Equipment & Techniques > Cameras, Lenses and Shooting gear

final judgment on Lieca Monochrom

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alifatemi:
I like to ask all friends here who have had first hand experience with Lieca monochrome, those who really have it and leave with it for long time, what is your idea in long run of this camera if we forget about deferences between viewfinder and SLR and just focusing on B&W picture differences. I am considering buying monochrome but don't know if even after post production manipulations, we can reach any meaningful verdict between the two? even without considering monochrome such a high price tag. I mean lets forget about viewfinder pros/cons compare to SLR, and lets forget about price we gonna pay for monochrome, can't we really reach the same file quality of monochrome with really good SLR with best chosen lenses available and also after in post production turning the files to B&W and tuning them accourdingly? Regards.

jrp:
The answer to your question is, obviously, "yes", as you can generate an infinite variety of b&w renditions of your colour image, but the only thing that you can vary with the b&w one is the local and global contrast and exposure; you cannot lighten or darken specific colour ranges only luminosity ranges.

That said, the b&w Leicas will produce slightly cleaner / less noisy pictures than their colour counterparts (particularly with older lenses, which were not corrected in the blue spectrum, because film was not sensitive to it).

How much any of this matters depends on what you are shooting, in what volume, and what you intend to do with it and how good your post-processing skills and aptitude are.

Iluvmycam:
MM?

It is OK. It tends to burn out the highlights unless you underexpose. Here is a shot done with the MM.

https://danielteolijr.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/whimsical-composition-copyright-2015-daniel-d-teoli-jr-mr-v42.jpg

Here is the rundown on the M240. Same thing applies to the MM if you wish to read my review. M240 does have the color sliders that can be used in PP as was noted previously.

https://danielteolijr.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/my-review-of-the-leica-m240-that-dp-refused-to-publish/

Allen Bourgeois:
If you are a B&W street photographer there truly is not a better digital tool for that. The files from my MM are much cleaner and void of artifacts that are sometime associated and some of hte problems I had when converting color to B&W. I tend to see in B&W and I shoot a lot of street so for me it was a no brainer. And apparently the original was a good enough seller for Leica because they just released an ungraded CMOSIS version. I don't have any plans of upgrading but the files I have seen on line from it are pretty amazing.

Petrus:
An important part of my B&W workflow is to find an artistically pleasing B&W interpretation of the scene in post. That is only possible by shooting color RAW. That alone takes Leica Monochrom from my list of possible cameras, not to mention the cost. I might loose a bit in resolution (unless using Nikon D800 series), but gain much much more in other possibilities in forming the final B&W rendition.

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