The Best Leica M Backup Body

[Stephen Starkman]

I went this route about a year ago - with an Olympus E-P2 and an EVF.

What I found is that anyone considering a mirrorless body as a backup for M lenses should test the camera/adapter/lens combination to see if the results are acceptable to them. For example, my 50 Cron produces beautiful images, corner to corner, however my 35 Cron is unacceptably soft in the corners  and my 28 Elmarit even worse. Of course, what is unacceptable performance for one user may be perfectly fine for another - and subject matter, er, well... matters (ie: street photographers may be perfectly happy with less than optimal corner performance).

Michael is dead-on regarding opening up the aperture when focussing, then stopping down before taking the exposure.

[douglasf13]

Boy, I completely disagree. I talk to many, many manual lens users on both m4/3 and NEX on a daily basis, and very few of them use stop down metering, but, rather, focus with the lens at shooting aperture. All that does is introduce focus shift and wasted time, IMO.

With NEX, between focus magnification and focus peaking, focusing at your chosen aperture makes things simple.

[pegelli]

My experience is the same as Douglas. For 2-3 stops below wide open I don't go through the hassle of opening/closing the aperture. Closed further than that usually hyperfocal works just as well and focussing becomes a non-issue.

Only for critical and determined types of shooting it might be worth it, but I don't use my little cam for that.