Musings . . .

When a Leica employee told me some time ago there’d be no sequel to the CL, he emphasized that he cannot say what products are coming, but that he can definitively say which ones aren’t coming. As a further example, he also disclosed that Leica will make no L-mount lens longer than 280mm.

“That’s what the alliance is for,” he added. To which I would add: other mounts and formats, too.

Dim overcast weather in the afternoon quickly gave me a chance to lay fresh eyes on how a current m43 sensor and up-to-date software have made some inroads in image quality since I last used the format. I shot away, knowing that these would be about the worst lighting conditions in which I’d ever bother to shoot birds.

The lapwing was shot in an open field at ISO 800 and is cropped at the pixel level. The ‘keet is ISO 2000, shot slightly backlit under canopy, +2 EV IIRC, cropped at about 70%. Yes, there’s a bit of coincidence of noise and details in the lapwing shot, but details are still evident. Surprisingly, the Panleica lens did extremely well capturing feather details on the parakeet, which few lenses do well; while rendering mediocre detail on a sunbird (not posted), which almost all lenses capture well.

There’s a lot more detail in the full file size, which cannot be displayed here. And after ditching Capture One, I haven’t quite learned my way around DXO yet, in case the images below don’t look up to par.

With so many megapixels in every format nowadays, I’ve started thinking in terms of pixel pitch rather than sensor format. Maybe that’s why I seem to be finally getting comfortable with m43 this time around.