Wired Cola

Photo: Rama (CC licensed)

The Leica M8 is a terrible camera. No wait, the Leica M8 is a wonderful camera!

Hm. With the preface that this is a camera I will never buy ($!), attached to very good lenses I strongly suspect are having mystical qualities imposed on them by gullible impressonable discerning users, I think the short answer is the M8 is probably a pretty good Leica and a pretty bad digital camera.

The basic advantage of the Leica is summed up by the "wonderful" review, where he talks about not being regarded as a "real" photographer because he wasn't carrying a honking huge SLR. That's a real point in its favor, except that several compact cameras (Canon G-series, as one of many examples) can probably play in the same performance class as the Leica at a fraction of the cost.

The basic disadvantage of the Leica is summed up by the "terrible" review, where the author talks about the many failings (ergonomic and photographic) that seem to amount to Leica not having a massive development budget for digital imaging systems and usability testing. Canon and Nikon (and even lesser players like Ricoh and Pentax, at least in comparison to Leica) on the other hand, do.

So the result is fabulous interchangeable lenses on a fundamentally solid body attached to electronic imaging systems that don't seem to be keeping up. If I seem to be faulting the Leica heavily, I think it's because its low-light performance is so poor compared to the leaders, and because low-light performance is such an obvious, basic want for a camera like the M8: it's optimized for intimate photos, has lots of wide-angle lenses in its range, and yet it can't do a good job of indoor ambient-light photography.

That's an oops.

So yeah, in sum, I'm still trying to save my nickels for a good used Pentax *ist; DS, DL, whatever.