The Leica M11 is the Best M Camera Ever — and One that I’d Like to Own
This ought to trigger the binary thinkers out there (“Lloyd hates Leica”, “biased because using non-Leica lens”, and similar twaddle from trolls and nitwits who don’t read my reviews). My previous post triggered at least one such.
I’ve had 48 hours with the Leica M11, loaned to me by a friend. Now I have a week or so of work ahead to publish my impressions and the images I made with it.
Caveat prelude: the Leica M11 has issues, just like previous models
Several significant design problems affect my ability to make good exposures and do actually in some cases damage both color rendition and detail capture. These are design decisions (bad ones) that one will have to learn to live with. They are likely never going to be fixed, as clearly Leica things they are a good idea. I have detailed some of these with the M10-R and will do so again with the M11.
Then there are the bugs, and who am I to say they are not also design decisions? Card compatibility, camera hangs, permanent alteration of raw files. These things can be fixed. Will they? I don’t know.
The ergonomics are awful (no grip), making my hand hurt within 5 minutes by trying to pinch it with two fingers on front. Gotta get a 3rd-party grip.
Top pick might not show in list: Voigtlander M 50mm f/2 APO-Lanthar Aspherical @AMAZON.
But overall.. BEST EVER M
I’m loving the image quality and sharpness I’m getting with the Leica M11. Looks to me to be the best sensor Leica has ever delivered in an M camera. If you are going to shoot a rangefinder, your ship has arrived!
The total image quality includes noise, color, dynamic range—these are are fantastic, As is the near-freedom from color aliasing and color moiré—never before in an M camera.
The new high-res EVF would have been nicer built-in, but I and finding that focusing is a breeze as far as manual focus goes. A real winner.
The 60MP capture resolution is at the least giving you oversampling (always a plus), and with suitably high performance lenses, you are going to get more than you bargained for, meaning a real bump up in capture resolution. This surprised me, as I thought that ray angle effects would dominate the performance.
There is something odd about the Leica M11—the lenses do not look right. Don’t panic—I mean that in a good way: there seems to be less degradation of lens performance (ray angle effects). The new sensor is surely involved, but perhaps the sensor cover glass could have been thinned-out and thus reducing the 'hit' to optical performance? I don’t know, and it’s still clear that some M lenses are really not up to the 60MP challenge.
Bottom line
The Leica M11 has some significant flaws. But never before has an M camera felt so compelling to me, and the Leica M rangefinder platform and its diminutive lenses now look unbeatable on a total system compactness and performance axis, if you can manage the manual focus.
I’d love to own the Leica M11 and I could see it as an outstanding hiking camera owing to the compactness of the lenses.
Top pick might not show in list: Voigtlander M 50mm f/2 APO-Lanthar Aspherical @AMAZON.
Roy P (Leica M11 owner) writes:
Based on what (very little) I've seen so far, I must say I am very pleased and impressed by the M11. So far, I haven't even used the EVF or any of the other lenses, but just using the RF and with the CV50, I took a couple dozen test shots around the house, and I can't believe what I'm seeing. It looks like my CV50 is well-aligned to the RF in my M11 - focus has been spot on. Leaning against a support, I've been able to take shots at shutter as low as 1/4 sec. The multi-field metering has so far worked very nicely when presented with imbalanced scenes with extreme contrasts, ranging from near-white to near-black areas.
There are a lot of irritating and goofy things in the firmware which will hopefully get fixed fast. This is absolutely the worst firmware-readiness for any camera launch I've ever seen. The old Canon S-90 pocket cameras had far more robust firmware than this $9,000 camera.
But setting that aside, I can't believe how much I'm liking this camera. Finally, there is an M camera that has the potential to fulfill the old vision of carrying a very small camera bag like a hip-hugging Tamrac, with 5-6 M lenses that cover the range from 16 or 18mm all the way to 135mm. I will likely re-acquire some of my old favorite M lenses that I used to own in the past.
DIGLLOYD: agreed. I’d love to own the Leica M11. But to own one with EVF and grip and spare battery is an $11K proposition, out of my reach.
