M8 Pics with IR cutoff filter

[billsmith]

" distant streetlights won't do it. You really have to force it. You pretty much need to shoot a very bright light fairly close up with a large adjacent dark area, and ***you have to expose for the dark area.**"


That's not true, walk outside at night and shoot for 5 minutes any street scene with streets lights and you will get banding. Shoot at iso 160 outside ,( Daylight) any everyone who walks by with a black dress, jacket, tshirt or canvas brief case will be STRONGLY purple. It's a disaster, people are not over reacting.... Carefully choose your subjects and scene, the image quality is excellent.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

purple is the new black.

It's great for the Dork Bar accessory. :angel:

 

[Peter G1G2]

Straight into the sun, distant streetlights won't do it. JC

Pardon me sir, but the sun is the brightest lightsource 'on' earth. If one would really expose for the sun, the sky would be as dark as midnight. That would suffice for the banding experiment, I think.🙂 Which camera on earth can take this contrast and not give some kind of artifact? At $5K that would be the best bargain 'on earth', contrastswise.

BTW I am really interested in your 'foggy night out' shots. Can you please post some?

... the exposure was for the black ceiling, and that you can see details in the black areas. In other words, the lights were not only super-bright, they were massively, massively over-exposed (not just over-exposed like you usually over-expose lights)

JC

With all due respect, sir, exposing for the ceiling would be 2-3 stops above (medium gray). With 'correct' exposure the bright lights would allready be something like (what?) 5-7 stops overexposed. 2-3 stops extra is not what I concider " massively over-exposed." What I mean is that these extra 2-3 stops should not make the difference between 'banding' and 'good Leica quality'.

So I just don't know. I guess, sir, like a lot of other People here, and over at the Leica forum.😕

Could you please be so kind as to give me the link for the picture? I've seen it somewhere but helas, one sees a lot, these dark-november days. :bang:

Peter

 

[Peter G1G2]

Well the hell with it ... people cross proces, use outdated film to get away from real colors, use warming filters, cooling filters etc... . ....
The M8 is an artist's tool that fits perfectly in this tradition 😎 😎
In the meantime i enjoy it as a wonderful dedicated B&W camera, because i bought it to shoot B&W anyway ....... in this case the IR sensitivity is even a Bonus!
At least one happy Leica customer here 🙂 🙂

Bravely spoken! 🙂 But maybe you right! We just might be witnessing the birth of a whole new 'Look' in Photography!

Cheers,

Peter

 

[Peter G1G2]

purple is the new black.

You got that right Mr. 😱

 

[jdos2]

Actually, the Emperor wears purple.

Is Leica now recommending one use a filter on the Noctilux? Harumph. My owner's manual is now in error.


Of course, the point of this whole thing is that Leica is just starting to come to grips with a finicky public.

Good luck to 'em. They are now no longer above the likes of Canon and Nikon, with folks carping at everything that they do in such a way that they simply can't wave 'em off and say "if you don't like it, you probably can't afford it..." At least, not anymore. Should have priced the camera over the Canons. That'd have helped.

 

[rpsawin]

I'm a bit in a daze - photographers have been using filters to balance the rendering of colour on film since the middle ages - and now, all of a sudden in the digital age this is the mortal sin? I would have preferred not to - but I can accept it, like I need a warming filter in the mountains, or a light blue one when shooting tungsten.

Yes, photographers of old, way back before MTV, Bill Gates and DSLR's ( you know...the middle ages), had a choice. The certainly could use filters or they could choose not to use filters. Either way they were able to produce acceptable results. Can you say that you have a choice?

The only sin I see is bringing a product to market before it clearly is ready. I beleive the sin is called greed.....not sure what it's called in German.

Bob

 

[KM-25]

Leica will fix this.

I really hope they can and it happens fast enough to help them maintain the momentum they gained from the intro of the M8.

They make the very finest optics on earth, it would be insane for us to not have proper digital venue for them.

I do want a digital M and I have to admit, the price is not that bad if it really does Leitz optics justice.

Besides, I need a second M6, I would love to get one for cheap because the M8 does so well, folks just sell them en' mass.

I am willing to bet that these issues are on the forefront of company's decision making.

Could it be that the most recent version of the firmware is the buggy one?

Let's hope so, filters are not the answer. I think it was a hasty mistake on Leica's part to have given Sean the reply they did. It did lots of damage and I am almost willing to bet someone's arse got chewed for it. It was just too half cocked, incomplete in areas like who would pay for this? Too many things were unanswered in that unofficial post.

 

[dazedgonebye]

Just my poor 2 cents...as a digital shooter late to rangefinders...
Isn't it likely that Leica will just come up with a firmware fix to make this all right?
At the very least, they should come out with a statement to that effect...if it is indeed possible.

 

[John Camp]

Pardon me sir, but the sun is the brightest lightsource 'on' earth. If one would really expose for the sun, the sky would be as dark as midnight. That would suffice for the banding experiment, I think.🙂 Which camera on earth can take this contrast and not give some kind of artifact? At $5K that would be the best bargain 'on earth', contrastswise.

BTW I am really interested in your 'foggy night out' shots. Can you please post some?




With all due respect, sir, exposing for the ceiling would be 2-3 stops above (medium gray). With 'correct' exposure the bright lights would allready be something like (what?) 5-7 stops overexposed. 2-3 stops extra is not what I concider " massively over-exposed." What I mean is that these extra 2-3 stops should not make the difference between 'banding' and 'good Leica quality'.

So I just don't know. I guess, sir, like a lot of other People here, and over at the Leica forum.😕

Could you please be so kind as to give me the link for the picture? I've seen it somewhere but helas, one sees a lot, these dark-november days. :bang:

Peter

I really don't understand a lot of the technical talk -- I just take pictures. I'm not suggesting that you "expose for the sun" and that's not what I said -- if you have a very bright light with a very bright surround, you will not get banding (on my camera.) In other words, a bright sun in a bright sky won't band, if you expose for the bright sky. A bright sun in a black sky would band.

Also, not being a technical guy, I don't think the sun is the brightest light on earth -- I think things like arc-welding light is brighter.

As I said, I'm just working from observation here, and my observation is that a light has to be a certain brightness, and a certain size, for banding to occur. The problem with the ceiling lights is that they are extremely bright (probably halogen) fairly close, in a dark surround (the black-painted ceiling.)

JC

 

[John Camp]

" distant streetlights won't do it. You really have to force it. You pretty much need to shoot a very bright light fairly close up with a large adjacent dark area, and ***you have to expose for the dark area.**"


That's not true, walk outside at night and shoot for 5 minutes any street scene with streets lights and you will get banding. Shoot at iso 160 outside ,( Daylight) any everyone who walks by with a black dress, jacket, tshirt or canvas brief case will be STRONGLY purple. It's a disaster, people are not over reacting.... Carefully choose your subjects and scene, the image quality is excellent.

I've got an M8, I'm doing just what you said, and I'm not getting banding, and I'm getting the magenta cast in only a few instances. Other people who have M8s are saying the same thing. What else can I tell you?

JC

 

[clintock]

Would a single IR filter mounted in front of the sensor take care of everything?
Kodak's fault.

 

[erikhaugsby]

I wish Leica would be bought out by a giant like Canon or something... that'd be great. Plenty of capital to come up with a proper M8.

Capital, yes; customer service, however, what would happen to customer service? Quality products? Hand-assembled cameras? Metal cameras?

I don't know, I don't want to know.

 

[ywenz]

Capital, yes; customer service, however, what would happen to customer service? Quality products? Hand-assembled cameras? Metal cameras?

I don't know, I don't want to know.

What is wrong Canon Professional service? In the end of the day it is only the Leica glass and stellar body that matters. Do you think Canon can't build a better body than Leica? Do you think Canon can't continue to build quality Leica lenses having acquired the Leica camera company and employing the same staff?

 

[John Camp]

What is wrong Canon Professional service? In the end of the day it is only the Leica glass and stellar body that matters. Do you think Canon can't build a better body than Leica? Do you think Canon can't continue to build quality Leica lenses having acquired the Leica camera company and employing the same staff?

No, I don't think they could; I haven't worked in a camera company, but I've worked in analogous situations, and if you have a mentality where "good enough is good enough," and "Let's fill up the niche and get the product out there before we miss the sales window," it's almost impossible to shift that to "the best possible." The whole culture fights against it -- which is reason that Chryslers still suck, even though it's owned by Daimler. And it's the reason Leica could never shift gears and compete with Nikon and Canon -- they couldn't adopt the "good enough is good enough" attitude. That's why Canon doesn't have a whole bunch of really good wide primes that Canon users have been screaming for ever since the 1Ds (1) came out -- they don't have to have them, so they don't. What are the users going to do? Dump all their Canon gear and go to Pentax?

Culture counts. It might be the most important thing. Canon optical engineers could build a lens as good as a Leica, they just won't.

JC

 

[ywenz]

No, I don't think they could; I haven't worked in a camera company, but I've worked in analogous situations, and if you have a mentality where "good enough is good enough," and "Let's fill up the niche and get the product out there before we miss the sales window," it's almost impossible to shift that to "the best possible." The whole culture fights against it -- which is reason that Chryslers still suck, even though it's owned by Daimler. And it's the reason Leica could never shift gears and compete with Nikon and Canon -- they couldn't adopt the "good enough is good enough" attitude. That's why Canon doesn't have a whole bunch of really good wide primes that Canon users have been screaming for ever since the 1Ds (1) came out -- they don't have to have them, so they don't. What are the users going to do? Dump all their Canon gear and go to Pentax?

Culture counts. It might be the most important thing. Canon optical engineers could build a lens as good as a Leica, they just won't.

JC

Then the whole point of acquiring a specialty brand such as Leica is to branch out in the niche photography market and continue to create leica spec lenses. If Canon acquires Leica with this intention then it's a win win situation for everyone!

With the M8 it looks like the "good enough" (or not good enough?) mentality is starting to permeate into the Leica world. It might not be such a difficult transition..

 

[JoeV]

re: Register Overflow

re: Register Overflow

As I recall, the problem described here as "banding" is also known as "register overflow", which in layman's terms is caused in CCD and CMOS camera sensors when excess light causes the resulting charges in a pixel (or register) to overflow to the neighboring pixels, resulting in vertical or horizontal banding (depending on the orientation of the sensor's rows in relation to the image orientation).

Sony and other Japanese makers have worked for years on eliminating this problem in video cameras using a variety of techniques, most of which require more than mere software reprogramming. It perhaps could be minimized by software in the camera by limiting the amount of exposure in high-contrast scenes, but the real issue, in my not-so-humble opinion, is it's a chip design problem.

Of course, it's also possible to theorize that Leica, in their infinite wisdom, left it up to the manual adjustment of exposure, by a knowledgable photographer, rather than having software do it for you; more in keeping with the manual heritage of their legacy products.

And did I just make this up, or is it true that Kodak manufactures the image sensor for the M8? Hmm....

 

[gogopix]

All this purple is caused by cheap polyester suits. Leica assumed a quality world where people wear natural fibres like wool, linen...they were wrong!

Who'd a thunk this processed oil stuff would bring down a top quality camera?

Not for me.

Everybody I know wears cotton, so I don't expect ANY problems...

All depends who you hang around with...

BTW notice the frowny is "quess what color!"🙁

and the smily is🙂

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Just my poor 2 cents...as a digital shooter late to rangefinders...
Isn't it likely that Leica will just come up with a firmware fix to make this all right?
At the very least, they should come out with a statement to that effect...if it is indeed possible.

Yes, this is what I've been reading. Of course, no official statement yet on anything. At least they are being more human than other DSLR companies, like, say, Can** or Nik** ( :angel: ) ; I remember the times I had issues with a camera of either company, they treated me like an idiot who didn't know the first thing about using a camera or software, and completely disavowing any knowledge of any issue(s) I reported. Of course, some of them would be fixed by a firmware upgrade within a month, others were quietly fixed in their software.

Leica, arrogant, they are not. The other ones I've had direct experiences with, hell yeah. To be fair, they do deal with an exponentially higher number of, emm, knowledge-impaired beings

🙂

 

[ampguy]

It's a Kodak sensor

It's a Kodak sensor

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/dpq/site...product/show/KAF-10500_productOrderingOptions

The press release is also on my blog site, along with a link to the Kodak datasheet for the CCD imager.

As I recall, the problem described here as "banding" is also known as "register overflow", which in layman's terms is caused in CCD and CMOS camera sensors when excess light causes the resulting charges in a pixel (or register) to overflow to the neighboring pixels, resulting in vertical or horizontal banding (depending on the orientation of the sensor's rows in relation to the image orientation).

Sony and other Japanese makers have worked for years on eliminating this problem in video cameras using a variety of techniques, most of which require more than mere software reprogramming. It perhaps could be minimized by software in the camera by limiting the amount of exposure in high-contrast scenes, but the real issue, in my not-so-humble opinion, is it's a chip design problem.

Of course, it's also possible to theorize that Leica, in their infinite wisdom, left it up to the manual adjustment of exposure, by a knowledgable photographer, rather than having software do it for you; more in keeping with the manual heritage of their legacy products.

And did I just make this up, or is it true that Kodak manufactures the image sensor for the M8? Hmm....