Leica M EV1 First Review - It's Bad

[Ken Ford]

As my eyes slowly slide off the cracker (to mix my metaphors) I find EVFs easier to work with - so I’ll be looking at these or the next iteration. It would require selling off my M-P240 and M246, though.

 

[LCT]

Interesting note about the flickering, was the ISO set to auto? That might have explained the finder behavior. Mine did something similar in high-contrast situations. My SL2 does the same thing. Manual ISO: smooth as a quiet lake, even in proximity to LEDs.

M11 owners might clue me in here: the EV1 seems really savvy at auto-detecting NON-6bit lenses, like my old 21 or 90. M10 doesn't do this. Does the M11? Pretty cool.

Got flickering issues with the MEV1 too. Setting Exposure preview to Off or Shutter Button Half-Pressed did fix the issue, don't ask me why. As for uncoded lenses, neither M11 nor MEV1 can detect them automatically. They just iD uncoded lenses as if they were the last lens manually coded in the camera.

 

[bjorke]

Got flickering issues with the MEV1 too. Setting Exposure preview to Off or Shutter Button Half-Pressed did fix the issue, don't ask me why. As for uncoded lenses, neither M11 nor MEV1 can detect them automatically. They just iD uncoded lenses as if they were the last lens manually coded in the camera.

Re flicker: I have seen flicker when the shutter speed is set high (say, 1/500) but it vanishes when I reduce if to 1/60 or so.

As for the auto-sensing: it's the darnedest thing, I thought it was pulling from my favorites, but it might have been illusory.

Then I started thinking with my engineer's hat: how *could* they do this? And realized that since the camera has a gyro and a list of lenses and an always-on image processor, you could calibrate image changes with known rotations in real time, detecting field of view and mapping that back to the closest available pre-chosen lens. It *could* be possible... but if it were being done, I'd think they'd be trumpeting it, considering it does little to sell *new* lenses.