As others have said, nothing wrong with M8 sharpness! Here's a 100% crop from a photo taken with a 40-year-old Summilux 35mm lens at f/8 (whole photo shown underneath the crop). If taken with a modern lens, you'd probably get a tiny bit more "pop" owing to the increased contrast. Note: no "smearing" (or over-sharpening) in this photo...!
Also, people can get a bit anal about IR filters. This photo wasn't taken using a filter, and it's still bitingly sharp. I generally leave them off unless the subject specifically warrants their use, as I've had photos ruined by reflections and flare caused by the IR filter. Before digital, colour films reproduced colours in their own unique ways, and most people ignored minor colour casts (e.g. when shooting in light that wasn't mid-day sunshine!) - so why this concern, for example, that foliage may be a bit more yellow in M8 photos taken without a filter? Anyway, IR filters are wandering a bit off topic, so getting back on track...
This photo was selected by The Royal Photographic Society as one of the 125 images in its annual print exhibition last year, out of over 3,000 images submitted. Leaving aside the judges' decisions on artistic merit, and considering only technical quality, the Society expects all prints to be technically faultless - my print was A3 in size (20 inches), and met its standards with ease. The point I'm making is that A3 and larger prints from the M8 are superb, and one of the world's foremost photographic societies agrees.
The M8 is optimised for Raw images, and the image quality of its JPG files is not as good. So, avoid shooting JPG if you can.
The trick to getting bitingly sharp images is to use Capture One for Raw development. I know people often prefer Aperture or Lightroom, but Leica designed its M8 Raw files for Capture One, and this shows in the quality of its output.
Unlike images from most digital cameras, Leica M8 images benefit from minimal noise reduction and sharpening, as they are particularly sensitive to these parameters: noise reduction loses and smears detail unnecessarily, while sharpening makes noise coarser and more visible. Ideally, noise reduction and sharpening are best done in Photoshop or similar, preferably with dedicated plug-ins allowing fine control - not in the Raw converter.
Turning off noise reduction can make a significant difference. Capture One settings for the M8 to maximise sharpness and detail:
Capture One 3
• Sharpening: 0, Standard look
• Noise suppression: off
• Colour noise suppression: 0 (below ISO 640), 15 (above ISO 1250)
• Banding suppression: off
• Pattern noise suppression: off (unless moiré is visible)
Capture One 4
• Sharpening: 0
• Luminance noise reduction: 0
• Color noise reduction: 0 (below ISO 640), 75 (above ISO 1250)
Lastly, because the M8 lacks an anti-aliasing filter, and hence does not blur the micro-detail like most other digital cameras, M8 images can be resampled to produce much larger files that retain a natural look without becoming "plastic and digital". The third image below is a 200% resample - this produces an on-screen width of 2 metres (over 6 feet)! It's "quick and dirty", so I could improve on its sharpness and quality (I resampled using the free Irfanview image browser, not some expensive fancy software like Genuine
Fractals).Regardless, although the image quality suffers from being enlarged to twice its original size, note that there are no appreciable digital artefacts like haloes or stair-stepping ("jaggies"). Move a metre or so back from your screen, and you can appreciate the quality.
One final point: I'm not saying that the M8 image quality is better than other decent digital cameras. It's good but there are several far cheaper cameras that equal it, and some, like the new top-range Sony will kick the M8's butt!
100% crop - at this size, the photo is 1 metre (39 inches) wide:
Full image:
Resampled image (200%) - screen width over 2 metres (6 feet):
