Leica M11 Information

[ptpdprinter]

I don`t have any large Mp camera at the moment but the advantage for many that do have them is that they save you carrying heavy larger lenses around.
You can travel light and still "get there" if you have to with a crop.
Nothing to do with prints or being"lazy" but everything to do with saving weight and carrying extra gear .
Not that it would necessarily be pertinent to a rangefinder system of course .
I was making a wider point .

I am not sure what the wider point is you are making. What does carrying a 60MP camera have to do with saving weight and carrying extra gear? Is it that you don't have to carry a 90mm lens since you can just crop the image from your 50mm lens? I guess someone could use that to rationalize buying an M11, but it sounds pretty desperate to me.

 

[Out to Lunch]

.... You're at 10... where can you go from there...exactly, nowhere! When we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Exactly, eleven!

 

[Michael Markey]

I am not sure what the wider point is you are making. What does carrying a 60MP camera have to do with saving weight and carrying extra gear? Is it that you don't have to carry a 90mm lens since you can just crop the image from your 50mm lens? I guess someone could use that to rationalize buying an M11, but it sounds pretty desperate to me.

Like I said in my post I was responding to the general issue of large MP sensors .
Makes less sense when applied to the focal lengths which are commonly used on an M body but essentially the example you gave is correct .
"Desperate" ... if that were the sole reason ,could be construed as such I guess.
Generally speaking the ability to crop on higher MP sensors saves you carrying or buying that longer lenses especially if its only an occasional use case .
Printing considerations or being too "lazy" don`t really come into it ... at least for me .

 

[Ko.Fe.]

LCAG made huge step with M11. They implemented three RAW sizes supported in camera. Looks like this is most significant achievement with M11.
But black M11 owners are set to be loosers with aluminum plates. M12 black is going to be with plastic plates, for sure.

 

[ptpdprinter]

LCAG made huge step with M11. They implemented three RAW sizes supported in camera. Looks like this is most significant achievement with M11.
But black M11 owners are set to be loosers with aluminum plates. M12 black is going to be with plastic plates, for sure.

I would be interested in how Leica implemented variable RAW size. For example, does it limit the number of pixels available on the sensor or is it a computational reduction of file size? If the latter, is it a lossy or lossless process?

 

[mapgraphs]

I would be interested in how Leica implemented variable RAW size. For example, does it limit the number of pixels available on the sensor or is it a computational reduction of file size? If the latter, is it a lossy or lossless process?

From the leaked specs, it sounds like the different size files are resampled, using the full sensor:

"The entire sensor surface will always be used irrespective of format and resolution. ..."

https://hmeye.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/open-leica_m11_technical_data_en.pdf

From:
https://hmeye.wordpress.com/2022/01/08/leica-m11-full-specs-leak/

 

[ranger9]

…at 300dpi, 60mp is about a 20x30" print. This is not big in the gallery or museum setting these days.

Exactly. I remember hearing a curator joke that nowadays the goal is to show prints that would kill somebody if they fell off the wall. The big-money collectors want size impact, and if you're a documentarian who funds your projects through gallery sales, you need to keep up with what your market demands. There aren't a lot of these people, but they do exist, and a surprising number of them use Leica Ms, so it makes sense for Leica to try to meet their needs.

 

[ranger9]

… many are just lazy to frame instead of crop.

It's not just laziness. I make my living as a graphic designer, and I constantly have to repurpose a campaign's “signature image” so it will work on a vertical stand-up banner, a horizontal billboard, multiple print-ad sizes, a responsive web page, and all the different crops needed for various social-media platforms. Not all these usages require high pixel counts, but some of them definitely do — the stand-up banners are especially demanding because people do examine them at close distances.

I constantly wish photographers would compose and shoot “looser,” but they’ve still got it in their heads that it's more virtuous to “crop it in the camera.”

 

[Ko.Fe.]

It's not just laziness. I make my living as a graphic designer, and I constantly have to repurpose a campaign's “signature image” so it will work on a vertical stand-up banner, a horizontal billboard, multiple print-ad sizes, a responsive web page, and all the different crops needed for various social-media platforms. Not all these usages require high pixel counts, but some of them definitely do — the stand-up banners are especially demanding because people do examine them at close distances.

I constantly wish photographers would compose and shoot “looser,” but they’ve still got it in their heads that it's more virtuous to “crop it in the camera.”

I asked once old photogs if I'm nuts to print not square from 6x6. They told me it was norm. They would take it on square and in the middle and someone else would have all freedom how to crop it for newspaper.

I doubt digital Ms are in use this way. How many with Leica taken photos have you deal with?

 

[jsrockit]

I constantly wish photographers would compose and shoot “looser,” but they’ve still got it in their heads that it's more virtuous to “crop it in the camera.”

Well, isn't that partially the job of the client to tell the photographer what they want? I mean, it is quite normal to use your frame to get your composition right as a photographer.

 

[hap]

I recently read that crypto gazillionaires are fueling a renaissance in ultra high real estate purchases...INCLUDING in NY and LA. These monstrosities are begging for large art pieces on many walls. Private homes like that are pseudo galleries and those with bulging wallets will spend BIG for anything considered art. Anything printed at scale from a Leica pro who used a 60MP sensor will be repaid many times over.

OTOH buyers may be hot for artists with old Leica film cameras sporting ancient lenses using Lomography film as the medium of art for the crypto kings.

 

[ranger9]

I doubt digital Ms are in use this way. How many with Leica taken photos have you deal with?

I don't know what camera is used and don't care. I'm just telling you how things work in actual business practice. It's okay not to like it.

 

[ranger9]

Well, isn't that partially the job of the client to tell the photographer what they want? I mean, it is quite normal to use your frame to get your composition right as a photographer.

The designer isn't the client. The designer's job is to prop up the illusion that the client's idea was great.

Yes, it's terrific if you can be in on the pre-plan and tell the photographer, "We'll need to use these shots for X and Y and Z, so make sure you keep the subject dead-center and compose a harmonious but non-essential background all the way out to the edges so I can crop it where I need to." And really good photographers can do that, and they'll use a camera with the pixel count necessary to generate images that will work in all your media, or plan the shots so they can be tiled, or whatever.

That's the ideal. But... This doesn't actually happen to me so much now that I have a better job, but in the bad old corporate-marketing days what would usually happen would be that the client (typically a product manager) would grab a photo out of some existing shoot and say, "Ooh, this is great -- I want to use it as the centerpiece of our trade-show campaign." Sometimes I could go back to the photographer and ask if there was any more data in the camera-original file, and sometimes there was... but often there wasn't, and I'd wind up spending hours in Photoshop piecing together enough fake background to crop the thing to all the shapes I needed, and if there wasn't enough pixel count to print the media at 300ppi we'd just have to grit our teeth and hope all the customers would have had a few drinks (usually a good bet at a trade show) and wouldn't notice how blurry our booth images looked. Fun times!

Anyway, the point is that end-users would almost always rather have more pixels to work with than fewer pixels, so there's a legitimate business case for the makers of any professionally-used camera to have a model in the lineup that keeps pace with the current state of the art for pixel count.

 

[ranger9]

Along the same lines, here's a speculation: The M11's putative feature of offering smaller, interpolated file-size options seems sensible, but I'll bet that among actual M11 buyers it will be heavily used by approximately zero people. They just won't be able to bear the thought of saving less than the full 60-mp file "because I might need it later."

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely demonstrated this kind of "option loss aversion" in a clever experiment which you can read about here.

 

[hap]

Along the same lines, here's a speculation: The M11's putative feature of offering smaller, interpolated file-size options seems sensible, but I'll bet that among actual M11 buyers it will be heavily used by approximately zero people. They just won't be able to bear the thought of saving less than the full 60-mp file "because I might need it later."

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely demonstrated this kind of "option loss aversion" in a clever experiment which you can read about here.

This is a variant of the "learn to say NO" gurus.

 

[ptpdprinter]

I constantly wish photographers would compose and shoot “looser,” but they’ve still got it in their heads that it's more virtuous to “crop it in the camera.

Cropping in camera is not a virtue; it is a technique used by photographers who shoot slides, print full frame, and/or shoot large format. Shooting looser is certainly a good idea if you don't know how your image is going to be used.

 

[Darthfeeble]

The reviewer seemed somewhat excited about....... USB C? I never had a gripe about the bottom plate, I mean how tough is it to give a quarter turn and put it in a pocket while you changed the battery or card? 60 MP and no sensor cleaning???? That's ridiculous in this day and age. On a happy note, the price of a used M10 should drop.

 

[KM-25]

60mp is a nice file, it will make good use of those lenses. Personally I am 100% set with my M10-P because that camera is not my fine art camera, it is reportage, news stories, things like that.

But..I do use high resolution and use it huge for some clients. Late Summer of last year I got a commission to shoot a life sized and artsy image of a stand of Aspen trees on a wealthy home owners property. I mounted a Hasselblad Flexbody atop an 8' foot ladder and stitched a bunch of frames using a 50MP back. I then stitched it, used Camera Raw's "Enhance" feature and up rezzed it in ACR to end up with the final file size.

The file that went to print was 3GB as it was 12' feet high at 300dpi.....around 1500MP.
What is also really crazy is my new Z9 kicking out 46MP files at 20fps.

 

[Emile de Leon]

No base plate..probably a bean counters cost savings measure.
Too bad Leica doesn't release lower cost/reduced feature editions at the end of the run like they used to do.
Would bring more people onboard.
I would probably buy the M11 if it had some kind of video.
There are times when I need that on the fly.
But..
This guy says Leica M11 sucks..for a lot of reasons..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix8Xe-6NMS0

 

[Freakscene]

But..
This guy says Leica M11 sucks..for a lot of reasons..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix8Xe-6NMS0

That guy also says he talks to dead people https://huffparanormal.com. Maybe the late Sushant Singh Rajput told him the Leica M11 was not good: https://www.india.com/viral/this-par...video-4091396/ I do not doubt the universe is full of things we do not know about, and that there are uncounted things that humans cannot understand. But anyone who makes money out of the supernatural meets numerous criteria for suspicion.

Although there is a general trend from camera manufacturers towards more pixels, it seemed to be plateauing for a while. Leica are a small manufacturer and their sensors are made by CMOSIS. It is possible that as the production run of the sensor in the M10-R finished and CMOSIS started a new production run of a new sensor, Leica had little choice but to go with the new one, which might happen to be 60MP. If the output characteristics are equivalent but there are more pixels, why not?

Marty