Hi, I'm Zak, I'm with the Video Team, and with me today are Ned and Kramer. They're both writers;
we're all part of the Creative department here at Crutchfield and we were lucky enough
recently to get our hands on some really great Leica cameras to test out for a little while.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm a photo nut like you, and and I just was salivating over the
idea of being able to use these cameras out in the wild a little bit. The one I had was the Q2
Monochrom, a very interesting black-and-white sensor only, and a fixed 28 millimeter lens on
it, and just blinding detail, and just, I couldn't believe how sharp and awesome it was. So I got into
photography as a kid. My dad was a math teacher, we lived on a private school campus, and we had
access to a darkroom, and I got a Pentax K-1000, very famous student camera, as my first camera, and
learned how to do that, and we learned how to develop the film and make prints from the enlarger
and use all the chemicals and hang things up and use the little red light and everything, and it was
just kind of magical to me, and I really got into it from then. And then, you know, in college
I found other things to do for a while. And then when digital came back, it
really just kind of re-awakened that creativity in me. I started with a Canon DSLR and then I
have shot with a number of them through the years, but the digital kind of re-awakened my
interest in film photography also. So there was a period of time right after my first kid was
born where I shot three or four hundred rolls of black-and-white film and developed them myself.
I didn't have a darkroom, but I would develop the film and then just kind of scan it and stuff.
But shooting with this Q2 camera brought back a lot of those memories, because just looking
really close at black-and-white files just, I don't know, it makes me happy. And it's kind of
a different creative process a little bit, and what you look for is a little bit different, and
I kind of like looking at the world that way. And it has a very fantastic black-and-white
viewfinder, so I can really see and kind of preview what I'm shooting in black-and-white in black-and-
white. So now I can look through here and see the world in black-and-white, and it really really
helps with finding those great shadows, finding those great things you want to take a picture of.
It's got a fixed 28mm f/1.7 lens on there, reasonably fast lens, good for lower light, super
shallow depth of field. With a with a 28 millimeter lens you have a lot of depth of field anyways, but
when you get this sucker opened up real wide it's got a nice, beautiful bokeh in the background
where you see those out-of-focus highlights are nice and just round and beautiful. And
I really, really enjoyed using it. It's also got
manual controls on the lens; it's got a shutter speed dial here; it's got a really nice focusing
scale. Cool thing it does in the macro setting, when you turn this macro lens you see the focus
scale shift because it's doing something in there to let me get closer to the subject to shoot it,
and now I've got a new focusing scale so I know where I'm in focus and where I'm not.
I just really like the mechanicals of these cameras. They're just so precise and so well-machined, and
just so well-made. It's like when you get your hands on a really, really high-quality tool
or something, and suddenly you realize, oh this is why people get really high-quality tools.
I really enjoyed it. It's not perfect for me...I mean, we all kind of shoot a little differently.
One thing I really like to do with some of my other cameras is shoot at waist level,
and that requires a screen that flips up. The screen doesn't flip up. That's one small regret I
have with it, but that said, it's very easy to adjust your shooting style to to that sort of thing.
I like how they do even the mechanical stuff, like how the battery pops out
is cool. It requires another little push to come out like that, and I haven't...I could tell you how
many times I've dropped the battery on the ground because I'm not paying any attention and I release
the thing and it just falls. Well, Leica thought of that, and that's impressive. And it's just,
everything about the camera that's mechanical, physical is just so well done and just quite
amazing. I like how they do the the viewfinder where you can dial it in for your vision.
It pops in, pops out, it's now, it's nice and flat, and when I need to adjust it I just
pop it, comes out, turn it, it's just a nice, it's it's nice in the hand, you know, and
in a perfect world I'd like a little grip right there maybe, but you know, if if this were my camera
I'd probably buy one of those ever-ready cases, those leather cases that goes around it, makes it have a
little bit more grip. But they have this nice thumb detent right here. When you grab a camera it's
often like this, and it's nice to have a an indent right there that's the size, the shape of my thumb.
Gives me just a little bit more grip on there, and I really appreciate that so. It's just such a well
thought out machine. Cool. And Leica, you know, famous for this red dot right here.
That camera, the black-and-white one, is just so incognito. Yeah. Because it's just it's a blackout
kind of camera. I mean, the the numbers are in white, but there's no there's no color on the
on the box itself. I've seen a lot of Leica shooters over the years that will
put a piece of tape over that red dot sometimes to kind of blend in a little bit, because right, you
know, you might...it's just it's one little thing, but I think when you're...if somebody's aware that
you're taking a picture of them, sometimes it helps you you blend into the background. But yeah,
it's a very clean, very unobtrusive camera. Which camera did you get a chance to use? So well, I used
that one for a while. I really, really loved that one, especially that it's a fixed lens, and
you don't...you can't change it, so you don't have to think about what you might change it to. So you can
sort of make the most of it, and just sort of get into that world. But this one is the
M10, which is a lot like a camera I grew up with, except the one I grew up with was a film camera.
M1 or M3, I can't really remember, or I don't really know what it was, because
I wasn't paying attention at the time. But I used it for years. It was my dad's
sort of second-line camera and he let me borrow it and learn on it, and so it seems strange
to me that someone would pick up a camera like this and be like, "What is going on here?" You know,
having the having the f-stops on the the aperture control on the end of the barrel like they do here,
that's exactly what I'm used to. Having the focus ring where it is, that's exactly what I'm used to.
Having the shutter speed up here is pretty typical; this one also has this cool, you lift it
to change the ISO, so even if you've set the ISO in the menus, here you can also set it manually
up here. And you can also set everything to automatic, except for the focus. You can't
autofocus with this one, this is manual focus only. So you know, it means you've got to look,
you can't just rely on the camera, which that's, that's just the way I'm used to anyway.
This one still is pretty, you know, "old school." It doesn't have, you can't just
access everything from the bottom without taking off this old brass base plate, and then
the modern is revealed inside, your battery and your camera and your card hatch, but it just...
everything just feels so solid. You know, you're not scared to take it out like, oh
I'm gonna damage this. This is a real heavy-duty tool. It's I guess they
are priced like a luxury item, but the reason is because they're just really, really good.
The non-ergonomic; you know, that doesn't have a grip in front like this. I've got a little
little hint of a thumb rest right here to make it more comfortable, but that's just feels natural to
me based on what I grew up with. But this camera, even though it is the the one
that's a lot like the one I grew up using, it did take me a minute to get back into it and to
find the sweet spot, but what I found was that I really needed to let go of of of scrolling
through any of these menus and just really take over again in in manual settings, and that's
that's the beauty of it. What's the compatibility of lenses on that? This is an M-mount, so Leica's
been making them since I don't even know how long they've been making them. The '50s at least.
The '50s, yeah. That old camera that I grew up with, I could take the lens from it and stick it on here.
And so, yes. Poking through used lenses and finding old old M lenses. It's not that
they're going to be that cheap, because as you said, Leicas really do hold their value,
but people who have them tend to take care of them, and they're, you know,
just as good now as the day they were made years ago. Yeah. Hearing the background of you guys
is fascinating, because I never shot film growing up. My introduction to digital or to photography
was through digital photography. My first camera was a crop-sensor DSLR, and I really learned how
to take photos in the last five years. It quickly became like my favorite thing in the world. And
my specialty, what I love doing the most, is going out for sunrise and seeing what develops
in the sky, what interesting things happen as dawn breaks. And what I'll often do
is go out during blue hour, you know, that magic hour before the sun rises where
the sky turns that sort of inky blue and you can just kind of watch the day unfold,
and you get all different kinds of cloud patterns and different kind of
light gradations, and wild, different kinds of color, different areas of the sky. And the seasonality of
the sky is what's so fascinating to me. You know, the way that sun tracks at different times
of the year, where it rises, or where it rises and sets, it's just a...it's a great way to experience
the natural world. And for me, it gets me out of bed early, it gets me out, gets my steps in, and it
lets me experience something that I wouldn't have ever thought to look for. And to me, that's the fun
part about photography is you really never know what you're going to find when you go out there,
and you know, every beam of light that comes down is unique. I mean, these photons that are coming in
will never reflect off these surfaces the same way again, and so every photo really is a unique
opportunity to capture a moment. And that's what makes it so magical to me. So I have the
Leica SL2, which is a 47-megapixel full-frame mirrorless camera. This is actually pretty
similar to my daily driver, which is a canon R5, a very similar resolution in terms of image quality.
Out of the box I found this to be a treat to hold because of the the unbelievable build quality,
and it's something that's apparent the second you pick it up. It just feels,
like you mentioned earlier, it's actually like a high-quality tool, and that's that's exactly
what it, that it feels like in your hands. This is a 35-millimeter Summicron f/2 prime lens, and
I have a 35-millimeter f/1.4 Canon that I've used for all kinds of landscapes and
street photography and environmental portraits, and this held its own and then some in terms of
richness and clarity and depth of color. The edge- to-edge sharpness...I was, I was truly impressed.
The camera itself, I was not expecting it to have some some real goodies tucked away here. There is
a full-size HDMI output, so if you want to connect this to your television and look at your photos, to
your computer monitor, it's very simple to do. And my favorite feature, this might seem like something
small, but for me was really nice is that you can charge this camera through USB-C,
so you don't have to take the battery out and look for your charger. For me, I can just plug my
phone charger right in, charges up the camera, I'm ready to go. That was a real nice treat for for me
to discover. And overall, I found the camera quite intuitive to use, and one nice thing about these
Leica cameras is that the menu systems on these digital cameras are are quite similar. So I had a
chance to play around with the Q2 Monochrom, and found the menu to be just as easy as and intuitive,
that color-coded menu, as on the SL2, and that's nice because you can go from platform to platform
and have some immediate familiarity when you pick up the camera. This is an L-mount, so any of Leica's
L-mount lenses will fit, as will those from Sigma and Panasonic that use that same mount, platform.
So if you have some high-quality glass from another manufacturer, those are fully compatible
with this camera, which is, which is really nice. Like you, Zak, I do a lot of waist-level shooting.
Often I'll get down the ground to get some interesting perspectives and angles.
I do wish this had a flip-out screen, but I've learned to work around that.
The only thing I will say that I wish I had was a battery grip with vertical controls. And I have
enormous hands, and so I really do appreciate the size of this camera, because it fits
aesthetically and ergonomically. It fits me quite nicely, but I found myself wanting to
be able to have some controls here. That's one thing I would uh enjoy seeing as available.
But all in all, it was an absolute delight to use, and I'm looking forward to getting the photos that
I took printed up and on display in my home. What about the programmable buttons on there? That's...
I don't think that's a feature of these two, but that's a pretty cool feature on that, I thought.
Yes, that's something where you can just simply press and hold
the, some of these buttons, and it allows you to quickly customize your own quick settings. So
if you want to jump in and and change from one mode to another, or change a white balance setting
or this to that, you have easy access to your menus, and it's nice. And that way you can really
make it your own experience. You know, you're not just limited to the default controls or settings.
It gives you the ability to customize it for what you're looking to do, in whatever
genre photography you find most appealing. Yeah, I think you can tell that photographers had a lot
to do with designing this camera. Sometimes... I've shot on many digital cameras
where it's pretty clear that the engineers had the last say in a lot of stuff, because there's
some really counter-intuitive stuff going on. This thing, the Q2 Monochrom, you push the menu
button once, your quick menu comes up, the stuff you need to get to right away, and then if you
need to get into the nitty-gritty a little bit you just press it again, and now you're in there.
Yeah, so every time you really just need the five or six controls that you usually need
while you're shooting, quickly change. Yeah. And this, this is, you know, all the the live views
on all three of these look really similar in the in the button layout for that is,
yeah, I agree, really intuitive. Little details like that, though, Leica has really
thought out, has clearly tested and thought about and, that's something I appreciate as a as a photo nut.
One of the things that struck me when I first unboxed these cameras was just the unbelievable
build quality. You know, these are hand-made in Germany, one by one, and they're built to last
forever. And it brought me back to a phrase I heard about 10 years ago. We hired a firm out in Richmond
called Caravati's to build us a farm table, a dining room table, and they specialize in reclaimed and
salvaged materials. And they had this old church that they had salvaged with these old beams
from the 1800s that they had used to to make our table, and when we came out to to to check on it
they said, "You know, we build things that are meant to be handed down, passed down instead of
torn down." And that always stuck with me, and I imagine that these cameras will last a lifetime.
You know, if you were to buy an M10 or even the new M11, or the Q2 or the SL2, these are cameras
that we'll pass down to our children decades from now and they'll still be taking amazing photos.
Well guys, I had a terrific time using the Leica cameras that they were kind enough to lend us.
I'm gonna be sad when we box these up and send them back, but yeah, but it was a lot of fun,
and I'm looking forward to getting some prints made up of the images that I took
Yeah, please thank our our Leica representative for this opportunity. We really
appreciate it. And I'm thanking you for doing it. You know, because I get a message from
you what, a month ago or so, saying, "We've got these Leicas if you want to check one out." Yes I do.
I didn't have to twist your guys' arms too much, though... No, they've been a lot of fun. Yeah, this was
a real treat. Well, thank you, Kramer, thank you, Ned, thank you, Leica. And if you want to check out some
of the Leica cameras we have on sale, check out our website. Thanks for watching; have a good day.