@Dreed: I had the same initial reaction as Michael: 'this is interesting but I don't quite get what he means'. What is it about 1/98.5th of a second that's so missing from this guy's life?
Your longer post really clarified it: just like us, you lament the inability to get *every last damn drop of photons* into the sensor WITHOUT burning out a single important pixel, and wonder why the hell cameras can't do this. You, like me, find full 1/3rd stop increments too crude, at least based upon the readout we get on the instantly generated in-camera histogram.
We are totally on the same page on this one.
This is why I wrote that "ETTR" mode would be one of the most important advances we could get on cameras (for our purposes landscape shooters).
The cruder answer, though, I believe is that the in-camera generated histograms are actually not a whole lot more accurate in their display of burn-out than 1/3rd stop increments. They are based on jpegs and are conservatively biased.They cause us to leave light 'on the table' with every shot anyway.
Most cameras already have continuously variable electronic shutters, the fail-point on this is colour-specific, pixel-level metering, or something like that - whatever it is that keeps anyone from building an ETTR-enabled camera.
We'll both be at the front of the line for that one!
@Klaban: yeah, I'm really interested in trying it with Leica glass too, but based on what I've seen of the manual focusing on EVF cameras, I am not optimistic that this will be useful for anything but certain landscape work.
Sean Reid has pointed out to me that, in fact, one CANNOT move the focus-point around in the OVF. What is being displayed on the overlay is the point on the screen (approximately) which will be brought up as an enlarged view on the EVF is you depress a particular button. This 'zoom-in' focus assist will be useful, but it's more limited than what I got the impression the camera could do.
I will write a longer clarification of this in my next installment. (this limitation makes sense when the impact of paralax with the OVF is taken into account)
The X-Pro1 also does not have focus-peaking. Focus peaking is a really annoying way to focus, imho, but it works. The raison-d'etre of the X-Pro 1 is that it autofocuses. I suspect the camera's use with Leica
glass will be limited to tripod-based scenics, using liveview. That said, I suspect that the image quality will be phenomenal, since one's only using the sweet-spot of the already super-sweet Leica glass, and without an AA filter. It will make us all wish the M10 will scale a sensor of this quality out to FF size (ie: 35-40MP) to really USE the Leica glass.
@Steve (etc). I'm profoundly amused by the rage provoked by my calling this a rangefinder camera. Sean Reid called me to set me straight on this already. Yes, I know it does not possess a rangefinder mechanism. I will talk about this interesting (but ultimately pointless) semantic debate in my next installment. The main reason I resist caving in and calling it something else is that RF has come to mean more than 'a camera which focuses through image triangulation'. There's only one production digital camera left that does that, the Leica. There will likely be no more. But the term persists. Manual rangefinding was invented as a way to focus back when there was nothing better. While I love RF cameras, it is not for the way they focus. It is for their size, shape, sound and view-finding way of seeing the subject.
To me, continuing to use the term "rangefinder" to describe cameras which have all of those attributes, save-and-except for the eponymous, and deeply annoying, method of focusing, is logically consistent and communicationally effective. But I remain open to the opposite view...
Cheers,
- N.