I leave for Laos and a motorcycle trip in two weeks and have not made any decision yet. To add to the mix is a new to me M9.
I am leaning toward the X100 and M2 (21/50/90) with TriX. Am still getting to know the M9.
Congratulations on the M9. If you could do a lot of shooting with it in the intervening two weeks, it would be a shame not to take the M9 considering the its fantastic color rendition on which I was inspired by a statement by Charles Peterson, a Seattle photographer who had showed me his personal color work that I found to be outstanding: he wrote that the he felt that the color rendition of the M9 was more like that of color slide film while that of CMOS-sensor cameras was more like that of color negative film — and that is also what I saw in his personal color work. Since then he also wrote the following, which I think is spot-on:
I do think that the higher iso's on the M9 are vastly underrated, and in general much prefer the image quality of the M9 to the M240. The M9 (and Monochrom by de facto) imo are truly two of the most unique digital cameras out there when it comes to the quality of the image. Not the "best" on paper but they have a look, an "umami" as the Japanese might say, that no other 35mm digital camera, comes close to.
If you are interested in night shooting, I suggest you have a look
at this thread, which describes the the technique of "Shooting at ISO640 and Pushing in Lightroom 5," which makes the M9 a great high-ISO camera, considering the unique color rendition. (Post #31 on page two lists the suggested steps in shooting and push processing for this technique.)
As backup, I would take the M2, particularly if you'd prefer to shoot Tri-X rather than converting M9 files. On the lenses, rather than 21-50-90, my own preference would be 21-28-50 or 21-35-50. Below my signature is a download link of a book project with 80 color photographs shot last week in the Shan State in Burma with the Summicron-35v4, which has the type of colors that I have been raving about.
Incidentally, I like the rendering of the Summicron-35v4 — last week was the first time that I've shot with it in color on the M9. While I have in recent years preferred the 28mm focal length to 35mm, in the markets of the Shan State towns I visited there was so much congestion, so many people in rather narrow paths or walkways, that I quickly found that, by having to shoot closer up with the 28mm (as I usually do), there is so much going on in the frame (of vision) that the photographer cannot keep track of it all when trying "to make sense of a complex scene," because one has to see things both to the left and the right at the same, and the angle of view to the edges is just wide to make sense of the scene — I mean not looking through the viewfinder, but looking at the scene before bringing the camera up to your face. Using the 35mm lens solved all that. However, I would find a 50 mm to narrow in FOV for these type of scenes.
—Mitch/Chiang Mai
Chiang Tung Days [direct download link for pdf file for book project]
