd, with a dot at the bottom of the viewfinder and an arrow on the left and an arrow on the right. If you're underexposed, one of the arrows lights up and you twiddle the shutter speed or aperture (or ISO) until the dot lights up. Curious. Simple enough, but you dont really know how over or under exposed you are - you just twiddle until the dot lights up. With no in-viewfinder display of settings (that I could see anyway!) you could end up with a stupidly low shutter speed as I did without realising it. Again, some Leica expert will probably correct me here and say that I should instinctively know the aperture & shutter speed to use anyway.
However, you can see how the setup of the camera would make you think much more about your shots. Rather than just pinging away and letting the camera sort it out, you need to move things around manually every time, which for me means you'd have a better connection with your subject and the images you are producing.
f/0.95 looks amazing by the way. However, is it worth £2000+ more than the f/1.5 (I think) 50mm that was sitting there? Hmmm...
A huge downside however is the speed that the software works. Viewing an image on the screen seemed to take an age. Zooming into it literally took 5 or more seconds before the screen responded. That is apalling in this day & age. Even the worst little Casio point & shoot does much better than that. One would hope that they'll sort that out.
All in all, a very desirable package let down by very slow software. Weightier than you'd think with that mega-lovely lens on. I might be swayed one day.....
Oh - they also had the little Leica X1 thingy in as well. As far as I know it's an APS-C sensor with a fixed 2.8 lens. I handled a couple of pre-production models, and gave them straight back. Overpriced, lightweight and not nice at all. Why on earth get one of those when you can have an interchangable lens Panasonic GF/1? Horrible. Yuk.
I wandered into the Leica store in London (Mayfair way in a lovely little mews) just out of interest today. Always a dangerous thing. I was primarily there to look at lenses in case I do eventually buy a Panasonic GF1.
However, they had a new M9 there and it would be rude not to really.
So I ended up demoing an M9 (in black, though the dark grey one looked lovely too) and a Noctilux f/0.95 lens. That's about £9,500 of kit.
Firstly, the M9 is beautifully made. I've never really played with a Leica before and it is definitely a solid bit of kit. Quite heavy. The Noctilux f/0.95 lens is a thing to behold. Again beautifully made, with such fine tolerances on the aperture & focus rings. f/0.95 is a bit special too I think.
Never having used a rangefinder, the focusing was a bit wierd, where you look through the viewfinder and line up the main image with a little rectangular ghost of itself which is shown in the centre of the viewfinder. Twiddling the focus ring shifts the ghost image left & right. I can certainly see how you could focus pretty quickly with this setup, though I doubt it would be easy to nail totally precise focus at f/0.95 though! Some LEica expert will probably say it's really easy of course.
The controls were very simple - an aperture ring on the lens, a shutter speed dial on the top, and some very simple and intuitive buttons on the back to set up white balance, ISO etc etc. Very user friendly.
Metering is slightly wierd, with a dot at the bottom of the viewfinder and an arrow on the left and an arrow on the right. If you're underexposed, one of the arrows lights up and you twiddle the shutter speed or aperture (or ISO) until the dot lights up. Curious. Simple enough, but you dont really know how over or under exposed you are - you just twiddle until the dot lights up. With no in-viewfinder display of settings (that I could see anyway!) you could end up with a stupidly low shutter speed as I did without realising it. Again, some Leica expert will probably correct me here and say that I should instinctively know the aperture & shutter speed to use anyway.
However, you can see how the setup of the camera would make you think much more about your shots. Rather than just pinging away and letting the camera sort it out, you need to move things around manually every time, which for me means you'd have a better connection with your subject and the images you are producing.
f/0.95 looks amazing by the way. However, is it worth £2000+ more than the f/1.5 (I think) 50mm that was sitting there? Hmmm...
A huge downside however is the speed that the software works. Viewing an image on the screen seemed to take an age. Zooming into it literally took 5 or more seconds before the screen responded. That is apalling in this day & age. Even the worst little Casio point & shoot does much better than that. One would hope that they'll sort that out.
All in all, a very desirable package let down by very slow software. Weightier than you'd think with that mega-lovely lens on. I might be swayed one day.....
Oh - they also had the little Leica X1 thingy in as well. As far as I know it's an APS-C sensor with a fixed 2.8 lens. I handled a couple of pre-production models, and gave them straight back. Overpriced, lightweight and not nice at all. Why on earth get one of those when you can have an interchangable lens Panasonic GF/1? Horrible. Yuk.
