Friday night went with unpacking and running limited test shots at home in low light.
My first impressions can best be described as falling in love. I was mesmerised by its beauty, its built quality, its craftsmanship, its responsiveness, but above all, its unique personality, its connectedness with Leica history.
This is the first camera Leica designed for stealth action. Like a jaguar it sticks itself to the ground and pounce when least expected. This is the camera I have been waiting for, and it felt like custom designed for me.
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| © 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved. |
Personality
I love it when a product has history, it is cherished and cared by the company that makes it. With its good looks and its industrial design Leica Q-P is unmistakably a Leica. Simply by looking at it and holding it you can feel its connection to the first 35 mm film Leica prototypes built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Aleut Optische Werke, Wetzlar, in 1913. And that is a privilege.Build quality
When you hold and weigh the camera in your hands, you just feel how finely built, how robust it is. This is especially evident in Leica Q-P.I spent agonising nights, reading a blog after another, watching YouTube videos, endlessly browsing user forums, camera review sites and decided that Leica Q-P was the one.
Technically Leica Q-P and its predecessor Leica Q are identical. They have the same hardware, same lens and same software. But when you hold them in your hands and compare the experience, there is big difference.
Leica Q-P has this beautiful charcoal coloured, textured, stealth finish, whereas Leica Q is pitch black, shinier and more visible. Consequently in the hand Leica Q-P feels very robust, but Leica Q feels slippery and insecure.
When you use its stops and dials Leica Q-P has a very assuring tactile feel, whereas Leica Q feels like a plastic toy.
For these reasons alone Leica Q-P worths every penny in the chunky price difference of AUD 1,000. Actually the difference is less, because Leica team threw a beautiful brown leather strap, and a spare battery in the Leica Q-P box.
Like me if you hesitate, I strongly encourage you to ask the Leica salesperson that you want to try them both. Hold them in your hands, and take some pictures.
Street photography experience
I spend the first day shooting 400 pictures in the Sydney CBD. It was a very hot bright day with lots of tourists moving around.I tried auto mode for a little while, then moved to f/1.7 manual focus when I started to get closer to my subjects.
The wait for focus is non-existent, it is so fast. I tried multi-point auto focus, and face recognition auto focus with success. But most of the time I was happy with single-point manual focus and aperture set to f/1.7. This gave me gorgeous bokeh and versatility to focus on my close-by subjects.
The output of JPEG from camera was good, but to my surprise DxO PhotoLab 2 (my image processing app) had better quality JPEG output. So from now on I’ll stick to DNG only output.
Hickups
Apart from important instructions on maintenance and safety, I don’t really read manuals.I am a guy who learn things by experimenting. I am very used to tinkering and failing which I see as an integral part of learning process.
Most of the issues I listed below were due to my extreme impatience and ignorance. In all cases I realised my mistakes quickly, I learned my lesson and moved on.
Setting AF
I naively assumed that AF is given when you set the aperture to A (auto).I wanted to experiment with aperture f/1.7, so I set the aperture ring to that. Naturally I had to use manual focus so I unlocked and slid the focus ring. Wide aperture tests went fine with Q’s gorgeous bokeh.
When I set the aperture back to A though, I didn’t realise I had to lock the focus ring at AF. This resulted in dark grey pictures.
Setting ISO accidentally
The second night I was excited, as I had the opportunity to try out legendary low light performance of Leica Q-P in a party. To my horror the images turned up blurred and white balance out of whack. When I noticed the shutter speed recordings I saw 1/3, 1/4 etc. Those of course explained poor image quality. The root cause of the anomaly was during the day I set the ISO to 100 from Auto and forgot about it. In low light the camera tried to compensate by reducing the shutter speed.Setting speed dial accidentally
I read that this is quite common. So maybe Leica can improve in this area. What happened was in more than one occasion while placing the camera in and out of my bag or while wearing it, sometimes without noticing I hit the speed dial. This often resulted in camera not responding, because it was busy with low speed shots.Processing crop images
One of the reasons I liked Leica Q-P was because in crop mode I figured I might take advantage of the full frame sensor for compensating for image quality while resolutions drop to 15.4 MP and 7.5 MP when 35 mm and 50 mm crops are used respectively. 15.4 MP is reasonable and close to film quality (18 MP), and I kind of fancy trying it out in my street photography. In some cases even 50 mm crop could produce reasonable outcome I thought.Leica promotes Lightroom, even bundles a trial package and manuals. Apparently with the crop function in Lightroom you can see the full image (provided that you had DNG output), cropped at 35/50mm equivalent.
I was perhaps naively expecting something equivalent at the DxO PhotoLab side, but discovered DxO PL lacks auto 35/50 mm cropping. All you could do in DxO PL is to drag the 24 MP image to precise pixel count. For example the original image with 6,000 x 4,000 pixels should be reduced to 4,800 x 3,200 and 3,360 x 2,240 pixel in 35 mm and 50 mm crop respectively. But manually adjusting the rectangular crop frame to precise units is quite painful.
As a result I decided to raise a customer ticket with DxO PL to request the Lightroom auto 35/50 mm crop feature. In the meantime I will write a command line utility to edit top files to have custom crop for 35 mm and 50 mm. It is a hassle, but hey, nothing is prefect.
Precise digital cropping is an important requirement for photographers who would like to print their work for a book or an exhibition, so that they would have a uniform, consistent quality in precise resolution for every image. I am definitely in this category. Right now I am experimenting and I am OK with arbitrary crop sizes, but as I get more serious about my work, I would like to have an efficient processing step for digital cropping in my workflow. Hopefully I won't resort to Lightroom to overcome this limitation.
