On the road to the city of minilabs, the Photographer found himself putzing about in a central business district, looking for something to photograph. He came upon a group of old men at a street corner. They were tapping away on their phones on social media, preparing to ratio a young man who was standing […]
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On the road to the city of minilabs, the Photographer found himself putzing about in a central business district, looking for something to photograph. He came upon a group of old men at a street corner. They were tapping away on their phones on social media, preparing to ratio a young man who was standing nearby with a battered Nikon around his neck.
“What’s this about?“
“He was caught in the act of taking photographs with a film camera, scanning them, sharing them on the internet, and never printing them on silver paper. The penalty for this is excommunication. Maybe death.”
“And you are certain of this?“
The chief-apparent of the angry old men scowled. “We are.”
“And you are fully committed to photochemical photography?”
“Indeed.”
“And are your consciences clean of digital intrusion or incomplete analog output?”
The men all nodded.
The Photographer furrowed his brow, ever so subtly. He stroked his clean-shaven chin for a second. From the ragged-edged back pocket of his jeans, he produced a square pad of Post-It Notes and the stub of a number 2 pencil. He looked a man in the crowd in the eye, wrote something on a page, peeled it off, and handed it to the man. He and did it again until each of the crowd held a small scrap of paper. Each in turn read a message, shrugged, crumpled the sticky note, and threw it in the general direction of the young man. And one by one, they drifted away.
The boy collected the notes, flattened them out, and silently read each one to himself:
“Dylan, you exhibited only archival pigment prints and giclees.”
“Terry, you have used an outside lab your entire life.”
“Ron, you take more pictures of your Leica M-A with your phone than you do of real subjects.”
“Las, no one would be making the materials you use if it were not for the people who ‘only’ scan film.”
“Luke, you are no stranger to Ilfospeed Rapid RC printed on a Lambda.”
“Andre, you’ve spent more time on Instagram than any of your work has spent on a gallery wall.”
“Bob, you have not fired up an enlarger in 20 years.”
“Cyril, you were a news photographer. Not a thing you photographed escaped being wired and digitally reconstructed.”
“Charles, you crossed a line on Photrio by posting digital pictures of your prints the analog channel.”
“Algernon, you think that Beseler made good enlargers.”
“Val, did you not say once that your middle name was Frontier?”
“Travis, your alternative prints are technically perfect but have no interest and no soul.”
When the boy looked up, the Photographer asked him,
“Who is left here to flame you?”
“Nobody.”
“That question was hypothetical.”
“Oh.What is the takeaway here?”
“Why does everything need a takeaway point? I dunno. Just come up with something.”
The Photographer continued his walk, where he came across a second young man fidgeting with a small digital camera, talking to his friends about film simulation recipes.
Thanksgiving weekend is a great time to catch up. On sleep. One thing that tends to get lost about the 1980s – among many other things – is that there was nothing such as a point-and-shoot mode on an SLR until 1985. Basically, there were two popular types of 35mm cameras. One was a class […]
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Thanksgiving weekend is a great time to catch up. On sleep.
One thing that tends to get lost about the 1980s – among many other things – is that there was nothing such as a point-and-shoot mode on an SLR until 1985. Basically, there were two popular types of 35mm cameras. One was a class of small, fixed-lens rangefinder cameras that eventually morphed into AF point-and-shoots. The other was semi-automatic SLRs that at most had aperture- or shutter-priority automatic operation. The outliers were things like the Canon AE-1 program, Nikon FG and FA, Konica FP-1, and a couple of others that had “programmed” autoexposure. The Konica FS-1 and FT-1 sported integrated motor drives, but none of these cameras had autofocus, let alone pulled all the automation into one camera.
The Minolta Maxxum 7000 (Minolta… Minolta… Minolta.. Maxxum… Maxxum… Maxxum, one obscure TV ad went) was the first camera to pull together programmed AE, multipattern metering, motor drive, and phase-detect autofocus using an in-body motor. The Nikon N2020 was second in line and lacked the Maxxum’s sophisticated metering. That is not to say that Minolta did not cheat to win; it ended up paying almost $130 million to Honeywell for violating phase-detect focusing patents. Minolta would later merge into Konica, which would then sell the camera line to Sony. So the lineage of your Sony A7-series camera runs right through two of the more innovative Japanese camera companies. Now a Maxxum video that will make you feel 99% less dorky:
By the way, Nikon’s N2020 spot is far less dorky than Minolta’s. By the time of this ad (1987), Nikon claimed that the camera auto focused more than 40 lenses, which I would have to assume included a bunch of AI lenses plugged into the TC-16AF. By the way, if you go back and watch the whole video, Nikon’s ads are wild. The Mind of Minolta had nothing on leopards, biker gangs, and 80s hair.
Today, the Nikon N2000/N2020 series (other markets: F-301/F-501) is one of the strangely forgotten greats of the Nikon world. There was a time when you could buy either for about $25. That time is over, but these are far from appreciated enough (especially in a world where flimsy, self-destructing point and shoots like the Olympus Stylus II sell for insane money).
N2020/F-501
We’ll do these backwards. The 1986 N2020 (I assume it could not be called the F-501 in the U.S. due to Levi’s 501 jeans) was Nikon’s first AF SLR, and it was the second AF SLR onto the market generally. The AF is early phase-detect, which means that you need to have a vertical line somewhere to focus on. That said, the focus is quite accurate, and especially where using lenses that have internal focusing elements, it’s quite good. People go completely crazy about first-generation AF. Yes, it’s primitive. And yes, it’s faster and better than a human can do.
The N2020 has an unusually good exposure system. Picking up from the FG and the FA, it uses a closed-loop exposure system, meaning that the camera does not need the linear aperture of an AI-s lens to properly expose in program mode. The camera finalizes the shutter speed with the lens stopped down. This leads to the superpower of having Program mode with every AI, AI’d, and AI-s lens. This ability is not even present in the F4, the contemporary pro model that was otherwise superior in every way – at least from a specs standpoint. The N2020 also obviously works with any lens with a CPU (all of which are AI-s anyway).
The N2020 still has completely conventional controls, meaning that there is no fumbling with thumb wheels and looking at LCD screens. The viewfinder display is very simple: a shutter speed scale, a flash icon, and AF/focus confirmation indicators (two arrows, a green dot, and an X). You can fit a B (matte), E (grid), or J (microprism spot) screen. The J does not have focusing brackets, but that’s academic because you will not likely ever seem one for sale.
The N2020 has an interesting program choice: P, P Hi, and P Dual. P Hi favors fast shutter speeds and wide apertures, presumably to keep camera shake under control with long lenses. P Dual selects between the 2 P modes, provided there is a CPU that tells the camera the lens focal length.
The N2020’s viewfinder is bright enough to pass with 500mm f/8 mirror lenses, though the counterweighted metering system – like most Nikons – struggles with mirror and shift lenses (mirrors tend to overexpose, presumably because the meter is seeing the “dead spot.”
Batteries on the N2020 are AAA (and only come stock AAA). The kit for changing to AA consists of a metal bar and a deeper bottom plate. As I will discuss with the N2000/F-301, the battery tray is not a common component (oddly).
Flash operation on the N2020 is basic Nikon TTL protocol, with no data transmission (so a flash like the SB-24 will not auto-zoom or show the correct distance ranges in M, A, and TTL modes; you have to set the parameters on the flash). This is not surprising because the contemporary flashes were the SB-20 and SB-22, which were old-school flashes with sliding “computers.” By contrast, the F4 (and N8008 and on) would transmit ISO, shooting aperture, and lens focal length to the flash.
Film advance is loud and proud, and the rewind takes a little getting used to, since you press a button and slide a lock on the top rather than the bottom (the bottom would have been off limits due to battery packaging). Film advance is confirmed by a little spinning wheel on the film back.
The N2020/N2000 has plenty of features that debuted on the Konica FT-1, including coreless integrated motor drive (albeit with the batteries in the bottom rather than a grip), autoloading, film movement confirmation, and the EV comp dial. Over time, the Nikon electronics have aged a little better than the Konica; you rarely find an unredeemable N2020 or N2000. One member of our family has shot over 200 rolls of film with an N2020 that I bought around 2010 for $20 (“not working” apparently means “no batteries”). That likely goes well beyond the design intent of the camera, which for most users would have seen a couple of dozen rolls of film, max. These units were not pushed to pros, though some (like Art Kane) appeared prominently in Nikon’s early ads for the series.
N2000/F-301
Although it was released a little earlier as the successor to the unergonomic FG, the N2000/F-301 today seems a little like an afterthought compared to the N2020. You would have to think, though, that both cameras were in development at the same time. It’s not like you just jam an AF motor and detection module into a camera that has no space for it (and if you are familiar with how Japanese cameras are designed, there is actually zero unplanned space).
The principal difference of the N2000 is that does not have AF and is not designed to mesh with CPU lenses. In practical terms, this means it has no AF selector, no AF lock, and no CPU contacts. This also translates into no P Dual mode, since the AI-s standard has no way to tell a camera what focal length is mounted. The N2000 was primarily intended to be used with Series E lenses (Nikon’s “lightweight” line, as described on Nikon’s own Thousand and One Nights site). Those lenses started as an adjunct to the EM, Nikon’s first SLR targeted at women.
The N2000 viewfinder is virtually identical to the N2020, though the focusing screen is a fixed K-type (split prism in the middle, microprism ring, matte surface). The screen is not easily interchangeable, but K is the GOAT of Nikon screens, commanding enormous prices when sold for cameras like the F4. It is strange that K screens were seen only on the F4 among Nikon AF SLRs. Well, maybe it isn’t that strange that they disappeared from amateur AF cameras. First, most focusing was going to be automatic, so focusing aids are secondary. Second, any type of focusing aid would show up minor deviations in mirror or focusing screen position. Finally, split-prism focusing screens (and indeed microprism spots) are optimized to particular maximum apertures. A split-prism screen that is accurate for a wide-aperture lens will black out on a small-aperture one. And splits designed for small-aperture lenses generally don’t have the accuracy you would want with fast lenses. This, I strongly suspect, is why people thought 1970s zooms were terrible: they were tough to focus using the “all purpose” screens built into amateur cameras. When you try them with digital, you tend to see that they are not bad at all.
The N2000, though, does have a couple of quirks. One is the exposure lock, which like on the F3 is a little lever on the front (the center button is the self-timer). The other is the battery arrangement. The N2000 definitely uses a different battery tray, with the configuration differences being:
N2020 with AAA – batteries go in a tray.
N2020 with AA – no tray; mount bars that are relieved to hold larger AAs, larger baseplate.
N2000 with AAA – batteries go in a tray
N2000 with AA – no tray; use a larger baseplate.
The only explanation I can think of for this subtle but real difference is the packaging of the AF motor toward the bottom of the camera.
How well do they work?
Our family’s experience with the N2020/N2000 series goes back to when these were released, and I’ve personally used 12 of them at various times (accumulating and then donating). A couple are still in use. The look and feel of these cameras is classic SLR. The sound is… loud. But they were from an era when few cameras had an “inside voice.”
Where do they really fit in an ecosystem? First, they are not lightweight, but the size is extremely manageable, especially in light of how Nikon SLR bodies progressively, ahem, grew. The N8008/F-801 is considerably larger and heavier, the F90/N90 was larger and rounder, and the F100 is larger and chonkier yet. The difference in design, one might surmise, is that the N20xx series came out when amateur cameras still had some connotation of portability. Over time, prosumer became a thing, and by the time of the F100 and the F5, the difference between enthusiast and pro was much smaller, especially as pro-looking street cred became a thing for cameras.
Second, in terms of a feature set, these cameras do not have Matrix metering, which means you do have to watch it when metering. They also do not have automatic exposure lock on a half-press on the shutter. That said, I have paid almost no attention to this in decades of use, and most pictures on negative film are well within bounds.
Having “only” 1/125 shutter synch has not been much of an inhibition; these were not designed during an era of daylight fill with SLRs, so flash use is primarily a nighttime exercise where a 1/2000 flash impulse is the main source of light. Even for daylight, with 100-speed film and a decently powerful flash, you will be fine.
I am of two minds about the AF. One is that it is indeed primitive. The other, of which I am reminded by shooting an F100 this week, is that end-stage Nikon SLR AF (even considering the F6 with its 11 focus zones) was not really that good either. Having some mildly off-center AF points doesn’t add a lot to capability, and cross-type sensors are better in low-light, but most of the time there you may be using a flash projecting red vertical AF-assist lines that even the most primitive AF could lock onto. I would comment even being a D700 user that 51 focusing points is still not as good as off-the-sensor mirrorless systems of today.
Needless to say, the (far bulkier and heavier) N8008/s was a big step up with a 1/8000 shutter and 1/250 sync, Matrix metering, added shutter-priority operation, multiple exposure capability, a high-eye point finder with a full-size eyepiece, full-info LED display, DOF preview and a full-featured Multi-Control back. But it was also a big step away from simplicity: you needed a lens with a CPU for programmed AE.
Upshot?
If you are looking at choices for a 35mm camera, both the N2020 and the N2000 are pretty solid choices and have a heavy enough build that they should not self destruct in everyday use. The only weak point is the leaf spring that secures the rewind knob’s lever, but that is an easy part to replace (and you don’t even need an N2000-series knob or even a Nikon knob to replace it – a lot of rewind knobs have the same threading across brands).
If you are a manual focus fiend, the N2000 is definitely better than the N2020, since its focusing screen is set up for this use case. I have seen people refer to the N2000 as a “baby F3,” though I think that’s probably true only in the sense that it is very similar in capabilities to an F3 with an MD-3 in a package that is about 1/3 the size. The N2000 obviously doesn’t have viewfinder and focusing screen choices nor 100% frame coverage in the viewfinder.
Here is how the rest of contemporaneous amateur Nikons stack up by comparison (and I’m sure someone will bring up the FE2/FM2, and I’ll tell you that the FA more than covers discussion of that family, but here are the data points anyway).
In looking at these specs for the first time in a really long time, I actually wonder what the continuing positioning of the FE series was, given the major overlap with the FA and F3. Price? Fear of a Matrix planet? The FA was more sophisticated than the FE2, and the F3 was a lot tougher (though the shutter speeds were lower).
By the mid-1980s, the FM seemed to be an ode to frequently unloved match-needle metering and the possibility of a world where LR44 batteries would not be available to regulate the FA and FE shutter. And I say that as someone who used FM2s on jobs for pay. Nikon did not foresee that the bigger issue over the lifetimes of these cameras would be film, 36 frames of which takes up more space than five sets of FM/FE/FA batteries (batteries that in a camera like this would last about a decade).
The N20xx series runs on AA and AAAs, which are available both as rechargeables (including Li-ion), and that show zero sign of going away. Which is a lot like the cameras.
It is not a long walk from the door to the pool at the end of the street. The roses, red and orange and yellow, have grown to an incredible height around the lamp post, almost a tree. The purple salvia has reached taller than the yews it replaced. The lavender is somewhere. Left turn […]
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It is not a long walk from the door to the pool at the end of the street. The roses, red and orange and yellow, have grown to an incredible height around the lamp post, almost a tree. The purple salvia has reached taller than the yews it replaced. The lavender is somewhere. Left turn on to cracked concrete. A once-decrepit tennis court, straight ahead, is in the delicate phase where it had been paved but not netted, striped, or fenced. It is a black plane of asphalt, perfectly symmetrical, a minor structure to each side, with some mid-century apartments standing in the distance. I’ve seen this before. Raphael gives you the vision of the Ideal City. I give you the future of pickleball.
It is impossibly cool for the month, but the smoke from Canadian wildfires is dabbing out what should be a warm June evening sun. There is a diffuse golden glow from the west. I have a copy of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer in my hand, with my index finger tucked at page 110 while I walk. The paper is rough to the touch, some kind of porous paper product made specifically for trade paperbacks. It has yellowed-in from the edges but white in the center; nothing from the 1980s avoided tan lines. It occurs to me that Philip K. Dick is the kind of author where one day you could read a hundred pages, and others, you struggled to read three.
This reminds me of writing this blog, site, or whatever you call it. And walking back through a neighbor’s fragrant garden worthy of Siddhartha’s childhood, I resolve to finish this one. Even if it kills everyone in the room.
The before times
The brand from Wetzlar is really good at attracting hatred from people that are not enthusiasts. I’m not one for the Keir Egan style narrative, the stories about some asthmatic microscope lens designer, or the photojournalist drag. What I do like is a high-resolution camera that delivers a vast and sharp monochrome image. But today is much different from how it starts.
I first buy a Leica because my father could not. He always wanted to buy one, though an R, but something else intervened. So that ended up on a generational to-do list. I have completed most of these tasks but will intentionally leave some new ones to my own children. Some of these will be extravagant.
I am not sure how I land on an M. We always have to do something different from our parents. It does not hurt that I have already tasted the forbidden fruit of the Canon P. But how much daylight is there between an apostle and an apostate? Not much, I suspect. I will sell my M6 within a few months. I will keep the P and replace the Leica a couple of years later with a Hexar RF.
It is now September 2000. It is a Sunday and a sunny afternoon. I am standing at the counter at B&H looking at an ancient M3, a much more civilized-feeling, if neanderthalic, version of the M6. Happily, the loading system does not feature finger-poking metal petals. I have just come off a wedding-shower weekend. The evening before, I walked past World Trade Center One and Two, briefly considered going to the observation deck, and dismissed it as something I’d do eventually. I walk out of the camera store and get directly into a cab. I get all the way to LaGuardia, to find out my plane is delayed for several hours. At that point, the internal chatter becomes too much. I jump back into a taxi (because you could) and re-enter Manhattan to buy that camera. The return is via the Queens Midtown Tunnel, but a defective memory tells me that I see the twin towers one last time. But like in many dreams, there are some details that can’t be right: the sun is coming from the wrong direction, and the sightline comes from the previous evening’s return on the Staten Island Ferry.
A week later, the camera lands on my doorstep, no sales tax.
One year later, everything will change.
Prompt for a false memory
Em Two Four Six
Fourteen years later, I am in San Francisco in the center of the Golden Gateway platform off the Embarcadero, looking at the black-and-white townhouses. Tudomodern? Japanesque? This is old territory, but nothing stays quite the same. The fountains with the bronze statues are dry, the red pavers are worn, and the old Buckelew and Macondray towers have been been painted dark grey down their concrete corners. I am relatively recently possessed of an M240. In my bag is a borrowed an M9 Monochrom from the Leica Store. I think that if you could take these two concepts and meld them, you would have one hell of a camera.
Leica, of course, obliges with a new product. A month or two later, I have one M246 and a lot less spending money. The M246 will not turn out to be an easy camera to use; the relatively standard Leica center-weighted metering, coupled with zero tolerance for overexposure, will make it an exercise in metering, locking, and shooting. Advanced metering will be much better, most of the time, but it will not be as quick. Either way, there will be a serious tendency toward underexposure and previews that will not be easy to interpret – since once will be looking at the histogram of an underexposed JPG. I will stick with that camera for a decade. No way will this goddamn camera beat me.
The M246 will go on to take some stupendously good pictures – and also a lot of bad ones along the learning curve. It documents a lot of moments with friends and family. It catches some landscapes too. There is magic. It can see in the dark. It does not have the massive noise and banding of the original M9 Mono. The EVF is magic with wide-angle lenses.
But I will never actually stop shooting film because dealing constantly with computers is irritating.
Monochrom: first of its name
The sunk-cost fallacy
Looking back now, the M246 taught me two things: (1) a manufacturer could design what should be a super-fun camera — but was not fun and (2) Leica fans would justify it. First, I questioned – especially after the M11 came out – how Leica had not figured out how to do highlight-priority metering earlier. That’s how point-and-shoots get perfect exposure most of the time. Adding highlight priority meant a huge difference between a camera acting like it is loaded with black-and-white film and acting like it is loaded with finicky slide film. The M240 was easy to live with because most forms of overexposure would leave data in at least one channel that could be recovered.
Second, I observed – not for the first time, but for the first time so acutely – that many Leica users entertain the same sunk-cost fallacy as anyone who buys something expensive and can’t admit that there is something that needs improvement. Leica snobs wrote off people’s concerns about Monochrom underexposure – and being forced to engage in it to save highlights – as paranoia: that there was “so much information” in the shadows and that files were “malleable.” It was pretty clear to me that no one who said that was familiar with shooting black and white film or could explain, at any rational level, why underexposure would ever be good in digital files.
Black and white film is exclusively an expose-to-the-right exercise with modern films like TMY. Even with older emulsions like TX, HP5, and FP4+ (note: I am of a generation where I refuse to say “film stocks”), mild highlight over exposure was not a serious issue, most of the time. And on the (quasi) math, the thing that did not sit right with me was this: why is the existence of copious detail information in the shadows a reason to tolerate leaving the upper bits (well, values) empty? If you’re already assuming major post-production manipulation, you might as well capture every iota of tone data you can. And that means that at least one pixel will max out bit 14. But illogical arguments are nothing new to the Leica and hardly unique to Leica even among cameras. If you pay enough for a piece of equipment, you will be loathe to criticize it or underlying design decisions.
This hand gesture means “highlight priority metering means never having to use EV comp.”
M11M Image Quality
If you have gotten this far, you realize that I learned from YouTube DIY videos how to prolong the agony of getting to the point. The M11M is really why we are here. Assuming you can focus the lens of your choice, this image quality is astoundingly good. It crushes 6×4.5. It crushes scanned 6×9. It has no noise at any reasonable ISO. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story. The Monochrom series cameras all have an unusual tonality to them, almost like T-Max 400 shot with a green filter, developed with HC-110.
I would comment that the output from color converted to monochrome is not the same because native monochrome capture, especially with a contrast filter, captures different data. Color conversions to monochrome are ok, but they are not always spectacular if you like dramatic landscapes. Channel mixing makes it really easy to get halos. And you do get 20% more effective resolution with a monochrome sensor. Interpolation takes a little bit of a bite.
The M11M can also comfortably shoot at double (or more) the ISO of color because its sensor picks up more light – and noise on a Monochrom image reads as “film grain” and not as “bad digital.” That said, you don’t even start to see noise until you hit ISO 1600 or more. Witness the below, shot at ISO 1600 with a Konica 35/2L Hexanon (yes, the lens Konica adapted from the Hexar AF is this good). If you click on the composite of the details, you will see sections at 100% of the image, in other words, at 240dpi, sized for a 40″ / 1m wide print, looking at the same distance you would a 4×6 print. If you actually followed the rules for viewing distance, this camera could shoot a quadruple-size highway billboard without breaking a sweat.
By contrast, color Leicas do not have the same types of overwhelming advantages over their contemporaries (for example, the 60mp Sony mirrorless cameras). The Monochrom is in a class by itself, and if you only have the budget for one Leica, it might be the one you want. There is nothing that competes with it.
Perspective Control
Leica’s inbuilt perspective control is helpful, though it is far from perfect. It corrects the JPG image (and pre-codes the raw file for “guided” perspective control) to match what the inertial measurement unit (IMU) in the camera detects as camera tilt. It is most useful with moderate wide angles like 35mm. At wider angles, you can lose quite a bit of the edges unless you are “mostly right” with keeping the camera level. Through the Visoflex 2, the shape of the trapezoid box shows you how much correction is being applied.
The perspective control and “digital level control” provided via the IMU does not seem to have any control over sensitivity, so things seem a little coarser than on the M240/246. That said, it’s ok to have a small amount of back-tilt of the camera in architectural pictures; software perspective control, if too perfect, can make things look unnatural.
You can also use adapted PC lenses for SLRs. The Venus Laowa 15/4.5 Zero-D shift lens works well, just as it did with the M246. Below, one such photograph.
Fit and Finish
As befits a now-$10k camera, the overall fit and finish are excellent, full stop. That said, I am not a fan of the new rear buttons (which feel a little lightweight). It is not clear how well the vantablack-looking paint finish will last. I was a big fan of black chrome. It is clear after just a couple of months that the top rails of the flash shoe are is already showing some wear from the Visoflex 2’s mounting foot. Some design choices were odd. It will remain a mystery why the “Monochrom” in the flash shoe and the A on the shutter are almost invisible, but the ISO and shutter speed dials are festooned with bright white lettering. Sometimes things get a little too cute.
The handling
The M11M is a lot lighter than the M246. Almost a featherweight by comparison. The elimination of brass top covers – reputed to be 25% of the weight of the M240 series – makes things a lot lighter. The body itself is thinner, using the same trick that the M10 used: make the lens mount project slightly and make the body itself slightly slimmer. If you have long fingers, though, you almost need a half case to hold it comfortably. The lightness of the camera gives it less inertia, and with 60mp, you now actually have go back to holding your breath.
Touch-screen menus seem like a novelty and one that can hold up picture-making if the camera is in “play” mode and your nose touches the surface. You can still use the icon-based menu without the touch-screen capability. The M11 has a handy “favorites” menu, but it has also rearranged and renamed some features on menus, leading to confusion when the “artificial horizon” has been renamed “digital level control.”
Otherwise, a big jump from the M246 is that the rear wheel can be clicked to lock/unlock its function as an exposure compensation dial. This is a big step up because the M240 series only had two ways to use that wheel for exposure compensation: (1) leave it unlocked, which means that it gets knocked off zero all the time or (2) require holding down the front button in addition to turning the dial, which was good primarily for hand cramps. The problem is that using the EV comp dial like this turns the screen on.
The dedicated ISO dial seems a bit much. I’m sure there are people who go full-on OCD, manually changing between fixed ISOs all the time, but this throwback to an M2/M rewind knob seems like an atavism. I think we could live with a menu and use the ISO dial as a multifunction wheel. Or just remove it.
Thankfully, compared to the M246, the main switch is just ON and OFF. The self-timer was really getting in the way. And everyone knows the only selfies Leica people take are in a mirror anyway. Just please wear a shirt. Not everyone has the well-developed physique of Lee Friedlander.
Viewfinder
It’s an M. Shockingly, or maybe not, the display is still four digits plus a dot plus two arrows. The viewfinder opening is larger, which makes things somewhat easier on the eyes but does not make it easier to focus. Nothing really solves for my tendency to disregard the framelines (note to self: just shoot with a 24/25mm lens and admit there’s a problem). No legacy eyepiece accessory works without a hundred-dollar adapter, and even the third-party slotted rings (literally, all these adapters are…) have prices that feel vaguely assaultive.
The viewfinder, obviously, does not provide any live view capability. For that, you need the $900 Visoflex 2, which is a heavy, metal Lego-looking EVF that snaps onto the top of the camera. With 3 million-plus megapixels, the picture is quite clear, and the EVF does not have annoying levels of blackout. Thankfully, the diopter correction is now on the size and difficult to turn by accident. If you shoot wides, and you have the means, I highly recommend it. Used. It is most choice.
I actually find that I use the EVF far less than I thought I would because the perspective control feature seems to absorb small camera leveling errors with glass finders. But when you do need the EVF, you can switch on the familiar artificial horizon and get things close to perfect.
Responsiveness
The M11 is a very responsive camera and does not hesitate to take a picture when you press the button. This is the cardinal virtue of Leicas; there is no “can’t” when it comes to exposures. The camera does not care if the exposure is off, the focus is not wrong, the flash is not ready. This does require presence of mind in making photographs, but it is not some Zen master exercise. It is more like any SLR of the 1970s.
Connectivity
A huge improvement with the M11 is the Leica Fotos software, which is actually better than Sony’s trashy Creators’ App. Fotos runs on iPhone and Android, and it is very good at acquiring a camera connection – it almost feels magnetic. It can run the camera remotely, import photos from the camera, or simply accumulate GPS data that it can then sync back to the camera (which will then write it to JPGs after the fact). Like a lot of things Leica, Fotos does not have every feature, but it covers the 80% you need, in a highly polished fashion.
Conclusion: Is it a Nice Thing? Should we have nice things?
It is hard to take a Leica seriously as an über luxury good in 2025, when sellers of everything have discovered that pretty much every consumer good has a price elasticity of demand of zero. Fifteen-dollar hamburgers are a bellwether. An M11M camera, arguably the most specialist of specialized cameras, costs as much as the planet’s median personal income. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But you could probably rationalize it. In the West.
If you actually use an M11M for 7 years and sell it for 40% of the purchase price, totally within the realm of realistic outcomes, the cost of owning it is actually pretty modest – around $75 per month. That kind of money is discretionary for a pretty wide band of the population; it’s about the same as a hardcore Starbuck’s habit, a monthly cellular bill, or the sum of all your streaming subscriptions. It is less than a lot of people spend on film/developing/scanning.
Even the gross purchase price – painful as it is – is about a year of car payments (hint: keep your whip an extra year after it is paid off). That’s not to say that your charge bill won’t be staggering the month you buy it. I found it a good excuse to unload a bunch of old gear. And unless you are in a hurry, you can score a used M11M for up to 20% off if you are ok with one with a few thousand shots on the clock. This will not quite trade in as high later unless you have all the trimmings, the original receipt, and the birth certificate of the original owner, but you pay a lot less upfront.
I would also tell you that unless you are a hard-core black and white person, walk away. A Monochrom is difficult to afford, difficult to learn, and difficult to justify. If you are happy with converting color pictures to monochrome, it’s a waste of money. If you are some kind of deviant who is chasing performance comparable to a 6×9 film camera, or think you are seeing something unusual (and desirable) in the look of the Monochrom images, it might be a different story.
SATIRICA, N.Y., MAY 22, 2029 – FUJIFILM North America Corporation, Electronic Imaging Division, today announced the launch of its FUJIFILM X Half 2™ premium compact digital camera (X Half 2). The X Half 2 builds on many of the core competences of the X Half, including several new exciting features that enhance the half-frame “film” experience. […]
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SATIRICA, N.Y., MAY 22, 2029 – FUJIFILM North America Corporation, Electronic Imaging Division, today announced the launch of its FUJIFILM X Half 2 premium compact digital camera (X Half 2).
The X Half 2 builds on many of the core competences of the X Half, including several new exciting features that enhance the half-frame “film” experience. These include a permanent Film Mode, with several improvements:
An innovative subscription service by which to enter Film Camera Mode, the user must buy a token from Fujifilm that is good for 72 digital exposures. The token is currently priced at $9.99, though certain film recipes will have higher prices. All tokens will expire 18 months from purchase.
This will be paired with new Asynchronous Imaging® development services. At the end of each simulated roll, the camera’s wifi will connect to the internet and transmit the contents of the camera to Fujifilm, which after a waiting period of 2-7 days will then return the images once the user pays $6.99 to develop the “roll” and receive JPGs via email or $12.99 to receive an envelope of 4×6 prints.
These are three new hardware improvements:
Because their presence takes away from the magic of Asynchronous Imaging®, the USB-C port, SD card slot, and access to internal memory has been removed. This also improves water resistance.
The xenon flash has been replaced by an LED that gently pulses like a heartbeat when the user wants others to admire the retro look of the camera.
The NP-W126 battery has been removed in favor of a fully internal battery that can be charged on a proprietary inductive charger midway in size between a Qi and an Apple Watch. This is to maintain water resistance and provide clean lines.
To enhance creativity and keep every experience spontaneous, yet true to its roots, Fuji has added seven new Imaging Events® and three new operating modes to the permanent Film Mode:
“Accidental-Open” Event that, at a random interval (fairly long) will simulate opening the back of the camera while it is loaded. The camera will accordingly wipe out all frames exposed on the “roll” to that moment. There will be no partial token credit.
“Loading Mishap” Event that will allow the camera to wind properly using the “winding” lever, count images up to 73 (or higher), and yet surprise the user with no actual images. The user will be able to reuse the token.
“Overwinding Calamity”Event by which the simulated film tears off the supply reel and requires the camera to be sent back to Fujifilm for “servicing” for a fee between $25 and $300. Images may be recoverable, the token is not.
“Diptych Intrusion” Event will insert an unwanted image from another part of the roll into JPG diptych.
“Ennui” Event will stall the creative use of the camera at a random frame between 54 and 57, and the camera will only resume photographing after a few days pass or the user gives up and sends the film to development anyway.
“Wrong f*cking film” Event functionality will change Auto ISO to a value that is incompatible with a correct light level and available shutter/aperture combinations. Depending on the film sim token selected, it will also change the contrast to something unsuitable for the dynamic range fo the scene.
“Phantom Image” Event makes it seems like a frame was taken, and maybe it was, but it will be gone. Phantom images do not count against token limits.
“Madogiwazoku” Mode turns on a babbling recorded commentary from some old man. It is not distinguishable as speech except that the words “Pen F” and “Zone System” sometimes are almost intelligible. Almost. Sometimes.
“Inner Dialogue”Mode detects nudity and tells the user that intended frame is not that pervy, and that the user’s significant other will only be young so long.
“Live Spouse/Dead Camera” Mode is available in the third year of service and simulates a dead camera so that users can buy the X Half 3 because the old one is “broken,” without discussion of the household budget.
These events are not available for earlier Fujis.
“We are so happy to bring this to market,” said Fujifilm Imaging Tri-State Division Assistant Manager Eugene “Dan” Williams. “When we were at the Eastern Zone sales meeting and saw the PowerPoint where this was shown with a bunch of captions in Japanese, we thought those guys from corporate were high. But they showed us that there was a real need for increasingly realistic film cosplay, as reflected by numerous consumer comments saying that the X-Pro3 was “too easy.” This will definitely be a favorite of people who like to do quirky things as well as those arty types.”
The Fuji X Half 2 will be available in late June 2029 at an MSRP of $1,849.99 US and $2,299.99 CAD.
Arrogant EditorializationBrands - FujiLenses and OpticsPhotography - General
The proposition The rise of one compact, cool, and yet provincial “medium format” digital camera has spurred endless spurious statements about “the medium format look,” particularly an assertion that you can see this undefined quality by comparing two high-resolution digital images. Tell us you don’t know anything about the medium format look without saying that […]
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Fujica G690BL, 100/3.5 Fujinon, Tri-X Pan
The proposition
The rise of one compact, cool, and yet provincial “medium format” digital camera has spurred endless spurious statements about “the medium format look,” particularly an assertion that you can see this undefined quality by comparing two high-resolution digital images.
Tell us you don’t know anything about the medium format look without saying that you don’t know anything about the “medium-format look.” Or whether it even exists. Does it even exist?
Chasing the “medium format look” will likely lead to endless disappointment because the concept does not translate well from film to digital. I can’t wait until the discussion starts about Fuji’s rumored half-frame digital camera, which promises to translate the concept of “saving film” to a filmless format.
What is medium format?
Medium format, in film cameras, is done on 120 film (formerly 220 as well). There was a time when it was 116 or 2×3 sheet film, but that light has gone out. Today, and going back decades now, medium format film starts with 6×4.5cm (56x41mm in real size, a minimum of 2,296mm2 of film area as compared to the 864mm2 of a 35mm/FX frame). 6×4.5, though, was never the most serious form of medium format. That began with 6×6 (56x56mm, 3,136 mm2) and more commonly, 6×7 (56x68mm, 3,808mm2). Then there is 6×9 (55x84mm, 4,704mm2). 6×12 (56x112mm, 6,272mm2) and the occasional 6×17 also exist, but they are only arguably medium format (if you need a 4×5 or 5×7 enlarger to handle your negatives…). Yes, and Fuji had some oddball 6×8 cameras whose brief existence still baffles Earth’s top scientists.
The common theme here is that the size of a medium-format frame, even the smallest one, is significantly larger than a 35mm/FX frame. It is not a trivial difference, and where condenser enlargers mercilessly exposed grain, and enlargement ruthlessly increased contrast to the detriment of smooth tones, you wanted as little enlargement as possible. A big negative is a way to do that. Enlarging a 6×9 frame to 8×10 is not even a 4x enlargement. It is 8x with 35mm/FX. Realistically, you could shoot 400-speed film on medium format where you would be shooting 100 on 35mm, and the larger film would still look a little better.
In digital, though, “medium format” is a very nebulous concept. The largest (and most expensive) sensor that fits a man-portable camera is the Phase One XF, which is 54x40mm, or 2,160mm2. So the largest (and most expensive) medium-format sensor is the same size as the smallest medium-format film format. If you read the previous installment about the performance differences among sensor sizes, you might have already surmised where this discussion is headed. If not, read on.
Fuji’s GFX sensor (43.8×33.9mm) sits midway between 35mm/FX and the smallest medium-format film frame. If the GFX sensor is 68% higher in surface area compared to 35mm/FX, the 6×4.5 format in turn outsizes the GFX by 58%. So is the Fuji GFX actually medium format? Yes, in the sense that it is larger than 35mm/FX. But in the historic sense of “medium format” as 120 film or 2×3 sheet film? It’s not really in the same class.
One thing also to take into account is that manufacturers love to talk about increases in surface area. Changes in sensor surface area sound big, but when you think about it, the increase in linear dimensions – the main determinant of the ability to enlarge or downsample – is modest. For example, GFX is 8mm longer than FX on the long side, in other words, only 22% wider than an FX frame. It is 9mm longer on the short side, which is 37% wider. Multiply 1.222 x 1.375, and you get… “68% larger” or “1.68x the size of.” This type of marketing is not unique to Fuji; film camera manufacturers sold medium-format cameras using this trick for decades. Marketing in terms of megapixels is a similar technique. You can double your megapixels by lengthening each side of the sensor by a factor of 1.414 (the square root of 2).
When it comes down to it, though, the ability to enlarge is determined by the longest side‘s size (film) or resolution (digital). So in this example, for a similar final dpi count on a print, GFX would only allow 1.22x more enlargement compared to FX (44mm vs 36mm). So this is something to consider if investing in a camera. It sounds exciting, but that’s what marketing is supposed to do. The reality is that we live in an era of Adobe Super Resolution, so from any camera you can gin up an image file large enough for a billboard.
Let’s be fair to Fuji though, because you don’t need a digital sensor anywhere near the size of film to get the same performance. Two points here: (1) high-resolution digital is a lot more enlargeable than film of the same size (say 35mm film to FX sensors) because grain is not the same type of problem – and upscaling works well, and (2) the high ISO performance of modern Sony sensors is better than film. So even if you wanted to argue that the Fuji was not medium format, you would still have to concede that it (or the related Sony FX sensor) is capable in good light of delivering quality that is at least as good as a 6×4.5 film camera. I have not finished my testing of the Leica M11 Monochrom, but I can tell you that it performs at least as well a 6×9 Fuji (as it should for what the Leica costs….).
Is digital medium format always medium format?
A related question is whether the GFX100RF is still a medium format when the angle of view is changed via “digital cropping.” The answer there is a “no” in every sense. Because the pixel pitch of the fixed-lens GFX is the same as a 61mp Sony FX sensor, once you crop tighter than “50mm” on the Fuji, you’re actually using a smaller sensor area than FX (corresponding to 31mp at 63mm-equivalent and 20mp at 80mm). This doesn’t change the fact that the native file is still a 102mp image taken at a 28mm FOV, but if you are chasing shallow DOF in a narrower shot, it makes sense to use a Sony A7-series camera – or a Leica – because both have 61mp sensors and access to telephotos with wide apertures. This situation is not unique to Fuji; Leica does the same thing with the Q series and cropping, only there, you are working down from an FX sensor and getting much smaller.
Why was medium format a thing? Is it still a thing?
Medium format was an important upgrade versus 35mm for a couple of reasons. One, it had the imprimatur of history. Film started out really big, and the revolution of the late 1800s (1895, to be precise) was George Eastman’s Kodak Brownie film, which we now know as 120. This was the source of the endless discarded family pictures you see at resale shops: they are contact prints. Pro cameras – until the 1950s – used 4×5 sheet film (4×5 was perfectly suited to make quick contact prints for newspaper use). Hobbyists used 120 film. Well-heeled amateurs used 35mm. As time went on, and films improved, pros started using medium-format more and 4×5 less. Through the 1970s, consumer film formats got ever smaller: 126, 16mm, 110, Disc. When minilabs became a thing, consumers went back to 35mm. Pros continued to use medium format, primarily 6×4.5, 6×6, and 6×7 – and less frequently, larger sizes.
Two, no matter what the era, medium format film required less enlargement for any given purpose. This helped prevent enlargements so big that grain (or surface defects) became visible. It allowed on-negative retouching. And the low enlargement factor preserved smooth tones and a “grainless” look. When you think about it, medium format advanced the film industry’s greatest goal: give film a “perfect” look. That weirdly looks like today’s digital.
And this leads to the big disappointment in the digital world. The expected jump from “small” to “medium format” sensors does not have the same impact than did often did for film. Most pictures destined for web use are massively downsampled, no matter what the original format and file size. This tends to obscure differences in equipment. But once sensors reached a certain level of size (FX) and development (backside-illuminated), they succeeded in looking like medium-format film. In fact, in good light, APS-C sensors are good enough to do this. In really good light, 1″ sensors as well.
In sum: any digital camera of even average quality can have the “medium-format look” in terms of grain and tonality. If you are careful.
What about lens speed and depth of field?
Medium-format lenses were not fast in terms of maximum f/stops because they needed large image circles. To get a lens faster than f/2.8 required massive glass that was not easy to produce consistently and well. And leaf shutters – which dominated medium-format cameras – basically could either cover a big lens aperture and have a low maximum speed (like 1/125 sec) or cover a smaller clear aperture and hit 1/500. The only workaround was to use a focal-plane shutter, but then your flash synch speed suffered terribly.
When you correct for the same number of stops from wide-open, a medium-format lens and a 35mm lens that have the same angle of view have almost identical depth of field.
So, for example, let’s compare a 40mm f/1.4 Voigtlander rangefinder lens to the bruiser Fujinon 100/3.5 lens for the 6×9 rangefinder (the one that captured the frontispiece here):
35mm format: a 40mm lens at f/1.4 at 2m has 0.2m of depth of field.
6×9 format: a 100mm lens at f/3.5 at 2m has 0.2m of depth of field
Stopping these down two stops would yield equivalent depth of field (the 40mm at f/2.8 and the 100mm at f/8): 0.42m.
This says nothing about light gathering, where the smaller f/1.4 lens pulls in 2.5 stops more light. There is a persistent and incorrect assertion that a slow medium-format lens somehow converts to “gather as much light” as a fast lens for a smaller format. That simply is not true; if it were, general exposure rules like the Sunny-16 rule would be format-dependent. They are not.
If there is a medium-format “look,” it is less depth of field at any given absolute aperture.
35mm format: a 40mm lens at f/8 at 2m has 1.29m of depth of field.
6×9 format: a 100mm lens at f/8 at 2m has 0.43m of depth of field
But on a tripod, you might stop that 6×9 down to f/22, which gives you 1.32m of DOF and negates any “look” based on shallow depth of field. Medium and large format cameras are frequently shot on tripods and stopped way, way down.
Sharpness and detail
One of the biggest fallacies about medium format was that it always picked up more detail. A medium format with a good lens, with say 400-speed film will resolve more than a 35mm camera shooting 400-speed film because details in the picture are larger compared to the film grain size. But aside from that, you can’t really generalize.
Optically, picking up more detail was only reliably true of two types of cameras: simple folding cameras with f/16 meniscus lenses (think: Brownie) and cameras with very rigid structures and very modern, highly corrected lenses (think: Pentax 6×7). That slow, simple, single-element meniscus lens – as Kodak’s own literature states – performs as well as any faster lens of the same focal length. That’s because it has little flare, even when uncoated, and because it has such a small maximum aperture, it effortlessly projects a sharp image on a large imaging surface.
When lenses get faster (i.e., have wider maximum apertures), you end up adding up more and more elements to correct aberrations. Every lens element can introduce flare, every one adds new aberrations that have to be canceled by other elements, and every air-to-glass surface reduces transmission – a lot. Until coatings became a thing, and even long after, three groups (6 air-to-glass surfaces) was the gold standard for lenses in the f/2.8-3.5 range. The development of modern coatings enabled much more highly corrected lenses that could operate in relatively low light, maintain contrast, and project a sharp image into the corners of a negative.
Most of what we associate with “affordable” medium format is not much better than 35mm, in the sense that it would not record significantly more line pairs across the frame. A 6×9 Super Ikonta negative might have the same total detail information as a 35mm frame from a Leica with a good lens, but if you looked under high magnification (say 15x), it would look softer on the negative. In fact, most older medium-format lenses had relatively dismal resolving power (in the 30lp/mm range, about a third of a high-end 35mm camera lens), and perception of them benefited greatly from the small amount of enlargement actually required. Everything looks good as a contact print.
Later on, things improved with high-spec optics from the late 1960s, typically found on rangefinder cameras: the Fuji medium-format rangefinders, the Koni-Omega system, and the Mamiya 6 and 7 series. When the light was good, and the focus was “on,” these lenses could hit 90lp/mm or more, which made them like oversized 35mm lenses in resolution. Rangefinders had a big advantages because they had symmetrical wide lenses, no mirror flip, and handled more like “normal” cameras (and not cubes). Medium-format SLR lenses were no slouch, but for wide-angle applications, they were not as good as cameras that could take symmetrical wides. Regardless, to get crushing detail with film medium format, you need to look at relatively modern equipment.
End of the day
It’s hard to identify the medium-format “look” because it is highly context-dependent (when you are looking in history and the sophistication of the optics). Fuji’s “medium-format” digital is comparable to the concept of medium-format film (both being larger than FX), though the size difference (from 35mm/FX) is relatively smaller. But more importantly, you don’t need a particularly large digital sensor to replicate the visual qualities of medium-format film. That doesn’t make the GFX100RF any less fun, it just makes it harder to justify to your spouse.
Everyone in those pictures was smiling. There were tens of thousands of them. Some I still know today. Some have changed considerably over time. Some I knew and lost to time: lost friends, lost loves, people whose names I knew for an instant. Some were in the frame, whether parts of larger groups or unlucky […]
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Everyone in those pictures was smiling. There were tens of thousands of them.
Some I still know today. Some have changed considerably over time. Some I knew and lost to time: lost friends, lost loves, people whose names I knew for an instant. Some were in the frame, whether parts of larger groups or unlucky standers-by. They smiled, even if they had no idea who was taking the picture, why, or how long it would last – because no one wants to be remembered with a frown.
Face recognition clipped out each face neatly. I could put a name on two hundred, maybe three hundred of them. AI could put names on a few dozen more. Sometimes it confused people with each other. But then there were question marks below faces, tons of question marks. It was almost an accusation. No, it was an accusation. Why did I have these? Should I delete the bounding boxes? The files? What if these were one of only a handful of pictures of someone? How would anyone know?
Modern photo editing and asset management suddenly make it possible to see things in ways you never could before, not in the least the sheer number of people you encountered in your life. One might observe that history is life with the boring parts edited out; a huge photo collection viewed as a grid is like everything you’ve ever seen, with time edited out. Is there really much daylight between Lightroom and a near-death experience?
Unless you are dead inside, it is fair to say that editing photos of your own experiences, spanning decades, can be an emotional millstone, a horror. Where, in a pre-electronic age, one might have encountered an old photo album every so often, the shock between a slow-changing, eternal present and a flashback to twenty years ago was sporadic, if not mild. There were just not that many photos to choose from, only so many fit in a physical book, and people could fade out of someone’s life rather easily. Images could not so easily trigger feelings of intense nostalgia because, whether actually or effectively, they did not exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
But technology makes everyone into Winston Niles Rumfoord, suddenly able to see the entire roller coaster at once. Entering a name as a search term, you could suddenly see a person across their entire life: young and idealistic, realistic in the middle, and fading at the end. Sometimes a child and a teenager, sometimes a teenager and an adult. You can see how X got big, Y got old, or Z got dead. The only people spared are the ones who passed away young; they live on forever at the same age on Kodacolor, though the uniform of their heaven might be bell bottoms. All of this is a completely different experience from being around someone constantly and never noticing subtle changes as days turn into weeks turn into years.
Your perspective changes when you can smell the Calvin Klein Eternity and the funeral florals on the same page.
Film - ScanningHow-toImages - Organizing35mmcamerasFilmFilm PhotographyPhotography
Statement of the problem One of the enduring mysteries of the darkroom lies in taking a pile of film, developing it, and getting everything into the right order for prints, scans, or negative pages. The problem with film is that even the most sophisticated data imprinting systems don’t really do the job well – assuming […]
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Inscrutable, unknowable. Where the hell did I take this picture?
Statement of the problem
One of the enduring mysteries of the darkroom lies in taking a pile of film, developing it, and getting everything into the right order for prints, scans, or negative pages. The problem with film is that even the most sophisticated data imprinting systems don’t really do the job well – assuming they count dates past 2018 (which is when most data backs stop incrementing years). The metadata we are thinking is: camera, lens, date, place. Leave the notebook behind. For any of the techniques below, you can use EXIFtool to write custom EXIF data to time, date, and location fields, but you can also do that manually using your digital asset management software.
Punching film (order of exposure)
If you are trying to keep film in date order, and you don’t have any other clever way of doing it (face it, you don’t), there is one easy option. You can use a hole punch to punch the leader of the film, preferably *after* you shoot it. You can use any code you want – number of dots, binary positions, different-sized punches. The best way to do this is to rewind with the leader out – and then punch the leader. If you are using a point and shoot, the alternative is to punch the film right before you load it. For example, the first roll gets one punch; the second, two; the third, three; and so on. The advantage of punches is that they don’t wear off when you develop the film. Just be careful not to cut the punched part off when you go to develop it. A related trick is using twin check stickers like in a photo lab, but hole punches are more foolproof and will never have a label get loose in your developer.
Title cards
A second way to attack recording is to use title cards. These could be a sheet of paper with critical information on it: camera, lens, date, roll number. Take a picture of it. A related technique is to open a blank document on your computer, type that info in 72 point, and take a picture of that. Title cards are not very easy to use in the field, but if you’re shooting one roll of film per outing, they are easy to incorporate. And since most rolls of film will accommodate 37 frames, it does not eat into the capacity of your film. You can obviously introduce cards mid-roll, but that does eat into capacity.
Anchoring time and location with a cellphone camera
The final way might be the most diabolical. If, on every roll of film, you duplicate one picture with a cell phone, you have a recording of the date and approximate location (thanks, invasive cellphone tech!) for at least the roll. If you duplicate every picture, then you essentially have recorded the time and location just as if you had a data back that performed that function. Back in Lightroom, you can clone the GPS data (and time data) from your phone pictures back to your film scans, either approximately (a frame per roll) or comprehensively. At a minimum, just one shot per roll helps you put rolls in the right order. Voilà.
Congratulations to Fujifilm with the GFX100RF and creating a Leica-M-like gatekeeing fanbase where questions about features are met with “you just don’t get GFX.” You’ve made it to the big time. It’s such a familiar pattern from the Leica M world – and an attitude absent among Q fans. Yes, old man, I will be […]
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Well, we knew your father.
Congratulations to Fujifilm with the GFX100RF and creating a Leica-M-like gatekeeing fanbase where questions about features are met with “you just don’t get GFX.” You’ve made it to the big time. It’s such a familiar pattern from the Leica M world – and an attitude absent among Q fans.
Yes, old man, I will be just like you.
Sensor-driven infirmities become dogma
And questions are legitimate. Fuji seems to be unable to admit that it was wrong about 36x24mm (FX) sensors. Back when the X100 and Xpro came out, Fuji was insistent that full-frame was meaningless because Xtrans was so good. When the rest of the world shifted to FX sensors in high-end cameras, Fuji was left holding its lens cap in its hand. So it decided that it would make a “medium format” sensor (44x33mm). In the digital world, that still has a crop factor versus film medium format, where the table stakes are 55x41mm (“6×4.5”).
Fuji arrived at a 4:3* “medium format” sensor in the GFX (note: it’s probably a Sony IMX461BQR). That had two huge consequences. One, you can’t use 35mm-format lenses with their 43mm image circle. Covering a larger circle drives a lot of compromises – like having slower lenses. Using a large sensor in a small body means that you lose advanced video (due to heat) and sensor stabilization (due to packaging). Despite the five-head of this camera, there is no room to stick the mechanical bits you need to shift a sensor.
*4:3 is an obsession among Japanese camera makers, and the only only other use of it is in old-school CRT TVs.
When people question the feature set, the Fujifan reaction has been to treat it as a tenet of Fujiculture: whatever Fuji does not provide is invalid. This is right out of the playbook employed by toxic Leica M fans. For them, whatever Leica did not put in an M was – tautologically – unnecessary. Metering, auto-exposure, TTL flash, etc. And so it goes here.
Oh no, did Leica somehow achieve greater bang-for-the-buck?
But when you look over the fence into Leicaland, even techno laggard Leica, in the Q3/Q43, has video up to 8k and 4k60p. It also has image stabilization. And it has a lens that is 2 stops faster (Q43) or 2.5 stops faster. This is a tough pill to swallow where Leica traditionally has been the company defending outdated specs for astronomically higher prices.
(Digression: please don’t argue that “medium format” makes f/4 into f/3.2 – that’s a depth of field conversion, not applicable light gathering. No matter what the sensor size, an f/2 lens still admits 4x as much light as f/4).
Leica can do all of this because it uses a 3:2 Sony 61mp sensor (IMX455), which is yes on video, yes on IBIS, and only needs a 43mm image circle from a lens. The packaging thing that people don’t seem to understand is that every imaging chip has an apron that is not sensor. Hence, the GFX sensor (49x40mm overall) takes up radically more space than a Q sensor (41x31mm overall size). That’s just a function of sensor area. A sensor that has 1.7x the area has at least 1.7x the footprint. Check out just how low the top cover of a Q is.
The Q3 is $1,300 more than a GFX – and that is not a huge premium for a Leica that is more beautifully designed, does more, and likely will be supported longer by the manufacturer. You can rail all you want about Leica and how much it costs, but this is a situation where Fuji’s Instax-looking design and short attention span for product support is worth examining.
The Q43 has a lot more appealing field of view for general use (43mm vs 28mm), but you will pay $2k over a GFX.
Any faith worth having can withstand questions
So is it ok for people to question the GFX100RF’s price and feature set? Yes. Will Fuji’s superfans clutch their pearls? Yes. Should we care? No.
Not every audience for a camera is monolithic, and some portion of your audience is going to want a $5k+ camera to be a multipurpose tool, at least theoretically, to mentally justify the spend. This is no different than any other object of male desire that needs to look at least nominally useful. Those casual consumers are the only people who contribute enough volume to get a GFX camera made. Let them ask. They are the ones spending their vacation money. The typical camera-maker sycophant corps has no skin in the game.
To the bottom line, at the end of the day 102mp is great, but you don’t get that in 3:2 (90mp) or 16:9 (76mp) with the Fuji. And over 60mp, it’s a pretty marginal real-world difference, especially if you are giving up things in the bargain. It is ok to interrogate that.
Ben Franklin, sei tu? When I was young, I had a particular distaste for Ben Franklin. It might have been fostered by the Fisher-Price American history story tapes (yes: cassettes) that reinforced his (sanitized) image as an inventive and penny pinching statesman who had a penchant for spouting annoying aphorisms like, “A stitch in time […]
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A generic CCD chip (Picture: Sony)
Ben Franklin, sei tu?
When I was young, I had a particular distaste for Ben Franklin. It might have been fostered by the Fisher-Price American history story tapes (yes: cassettes) that reinforced his (sanitized) image as an inventive and penny pinching statesman who had a penchant for spouting annoying aphorisms like, “A stitch in time saves nine,” or “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” For man of science, he also seemed to be doing experiments that were either dangerously daring or incredibly stupid, almost as if his final feat would be to prove whether the Deist or Anglican conception of God was the correct one. If that was his point with the key and the lightning, I think “Anglican” won, since he lived to tell the tale. I might have also been creeped out by how well he pulled off the skullet-round metal glasses-belly-tights look or his appearance on the packaging for off-brand Cracker Jacks.
When I was about 16, my father – sitting in the bay-windowed breakfast nook of our house – told me the true story of Ben Franklin. He twisted the end of his waxed mustache. “Ben Franklin, you see, was a monster. He had mistresses on multiple continents, he left his dying wife for his mistress in France, and pretty much every one of his catchy sayings is actually about sex.” I wasn’t sure I was buying it, but it’s hard to argue with someone who can pull off smoking with a four-inch ivory cigarette holder. And he explained to me that “In the dark, all cats are grey” does not mean “for some purposes things are the same.” He put the cigarette down on the square glass ashtray and picked up a cup of black coffee. Not a speck of ash was on the white lace tablecloth.
Twenty-five years after his early death (probably from cigarettes in a four-inch ivory holder), I happened upon a book of historic letters. Flipping through it one Sunday morning, I found the one in which “all cats are grey” appeared. It was a letter to his nephew about going after older women for their amatorial experience, conversational skills, and several other advantages that could easily be decoded from his language but are not suitable for this site. At that moment, I heard my father chuckle.
Base ISO is the great equalizer
Which gets us to the very short point of this essay.
The point is this: at base ISO, with modern sensors, there is virtually no difference between the smallest, cheapest digital sensors and the largest, most expensive ones. The sensitivity and noise resistance of digital sensors is measured by registering photons on a photodiode. This takes a certain amount of light. If you have enough light, you get high signal and low (or no) noise. Noise comes in when there is not enough light to create a good basis for signal amplification.
A modern sensor where all available light goes to the photodiode (Picture: Sony)
That’s it. That’s physics.
The implication is very clear – you get no dynamic range or noise advantage by using a larger sensor in bright sunlight. This is how a Light L16 with a bunch of computationally stitched 2/3″ sensors can outresolve a Fuji GFX50 if the light is good. It’s why your daytime iPhone pictures look so clear. If your days are sunny, you can spend as much as you want on as big of a sensor as you want to haul around, and you will never see much of an advantage. In fact, if you shoot with a flash, it’s the same situation.
Light gathering (and noise). The first factor is really a ratio: how many pixels for how much physical size. This ratio determines low-light capability because it directly correlates to the number of photos available to each photo site. Aside from sunny days, a large sensor will do better than a small sensor that has the same number of megapixels.
Depth of field – shallow. In general, the ability to maintain a shallow depth of field is a function of focal length, clear aperture, and pixel size. That means, generally, that larger sensors more readily allow for depth of field control. You can get equivalent control on smaller sensors, but it usually requires lenses of very large apertures.
Depth of field – deep. Here, assuming you can accommodate your light-gathering needs, the smallest sensor with acceptable resolution would promote deep depth of field.
Portability. Cameras with 36×24 sensors are usually much larger than APS-C (and massively larger than 1″). This is a function of sensor size as well as necessary heat dissipation.
Cost. Big sensors cost more; at the other end of the scale, you have a fairly decent small one in your recent iPhone.
Do I really need more than a camera phone for my trip to the Med?
Let’s just be honest – if it’s Santorini in daylight, probably not. If you have a lot of light, a camera phone is not terrible – except for the absurd AI-powered image correction (which is not the focus of this piece). Maybe a phone being enough is an exaggeration (for many people it isn’t). But for daylight, it’s hard to say with a straight face that you need something much bigger than 1″ or APS-C to do a decent job. Your phone really falls apart in the image quality department when it gets dark, though. Sometime take a look at the metadata of your night pictures. Low ISO, very low shutter speed, abusive noise reduction. Check it out at a pixel level. It’s nasty. And that’s even on the iPhone 15 and 16 Pro. Indoors, sundown, and onward is for progressively larger sensors. Those cats might be in color.
If you fancy yourself liberal, or even classically liberal, it cannot escape your notice that politics worldwide have been moving in a populist, nostalgic direction (especially in the United States). A lot of this revolves around seeking life like in the Before Times. Whether things were actually better in the Before Times is highly dependent […]
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If you fancy yourself liberal, or even classically liberal, it cannot escape your notice that politics worldwide have been moving in a populist, nostalgic direction (especially in the United States). A lot of this revolves around seeking life like in the Before Times.
Whether things were actually better in the Before Times is highly dependent on who you ask about the Before Times, and even in the selected audiences where the Before Times have a favorable rating, the view is through rose-tinted glasses. Polio was a thing. So was losing all of your teeth before age fifty. If you weren’t in the politically and socially dominant group, you might be limited in your job, your mobility, or your relationships. In some situations, and for some people those Before Times were positively life-threatening.
In photography, the Before Times were a camera with no screen, in many cases no meter, and in every case thirty-six available frames before a cumbersome (and for Leica, finger-poking) film changing process. You would either turn your film in to a lab or develop it yourself. You might wait days or even weeks to see what you shot. Any way you slice it, there was a non-zero chance that your photos would be lost in a mishap or that someone blinked. I’m not sure I’m one of the people that sees that with rosy glasses. I do relentlessly shoot film – but rarely in any context where missing a shot would mean missing some critical moment in life.
What is the psychology of a person who is drawn to a digital camera with no rear screen? It’s honesty hard to say because the intersection of the sets “really rich” and “wants this” is pretty small. The sample size just isn’t there. You could speculate that there is a group of people who want to cosplay film photography using a crippled digital camera. There is a group of people, potentially overlapping, who can’t keep their fingers off that playback button. A possibly related loud contingent lobbied to get video removed from Leica Ms because they could not keep their fingers off that button as well. And we cannot discount yet another proponent group, which talks about how much better their pictures are when the camera forces them to go slow and think about basics. To which I would say, just get a film camera. Maybe a 4×5 view camera.
Some commenters on, and admirers of, the Leica M seem to be asking for guidance: how to be a photographer by using something that (at least visibly) only has the controls that a 1986 Leica M6 does. If we follow this formula, roll back to the past, use the tool prescribed from on high by Leica, we will prosper. Most people who own Leicas, at least as measured by the LUG and Leica’s official forum, fancy themselves to be rational, liberal, and not susceptible to control. They would never admit that they may come under the thrall of a strongman, a schismatic bishop, or a camera company out of central Germany. And yet some number will pay a large sum of money for a camera that may not be fun for them – on the promise that being controlled control will liberate them to make great art.
Maybe it’s hard for people who are not “Leica M people” to understand things like the M11-D because they don’t understand Leica’s role as a substitute religious experience. In fact, it has many of the makings of a religion, with the same kind of missionaries that relentlessly defend Apple products. Leica has an origin story in an asthmatic microscope technician with a message. Leica M has a canon: the M5, CL, and M240/246/262 are some kind of Romanist apocrypha. It has a creed that has evolved… at the speed Leica can commercialize features. You don’t need X. That is, until Leica produces a product with X. Witness the march [metering, TTL flash, autoexposure, electronic viewfinders, 24x36mm sensors, etc.]. It has its saints (Cartier-Bresson and Korda being examples). It has its holy shrine (“next year in Wetzlar” was the cry from Solmsian captivity). And it has its dogma: the Decisive Moment® seems the most oft-repeated verse. The interoperability of the M11-D with Fotos, a phone-based app, though, seems like calling muskrat “fish” during Lent. Digital is digital, and there are certain dispensations and accommodations.
And yet, who are we to judge? Leica is already something of a rarified taste; you must really want a certain feel to want a camera that is heavier, less convenient, and spectacularly more expensive than most modern ones. Some of us are in it for the small lenses and superb image quality, but what is the clear line between that and wanting something that pretends not to be a digital camera at all?
premium compact digital camera (X Half 2).
