Bravo, Leica!

The Leica campers really had it figured out.

I spent most of the evening following live tweets from the Leica press conference this evening from Red Dot Forum, Steve Huff and Eric Kim, excited as to what new products will be released. While I was sure that there was going to be a Leica M10, the Leica...excuse the term..."fanboys" were right all along.

There is no Leica M10. Leica has instead launched a new version called the Leica M Monochom, a camera that shoots ONLY in black and white!

You would think that the Leica digital M was a niche product. But this one really takes not only the cake and the icing, but the entire bakery as well, and probably even the baker and his wife!

This new Leica retains the same full frame sensor found on the M9 and M9-P cameras, but chucks out all those wonderful colors. It even bundles with a copy of Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro, to make your black and white photos even more...black and white (?). And the price: US$ 50 short of EIGHT THOUSAND!

There is a good news behind this for those who are not very interested in black and white photography: the Leica M9 and M9-P's shelf life has just been indefinitely prolonged. If you are already a lucky owner of one of these then you can sleep tonight knowing that your camera won't be selling on E-bay for cheap the following morning. And for those of us (including myself) who were thinking we might be able to get the Leica M9 at a bargain basement price: this is, unfortunately, not going to happen.

This is where Leica gets my fervent "bravo". They decided not to fall into the "digital rot" trap, and made sure that the color Leica M's remain on the top echelon of full-frame digital photography.

I am not a Leica owner nor user. I wanted to be one. But even now that I can afford one, I for the life of me cannot justify spending close to ten thousand dollars for a camera which, albeit great, has inferior ISO performance, and lacks the bells and whistles which define modern photography as we know it. And even more so for the M Monochrom: spending US$ 8000 on a camera that doesn't have autofocus and shoots only in black and white, seems utterly ridiculous. If I really wanted a Leica, I would just buy a "normal" Leica M9 or M9-P, and just convert the images to black and white myself.