![]() This became a real concern when I had an unreleased prototype M camera hanging off my shoulder in a room full of some of the most astute Leica users and collectors to be found anywhere. Join us in Washington, DC for the Annual Meeting this October.įrankly, I was a little worried about someone spotting the MM246. If you haven’t been to an LHSA meeting before, don’t feel too bad about missing a great one in New Orleans. The LHSA is also known as the International Leica Society and I am a proud member, attending every event since 2006. My colleague Peter Dooling joined me in Nola for the LHSA Spring Shoot. M Monochrom (Typ 246) with 35mm Summilux-M ASPH FLEĮven before I had a chance to get all my editing done from New York, I was already getting ready to head off to New Orleans just a few days after returning from my previous trip. I also concluded that in addition to being able to match the look of the M9, the M240 had the advantages of a more modern interface, larger and higher resolution LCD, faster image processing, lower shutter vibration and sound, live view, external EVF compatibility, improved dynamic range and superior high ISO performance. In the end, with minimal processing in Lightroom, I was able to make the CMOS-based M240 files look like those from the CCD-based M9, casting doubt on the supposition that the CCD look is unique and unreproducible. Could the new CMOSIS Max CMOS sensor sans CFA match up to the nuanced fidelity of the original monochrome Truesense CCD? I recently published a three-part piece here on Red Dot Forum ( Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) putting the CCD vs. Of course, this platform shift re-opens the long running debate of the merits of CCD vs. If you need to shoot in brightly lit conditions with a fast aperture, get yourself a good quality 3 stop ND filter. As this setting was often misunderstood to offer better quality when the opposite was true, it has been removed. Absent is the PULL 160 option like the M9 Mono had. But, unlike the M-P, the MM246 features a higher ISO range, running from a base ISO of 320 up to the normal range maximum of ISO 12500 in 1/3 stops, with an additional ISO 25000 PUSH setting. So, if you are familiar with the M240 or the M-P 240, you already know most of what this new camera has to offer and how it operates. M Monochrom Typ 246, top and M-P Typ 240, bottom For an even more in-depth technical discussion, refer to my earlier M Monochrom review. Take away the need for color and most of these challenges cease to matter. Making them produce color is an exercise in balancing compromises. Digital sensors, be they CCD or CMOS are inherently monochrome capture devices. This is why there are twice as many green pixels relative to red or blue – to minimize this effect without losing too much chroma, or color, information in the resulting file. Sure, you’ll pull up more detail, but you’ll also create a lot of additional noise in the process. Digital gain is like boosting the shadows on an underexposed image. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that the light transmission characteristics of red, green and blue are quite different, so additional gain needs to be applied to the darker red and blue pixels in order to match the luminance of the lighter green. Sharp, defined digital noise isn’t limited to the pixel from where it originated, but is spread, creating smeary detail-robbing clumpy noise patterns. But, just as information is averaged from a larger area for color, so too is noise. The missing information is filled in by a very complex algorithm, called demosaicing, which does a surprisingly good job guessing the color from surrounding pixels. This is not the case for a color sensor, where 25% of the pixels are red, 25% blue and 50% green. This meant that every pixel captured every tone (16,384 shades of gray, to be precise). But, what they failed to take into account was that with no Bayer color filter array over the sensor, there was no interpolation, nor additional gain for added filtration. Upon its launch in Berlin in May 2012 at the Das Wesentliche event, skeptics, naysayers and armchair imaging experts immediately questioned the relevancy of a dedicated B&W digital camera when it was, and still is, so easy to convert from a color image in your chosen editing software. It reinforced Leica’s reputation for making straightforward, no-frills cameras of exceptional quality for serious photographers, and at the same time, showed that there are still a lot of shooters who want to use such tools. The original M Monochrom, perhaps now better referred to as the M9 Monochrom, was a huge success for Leica. Many in the photographic community have speculated that it was only a matter of time until Leica made a monochrome version of the M (Typ 240), more commonly known as the M240.
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