Leica’s Fancy New M-P Camera May Actually Be Worth $8,000

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

There’s this routine you go through when you review a camera. The first thing you do is take it out of the box and shoot whatever mundane object is directly in front of you. It’s a throwaway shot, a test to make sure the camera is operational and meets the minimum requirements for calling itself a camera. For this reason, many camera reviewers’ SD cards are half-full of pictures of laptop keyboards, pens, coins, coffee cups, and desk flair.

The first thing I shot with the Leica M-P (Typ 240) was a sandwich. The camera’s battery finished charging around lunchtime, and I was eager to see what the Leica hype is all about. Also, there was a sandwich right in front of me. It was supposed to be a throwaway shot. It was something else entirely.

It was, quite simply, the greatest sandwich photograph I will ever take.

After devouring my delicious subject I dove into the M-P’s menus, flipped the film mode to black-and-white, set focus to infinity, and half-assedly aimed a shot out the office window. The result made me giddy. I couldn’t wait to use this camera to take deliberate, composed photographs.

Tim Moynihan

When everything is in focus, there are no throwaway shots with the M-P. Everything looks like a frame from some Wim Wenders documentary about the human condition. There’s an OMFG combination of crisp contrast, smoothness, sharpness, warmth, and dynamic range in everything the camera captures. The photos have a distinct presence, a heaviness, sometimes a dreaminess. The lens I used, an amazing 35mm/F2 piece of glass, certainly helped.

When everything is in focus, there are no throwaway shots with the M-P. Everything looks like a frame from some Wim Wenders documentary about the human condition.

But here’s the stone-cold reality of the situation. Leica cameras—and Leica lenses—cost a ton of money. This one has a 24-megapixel full-frame sensor and three diagonal inches of scratch-resistant sapphire glass covering its 920K-dot LCD display. It costs close to $8,000, and that’s without a lens. That wonderful glass I tested it with, the Summicron 35mm/F2.0 aspherical prime, costs $3,350. The lens costs more than any camera I’ve ever used.

If you’re looking strictly at specs for the cost, the Leica M-P seems like it was made for suckers. A full-frame sensor? Great, that’s the least it can do. Spending a little bit more (relatively speaking) gets you a medium-format camera with a lens. The M-P has an ISO range of 100-6400, and I saw some grain starting at ISO 1600; tripod and a slow shutter speed worked better. Flagship full-frame cameras from Canon, Nikon, and Sony have its ISO performance beat by several stops for thousands less. The M-P’s burst speed of 3fps is laughable compared to those other cameras, and that’s without continuous autofocus.

In fact, this camera doesn’t have an autofocus system at all. It’s a rangefinder, so you’ll need to use manual focus for everything. It’s not like manually focusing a DSLR either because there’s no through-the-lens viewfinder. You use the porthole on the top-left of the camera to line up a small, sometimes hard-to-see overlay with your scene by adjusting the lens. If the two images are lined up just so, your shot is in focus. It takes practice and a bit of luck, especially at wide apertures. Sometimes you’ll need to move the camera away from composing the shot, set focus against an easier-to-see background, and then reframe the shot. Sometimes, even if you think you’ve focused perfectly, you’ll find blurry details when you review shots on a bigger screen. And while it shoots lovely 1080p video at 24fps, the fact that you have to focus manually by handling the lens limits what’s feasible to capture with it.

The M-P forces you to slow down, concentrate on getting the focus and exposure just right. And that makes the results more gratifying.

That may sound like an absurd amount of tradeoffs for an $8,000 camera. But here’s the thing: This camera takes the most beautiful pictures I’ve ever seen, and shooting with it is a zenlike experience.

Less is more with the M-P. The missing features and knobs and labyrinthine settings of other full-frame DSLRs doesn’t detract from the camera. Rather, their absence enhances the experience of using it. The M-P forces you to slow down, concentrate on getting the focus and exposure just right. And that makes the results more gratifying.

Tim Moynihan

There are only a few immediately accessible physical controls. The most-prominent is a shutter-speed dial on the top, which lets you dial in speeds ranging from 1/4000 sec. to 8 seconds. There’s also a bulb mode setting that tops out at 60 seconds and an “A” that sets it to aperture-priority mode. Aperture adjustments are done with the lens. ISO adjustments are done by pressing the ISO button to the left of its screen while adjusting the thumb wheel.

The M-P lacks a dedicated exposure-compensation dial, but you adjust the EV by pressing the unlabelled front-facing focus button while scrolling the thumb wheel. For everything else—picking JPG or RAW (.DNG), metering modes, film-simulation modes, exposure bracketing, setting the timer—you dive into the menus. Those are also refreshingly minimal and straightforward. You won’t have a problem finding anything.

The M-P is smaller than a full-frame DSLR, but it’s built like a tank.

It doesn’t take too long to get the hang of the traditional rangefinder focusing scheme, but there’s another way to do it. For a brighter, more magnified experience, you can turn on focus peaking while using Live View on the bigger LCD screen. You hit the focus button on the front of the camera and scroll the thumbwheel to magnify the view. Once the edges of your subject are highlighted in your choice of red, blue, or green, it’s in focus. It feels blasphemous to frame and focus shots like this on such an old-school camera, but it helps in many cases.

The M-P is smaller than a full-frame DSLR, but it’s built like a tank. It’s a sturdy, weather-sealed die-cast magnesium brick of a precision-engineered photography machine weighing in at 2 pounds with the 35mm lens attached. Two-handed operation is a must, and it’s not the lightest load on your neck. There’s no handgrip, but the camera itself is fat and has a faux leather surface to help with the handling.

Tim Moynihan

Overall, it’s very similar to the Leica M, which has the same sensor, control scheme, and video capabilities. There are a few differences, though. The M-P has that sapphire-glass screen. It also has a 2GB buffer, which lets you capture 3fps at full resolution for eight seconds before it stops.

There’s one more difference: No traditional Leica “red dot” logo on the front of the M-P. It’s supposed to make this camera inconspicuous. It’s supposed to fool thieves who know how much a Leica costs and scan crowds for red dots. A few things make that plan ridiculous. First, there’s a sizable “Leica” etched into the top of the camera in baseball-uniform script. Second, Leica lenses say “LEICA” on their front-facing rim. Third, this camera looks unmistakably like a Leica. If Leica really wanted this camera to be incognito, it should have gone the Chameleon XLE route.

It’s hard to believe, but this camera will please everyone. It will please the people who buy it for its photographic excellence. And it will please the people who don’t buy it because more-versatile cameras cost a helluva lot less. Beyond the beautiful images, the difference with the M-P comes down to the experience of using it. This camera gently grabs you, drags you outside, and begs you to take a bunch of great pictures with it. Sure, the time needed to get your focus just right means it’s a bad choice for action photos or quick snapshots, but it’s an all-star otherwise. For street scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and sandwich photography, it doles out pure magic.

Barash’s Talk [EvolutionBlog]

University of Washington biology professor David Barash published this op-ed in The New York Times recently. The title: “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class.” Intriguing! Let’s have a look.

EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn’t, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don’t.

I’m a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist, and no biology course, can help being “evolutionary.” My animal behavior class, with 200 undergraduates, is built on a scaffolding of evolutionary biology.

And that’s where The Talk comes in. It’s irresponsible to teach biology without evolution, and yet many students worry about reconciling their beliefs with evolutionary science. Just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of my students are troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material.

Until recently, I had pretty much ignored such discomfort, assuming that it was their problem, not mine. Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry without molecules, or physics without mass and energy. But instead of students’ growing more comfortable with the tension between evolution and religion over time, the opposite seems to have happened. Thus, The Talk.

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, alas. He has many students, unsurprisingly, who have religious objections to evolution. So he addresses the issue by opening the semester with a talk aimed at confirming their fears? Why is that a smart thing to do? He had it right the first time. It’s their problem, not his.

I have a real problem with Barash’s talk. My problem is not with the substance of the talk, as I shall describe below. Unlike Jerry Coyne, I do not think there is any first amendment issue here. I’m not motivated by political concerns that challenging religion in this context makes it harder to protect science education below the college level. And my objection is not primarily that the talk seems tangential to the main business of the course.

Rather, my problem is that this seems like a needlessly aggressive way of starting the semester.

People who don’t teach often think that teaching is just a matter of having a smart person standing at the front of the room, coldly transmitting knowledge to students who dutifully jot everything down in their notes. People who actually do the job, on the other hand, understand that teaching is far more than that. It has to do with building a rapport with the class. If you want to be effective, especially in math and science courses (where beginning students often start out nervous and fearful), you need them to trust you and to feel comfortable around you. They need to know they can talk to you about any concerns they might have. That includes the very religious students. Opening the class with an attack on their religion hardly seems like a way of building trust.

Please spare me any harangues about the value of challenging student’s beliefs, or about how college is about making students think in new ways, or anything like that. I’m not saying that student’s beliefs must always be respected or anything of that nature. In an evolutionary biology class, any student raising a misinformed religious objection to the material (or a faux scientific objection easily recognizable as standard creationist BS), should be politely but firmly smacked down. I am saying, though, that you shouldn’t look for excuses to be confrontational with your students. I am saying that you will have all you can handle pounding the course material into their heads, without wasting time with a lot of irrelevant preaching about religion or politics.

Let’s move on to the rest of the talk:

There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible. Stephen Jay Gould called them “nonoverlapping magisteria,” noma for short, with the former concerned with facts and the latter with values. He and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather loudly); he claimed I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he was misrepresenting both science and religion.

On the subject of NOMA, Barash is right and Gould was wrong. Gould’s book Rocks of Ages, in which he laid out his ideas about science and religion, was by far his worst. It was a quickie book, pure and simple, and it achieved its reconciliation of science and religion only by ignoring most of the real points of conflict between the two.

But Barash has also erred, I believe. In starting his talk with the idea that NOMA represents the compatibilist position, he has overlooked an important, and not so uncommon view of this matter. I am referring to those who argue not simply that science and religion are compatible because you can separate them with a big fence, but who go further in arguing that science and religion actually complement each other. Writers like Ken Miller and John Haught, among many others, argue that evolution strengthens and enriches their faith. And while I happen to find their views incomprehensible, they nonetheless deserve mention in any talk about the possible relationships between science and religion.

In some ways, Steve has been winning. Noma is the received wisdom in the scientific establishment, including institutions like the National Center for Science Education, which has done much heavy lifting when it comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution. According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.

This is undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything under the sun — or beyond it — to work his will. Hence, there is nothing in evolutionary biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for most religious fundamentalisms (everything that we know about biology and geology proclaims that the Earth was not made in a day).

You probably sense a “but” coming. I agree completely with Barash that the vapid, but often heard, argument that maybe evolution is just God’s way of creating, is not adequate, since it ignores the many non-Bible related conflicts between evolution and religion. It is from this point on that I start warming up to Barash’s talk.

So far, so comforting for my students. But here’s the turn: These magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish.

As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.

The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. This once seemed persuasive, best known from William Paley’s 19th-century claim that, just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator. Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon.

Bingo! This is exactly right.

Now, a common retort here is that nothing in Christianity rides on the correctness of Paley’s argument. A Christian can simply agree that Paley was wrong, shrug his shoulders, and move on as though nothing had happened. This is true as far as it goes, but it misses an important point.

As I discuss in more detail in Among the Creationists , Paley’s intent was not just to make an intellectual argument for God’s existence. Rather, he was also using his observations about nature as a vehicle for stressing God’s nearness in our daily lives. There was an emotional component to the argument, and not just an intellectual one. So when Darwin and his successors refuted the argument, religion suffered two blows. On the one hand, a previously persuasive argument for God’s existence was now untenable. On the other, God was made to seen very far away, if He existed at all.

Understanding this also makes it clear why another possible line of defense, that God’s design is found not in the contrivances of organisms but in the fine tuning of fundamental constants and whatnot, is not very effective. Of course, there are strong scientific refutations of all such arguments. But there is also the fact that a lot of blather about fundamental constants, which are things you read about in physics textbooks, carries nowhere near the emotional force of Paley’s arguments.

A few of my students shift uncomfortably in their seats. I go on. Next to go is the illusion of centrality. Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism.

Bingo again, though I think this argument could be made stronger. It is not just that humans are not central to the evolutionary story, it is that there was nothing inevitable about our appearance. That is a very serious blow to any religious view suggesting that humans are the reason for creation. The standard response here, and really the only serious one, is that the ubiquity of “evolutionary convergence” shows that humans were, indeed, inevitable. Scientifically this claim is highly dubious. Theologically it’s not even clear if it solves the problem. If humans really are the inevitable end result of evolution, then it only becomes harder to explain why God felt the need to create through a lengthy process, let alone one that entails eons of cruel and vicious bloodsport.

Which brings us to this:

Adding to religion’s current intellectual instability is a third consequence of evolutionary insights: a powerful critique of theodicy, the scholarly effort to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering.

Theological answers range from claiming that suffering provides the option of free will to announcing (as in the Book of Job) that God is so great and we so insignificant that we have no right to ask. But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things. The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.

Hat trick!

Of course, there is a vast scholarly literature devoted to protecting religion from these arguments. That a vast literature is needed tells you something about the severity of the challenge. If Barash wants to provide a reading list that will persuade his students of the correctness of his views, it is this literature, and not anything by Richard Dawkins, that he should recommend. It contains little to mitigate the force of Barash’s arguments.

I’ll let Barash close out the post:

I CONCLUDE The Talk by saying that, although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass my course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastic routines. And while I respect their beliefs, the entire point of The Talk is to make clear that, at least for this biologist, it is no longer acceptable for science to be the one doing those routines, as Professor Gould and noma have insisted we do.

Despite these three evolutionary strikes, God hasn’t necessarily struck out. At the end of the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” based on the famous Scopes “monkey trial” over a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, Spencer Tracy’s character, fashioned after the defense attorney Clarence Darrow, stands in the empty courtroom, picks up a Bible in one hand and Darwin’s “Origin of Species” in the other, gives a knowing smile and claps them together before putting both under his arm. Would that it were so simple.