The report is more than "passing interest".
I'm sure the M8 is fine for gentlemen photographers and is just fine for weekend and travel snaps.
Leicas have a distinguished heritage of serious photojournalism under difficult conditions.
It must be possible for Leica to come up with something that cuts it- silent, small, fast, tough, reliable and with exquisite results.
No-one else has done it. Leica did it for decades and we expect it of them in the digital world.
If they can pull it off there are thousands of us who willl put ourselves into hock and go hungry to get one.
Cheers
Brian
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I think some of this report rings true, but a lot of it is misleading.
I've never owned a camera, film or digital that you couldn't accidently change some setting.
Even in studio we lock down a lot of stuff with gaff tape, from shutter, to f stop to file quality on the Canons, Nikons, Contax/Phase and yes the Leica.
Also I've never seen a ccd camera that will go to extreme iso settings as well as cmos cameras and whether that's the in camera processing or the actual sensor, ccd always is about 1 or 2 stops below a comparable cmos camera.
The Leica is not perfect, far from it and for me it was a 6 months learning curve as I've never shot a rangerfinder camera before, but now it's second nature and probably the easiest camera I shoot.
Granted you have to test all the lenses, because focus is critcal and some lenses, like my 90mm just aren't calibrated properly so Leica does need to step up the quality control efforts.
It also has a different look from the usual AA filtered dslrs and that proably is a combination of the leica glass and no AA filter.
I wouldn't want to shoot it in pitch darkness, but once again, I don't know any ccd camera that goes to extreme iso settings without a lot of noise, though up to 640 is useable and 1/15th of a second is easy to hand hold.
Given all of this, I would like to see some improvements like actual full frame sensor and proably one from cmos without an AA filter, autofocus would just be amazing, but probably Leica purists would have a heart attack over that request.
Still, if my M-8 disappeared tomorrow, I would walk over and buy a new one as I don't use it that often but when I do I find it to be very special.
JR