Harry Lime
Practitioner
I have a sneaking suspicion they started to work on the M9 the moment the M8 stumbled out of the door. They KNOW that the M8 was a stop gap measure. Just look at the inside of one. By German or Japanese standards it's a train wreck in there, but considering that they built it mostly from off the shelf parts, with no R&D budget and probably under huge time pressure it's an impressive achievement.
The M series is not a terribly complicated camera in comparison to your average DSLR.
Your main area of engineering is image capture and processing.
The RF unit is done and may be tweaked, but it's not like they have to redesign a sophisticated AF system.
The metering system is as simple as it comes and probably hasn't changed much since the M6. Same for the flash system.
The body is rather straight forward in comparison to a pro series DSLR.
I'm suspect that Leica has to do about 35-50% of the work that Canon or Nikon have to invest when they design something like the D700 or 5D-2.
They don't even have to worry about the sensor. They send Kodak a spec sheet and write a check.
So, yes I think it's very reasonable to assume that they could have designed the M9 in less than 2 years.
totifoto
Well-known
And what if they come out with an M9 B&W sensor only? I would even be tempted to buy one if it came out. Think of it, no IR filter, no cyan drift, no Bayer pattern, no AA filter... everything simpler to make, high ISO much cleaner due to lack of filters, DR better, etc, etc... And it would really be a status symbol camera too...
I would like that
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Well, yes. Apart from (a) getting it into the space available and (b) dealing with the short flange/sensor distance, both of which are MORE difficult as compared with generic SLR engineering. So is rangefinder coupling for fast lenses but they were already pretty good at that.
Of course M9 research started before the M8 was released. And it's taken (at least) this long to solve the problems of a full-size sensor.
Cheers,
R.
Steve Bellayr
Veteran
Will older lenses not coded need to be coded for an M9? Does anyone out there have an idea about this?
Alberti
Well-known
Sure, a BW with a true astounding pixel depth of say 16 bits true with variable binning (2X2, 3X3), the RAW output available in say 10.000 by 6.000 pixels . . (the Bayer pattern is gone then) and the remaining CCD capture cells might be recombined and used in such a way to have overlapping sensitivities in BW, pure light. Post-processing brings in a true random arranged 'graininess'.I would like that
Some way I think a BW capture needs more details.
Now that would be a unique machine.
alberti
sunsworth
Well-known
The coding also corrects for vignetting - which will be more of an issue on a full frame sensor than the cropped M8.
The _estimated_ aperture is already held in the Exif data.
johnastovall
Light Hunter - RIP 2010
I see nothing there to think it has anything to do with the collective hallucination called the M9. They are talking about the S2.
Ken Shipman
Well-known
This is a "coming out" party and the S2 has been out for awhile now. No, this is something else.