jaapv
RFF Sponsoring Member.
But a result of my miserable failure, some two years ago when I started shooting digital, on my (then) new Canon 10D to get decent atmospheric shots.
I decided to get a misty winter scene and put two camera's head to head:
Contestant 1: My Leica M3 and Summaron 3.5/3.5, more than 50 years out of date, against contestant 2: my Leica Digilux2, currently Leica's RF-like offering. The Digilux was on full manual, centre-weighed metering,automatic WB, Jpeg maximum and my M3 was wearing it's Voigtlander VCII meter. I decided to even the playing field by using a pedestrian consumer-grade film, Kodak Gold 200.
Based on my previous Canon digital experience I expected the Digilux2 to lose out on the following counts:
1. Color balance, I never got that quite right on my Canon, even shooting RAW
2. Atmospheric contrast
3. Resolution, after all, the Digilux2 has only 5.3 Mp
4. Digital "look".
The result: The Digilux2 was far better than I expected. The rendering, color balance, contrast and look were virtually identical. The M3 won only on detail resolution and as a logical consequence, contrast differentiation and tonal separation.The Digilux2 lens won hands-down on vignetting,surprising for a high-aperture zoom, but indicative of 50 or more years of progress in lens design. So for this kind of low-contrast, high-detail shots, digital is close already and we can expect the digital M to be as good or better than film, based on the expected resolution-boost. It also means, that for higher contrast, low-resolution shots this kind of contest is not required; just look in my gallery:"Winter in Europe", it has some night-shots by the Digilux2.The left-hand thumb-nail is the Digilux2.
I decided to get a misty winter scene and put two camera's head to head:
Contestant 1: My Leica M3 and Summaron 3.5/3.5, more than 50 years out of date, against contestant 2: my Leica Digilux2, currently Leica's RF-like offering. The Digilux was on full manual, centre-weighed metering,automatic WB, Jpeg maximum and my M3 was wearing it's Voigtlander VCII meter. I decided to even the playing field by using a pedestrian consumer-grade film, Kodak Gold 200.
Based on my previous Canon digital experience I expected the Digilux2 to lose out on the following counts:
1. Color balance, I never got that quite right on my Canon, even shooting RAW
2. Atmospheric contrast
3. Resolution, after all, the Digilux2 has only 5.3 Mp
4. Digital "look".
The result: The Digilux2 was far better than I expected. The rendering, color balance, contrast and look were virtually identical. The M3 won only on detail resolution and as a logical consequence, contrast differentiation and tonal separation.The Digilux2 lens won hands-down on vignetting,surprising for a high-aperture zoom, but indicative of 50 or more years of progress in lens design. So for this kind of low-contrast, high-detail shots, digital is close already and we can expect the digital M to be as good or better than film, based on the expected resolution-boost. It also means, that for higher contrast, low-resolution shots this kind of contest is not required; just look in my gallery:"Winter in Europe", it has some night-shots by the Digilux2.The left-hand thumb-nail is the Digilux2.
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