It's funny. When Leica incorporates a "feature" into a camera people don't know how to respond. Take the ability to engage frame lines in the finder of the Q2 to show you the accurate crops for 35, 50 and 75mm lenses. Take the photo at, say, a 35mm crop and that's what you end up with if you are shooting Jpegs. A photo with a 35mm angle of view. The framelines are a good indicator that you're actually doing some cropping. You won't get to use every pixel you paid for. It set the web on fire at the time of the camera's introduction. How dare they make in-camera cropping a thing in an over-priced, red dot, Veblen photography product. And then call it a feature!!! IT'S JUST CROPPING! I CAN DO THAT IN POWER POINT!!!
But stick the same capability in a newly announced Fuji medium format camera and you'd think you just bought tickets for the second coming of Christ.
Out for a walk today with the Leica Q2 camera. Trying to decide, by using this camera all the time, if I could really just buy a Q3 with a 43mm lens on it, keep the original Q2, and get rid of every other camera, camera body and lens in the entire studio. Gone. Trashed. Sold. Liquidated. Sure would make packing a lot easier. Two cameras and good coverage from 28mm to about 90mm. With enough resolution for everything. But..inertia. Common sense. Conservative constraint.
I liked the way the light played across the bench and also created shadows of the leaves. It was well suited for the 35mm focal length. And since I was shooting Jpegs I thought I'd just push the little button on the back and engage the frame lines. Turn the camera into a 35mm lens camera. The push of a button.
I've been playing around with the cropping feature for days now. It's elegant and reminds me of the frame lines in any M series Leica camera. You can also see "outside the frame" which I think allows for better compositions. The ability to see what's in and what's out.
Sad to think I'll have to settle for "only" 30 something megapixels when I use that 35mm crop mode. I guess there are worse things to contemplate.
Ah. First World Veblen Problems... FWVP. Never learned about that in prep school.
The frame lines are okay, I guess, but I wish Leica would deploy a firmware enhancement option that would allow the viewfinder to zoom in to match a selected crop. It seems likely the essential functionality is already present—at least on the Q3; I've never used a Q2—because in manual focusing mode an enlarged view is available as a focusing aid.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy the thought that there may be people who feel upset that not all the pixels they paid for are being used. Leica, Fuji and others should simply release cameras in groups, the first with a 28, a second with a 35, third with 50, fourth with 75. Ricoh has gone partway down that road with two models, which is pretty timid of them. Such a line-up would increase camera deliveries substantially and improve those sales graphs.
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