Leica M11M and why we could[?] have nice things
It is not a long walk from the door to the pool at the end of the street. The roses, red and orange and yellow, have grown to an incredible height around the lamp post, almost a tree. The purple salvia has reached taller than the yews it replaced. The lavender is somewhere. Left turn on to cracked concrete. A once-decrepit tennis court, straight ahead, is in the delicate phase where it had been paved but not netted, striped, or fenced. It is a black plane of asphalt, perfectly symmetrical, a minor structure to each side, with some mid-century apartments standing in the distance. I’ve seen this before. Raphael gives you the vision of the Ideal City. I give you the future of pickleball.
It is impossibly cool for the month, but the smoke from Canadian wildfires is dabbing out what should be a warm June evening sun. There is a diffuse golden glow from the west. I have a copy of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer in my hand, with my index finger tucked at page 110 while I walk. The paper is rough to the touch, some kind of porous paper product made specifically for trade paperbacks. It has yellowed-in from the edges but white in the center; nothing from the 1980s avoided tan lines. It occurs to me that Philip K. Dick is the kind of author where one day you could read a hundred pages, and others, you struggled to read three.
This reminds me of writing this blog, site, or whatever you call it. And walking back through a neighbor’s fragrant garden worthy of Siddhartha’s childhood, I resolve to finish this one. Even if it kills everyone in the room.
The before times
The brand from Wetzlar is really good at attracting hatred from people that are not enthusiasts. I’m not one for the Keir Egan style narrative, the stories about some asthmatic microscope lens designer, or the photojournalist drag. What I do like is a high-resolution camera that delivers a vast and sharp monochrome image. But today is much different from how it starts.
I first buy a Leica because my father could not. He always wanted to buy one, though an R, but something else intervened. So that ended up on a generational to-do list. I have completed most of these tasks but will intentionally leave some new ones to my own children. Some of these will be extravagant.
I am not sure how I land on an M. We always have to do something different from our parents. It does not hurt that I have already tasted the forbidden fruit of the Canon P. But how much daylight is there between an apostle and an apostate? Not much, I suspect. I will sell my M6 within a few months. I will keep the P and replace the Leica a couple of years later with a Hexar RF.
It is now September 2000. It is a Sunday and a sunny afternoon. I am standing at the counter at B&H looking at an ancient M3, a much more civilized-feeling, if neanderthalic, version of the M6. Happily, the loading system does not feature finger-poking metal petals. I have just come off a wedding-shower weekend. The evening before, I walked past World Trade Center One and Two, briefly considered going to the observation deck, and dismissed it as something I’d do eventually. I walk out of the camera store and get directly into a cab. I get all the way to LaGuardia, to find out my plane is delayed for several hours. At that point, the internal chatter becomes too much. I jump back into a taxi (because you could) and re-enter Manhattan to buy that camera. The return is via the Queens Midtown Tunnel, but a defective memory tells me that I see the twin towers one last time. But like in many dreams, there are some details that can’t be right: the sun is coming from the wrong direction, and the sightline comes from the previous evening’s return on the Staten Island Ferry.
A week later, the camera lands on my doorstep, no sales tax.
One year later, everything will change.
Em Two Four Six
Fourteen years later, I am in San Francisco in the center of the Golden Gateway platform off the Embarcadero, looking at the black-and-white townhouses. Tudomodern? Japanesque? This is old territory, but nothing stays quite the same. The fountains with the bronze statues are dry, the red pavers are worn, and the old Buckelew and Macondray towers have been been painted dark grey down their concrete corners. I am relatively recently possessed of an M240. In my bag is a borrowed an M9 Monochrom from the Leica Store. I think that if you could take these two concepts and meld them, you would have one hell of a camera.
Leica, of course, obliges with a new product. A month or two later, I have one M246 and a lot less spending money. The M246 will not turn out to be an easy camera to use; the relatively standard Leica center-weighted metering, coupled with zero tolerance for overexposure, will make it an exercise in metering, locking, and shooting. Advanced metering will be much better, most of the time, but it will not be as quick. Either way, there will be a serious tendency toward underexposure and previews that will not be easy to interpret – since once will be looking at the histogram of an underexposed JPG. I will stick with that camera for a decade. No way will this goddamn camera beat me.
The M246 will go on to take some stupendously good pictures – and also a lot of bad ones along the learning curve. It documents a lot of moments with friends and family. It catches some landscapes too. There is magic. It can see in the dark. It does not have the massive noise and banding of the original M9 Mono. The EVF is magic with wide-angle lenses.
But I will never actually stop shooting film because dealing constantly with computers is irritating.
The sunk-cost fallacy
Looking back now, the M246 taught me two things: (1) a manufacturer could design what should be a super-fun camera — but was not fun and (2) Leica fans would justify it. First, I questioned – especially after the M11 came out – how Leica had not figured out how to do highlight-priority metering earlier. That’s how point-and-shoots get perfect exposure most of the time. Adding highlight priority meant a huge difference between a camera acting like it is loaded with black-and-white film and acting like it is loaded with finicky slide film. The M240 was easy to live with because most forms of overexposure would leave data in at least one channel that could be recovered.
Second, I observed – not for the first time, but for the first time so acutely – that many Leica users entertain the same sunk-cost fallacy as anyone who buys something expensive and can’t admit that there is something that needs improvement. Leica snobs wrote off people’s concerns about Monochrom underexposure – and being forced to engage in it to save highlights – as paranoia: that there was “so much information” in the shadows and that files were “malleable.” It was pretty clear to me that no one who said that was familiar with shooting black and white film or could explain, at any rational level, why underexposure would ever be good in digital files.
Black and white film is exclusively an expose-to-the-right exercise with modern films like TMY. Even with older emulsions like TX, HP5, and FP4+ (note: I am of a generation where I refuse to say “film stocks”), mild highlight over exposure was not a serious issue, most of the time. And on the (quasi) math, the thing that did not sit right with me was this: why is the existence of copious detail information in the shadows a reason to tolerate leaving the upper bits (well, values) empty? If you’re already assuming major post-production manipulation, you might as well capture every iota of tone data you can. And that means that at least one pixel will max out bit 14. But illogical arguments are nothing new to the Leica and hardly unique to Leica even among cameras. If you pay enough for a piece of equipment, you will be loathe to criticize it or underlying design decisions.
M11M Image Quality
If you have gotten this far, you realize that I learned from YouTube DIY videos how to prolong the agony of getting to the point. The M11M is really why we are here. Assuming you can focus the lens of your choice, this image quality is astoundingly good. It crushes 6×4.5. It crushes scanned 6×9. It has no noise at any reasonable ISO. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story. The Monochrom series cameras all have an unusual tonality to them, almost like T-Max 400 shot with a green filter, developed with HC-110.
I would comment that the output from color converted to monochrome is not the same because native monochrome capture, especially with a contrast filter, captures different data. Color conversions to monochrome are ok, but they are not always spectacular if you like dramatic landscapes. Channel mixing makes it really easy to get halos. And you do get 20% more effective resolution with a monochrome sensor. Interpolation takes a little bit of a bite.
The M11M can also comfortably shoot at double (or more) the ISO of color because its sensor picks up more light – and noise on a Monochrom image reads as “film grain” and not as “bad digital.” That said, you don’t even start to see noise until you hit ISO 1600 or more. Witness the below, shot at ISO 1600 with a Konica 35/2L Hexanon (yes, the lens Konica adapted from the Hexar AF is this good). If you click on the composite of the details, you will see sections at 100% of the image, in other words, at 240dpi, sized for a 40″ / 1m wide print, looking at the same distance you would a 4×6 print. If you actually followed the rules for viewing distance, this camera could shoot a quadruple-size highway billboard without breaking a sweat.
By contrast, color Leicas do not have the same types of overwhelming advantages over their contemporaries (for example, the 60mp Sony mirrorless cameras). The Monochrom is in a class by itself, and if you only have the budget for one Leica, it might be the one you want. There is nothing that competes with it.
Perspective Control
Leica’s inbuilt perspective control is helpful, though it is far from perfect. It corrects the JPG image (and pre-codes the raw file for “guided” perspective control) to match what the inertial measurement unit (IMU) in the camera detects as camera tilt. It is most useful with moderate wide angles like 35mm. At wider angles, you can lose quite a bit of the edges unless you are “mostly right” with keeping the camera level. Through the Visoflex 2, the shape of the trapezoid box shows you how much correction is being applied.
The perspective control and “digital level control” provided via the IMU does not seem to have any control over sensitivity, so things seem a little coarser than on the M240/246. That said, it’s ok to have a small amount of back-tilt of the camera in architectural pictures; software perspective control, if too perfect, can make things look unnatural.
You can also use adapted PC lenses for SLRs. The Venus Laowa 15/4.5 Zero-D shift lens works well, just as it did with the M246. Below, one such photograph.
Fit and Finish
As befits a now-$10k camera, the overall fit and finish are excellent, full stop. That said, I am not a fan of the new rear buttons (which feel a little lightweight). It is not clear how well the vantablack-looking paint finish will last. I was a big fan of black chrome. It is clear after just a couple of months that the top rails of the flash shoe are is already showing some wear from the Visoflex 2’s mounting foot. Some design choices were odd. It will remain a mystery why the “Monochrom” in the flash shoe and the A on the shutter are almost invisible, but the ISO and shutter speed dials are festooned with bright white lettering. Sometimes things get a little too cute.
The handling
The M11M is a lot lighter than the M246. Almost a featherweight by comparison. The elimination of brass top covers – reputed to be 25% of the weight of the M240 series – makes things a lot lighter. The body itself is thinner, using the same trick that the M10 used: make the lens mount project slightly and make the body itself slightly slimmer. If you have long fingers, though, you almost need a half case to hold it comfortably. The lightness of the camera gives it less inertia, and with 60mp, you now actually have go back to holding your breath.
Touch-screen menus seem like a novelty and one that can hold up picture-making if the camera is in “play” mode and your nose touches the surface. You can still use the icon-based menu without the touch-screen capability. The M11 has a handy “favorites” menu, but it has also rearranged and renamed some features on menus, leading to confusion when the “artificial horizon” has been renamed “digital level control.”
Otherwise, a big jump from the M246 is that the rear wheel can be clicked to lock/unlock its function as an exposure compensation dial. This is a big step up because the M240 series only had two ways to use that wheel for exposure compensation: (1) leave it unlocked, which means that it gets knocked off zero all the time or (2) require holding down the front button in addition to turning the dial, which was good primarily for hand cramps. The problem is that using the EV comp dial like this turns the screen on.
The dedicated ISO dial seems a bit much. I’m sure there are people who go full-on OCD, manually changing between fixed ISOs all the time, but this throwback to an M2/M rewind knob seems like an atavism. I think we could live with a menu and use the ISO dial as a multifunction wheel. Or just remove it.
Thankfully, compared to the M246, the main switch is just ON and OFF. The self-timer was really getting in the way. And everyone knows the only selfies Leica people take are in a mirror anyway. Just please wear a shirt. Not everyone has the well-developed physique of Lee Friedlander.
Viewfinder
It’s an M. Shockingly, or maybe not, the display is still four digits plus a dot plus two arrows. The viewfinder opening is larger, which makes things somewhat easier on the eyes but does not make it easier to focus. Nothing really solves for my tendency to disregard the framelines (note to self: just shoot with a 24/25mm lens and admit there’s a problem). No legacy eyepiece accessory works without a hundred-dollar adapter, and even the third-party slotted rings (literally, all these adapters are…) have prices that feel vaguely assaultive.
The viewfinder, obviously, does not provide any live view capability. For that, you need the $900 Visoflex 2, which is a heavy, metal Lego-looking EVF that snaps onto the top of the camera. With 3 million-plus megapixels, the picture is quite clear, and the EVF does not have annoying levels of blackout. Thankfully, the diopter correction is now on the size and difficult to turn by accident. If you shoot wides, and you have the means, I highly recommend it. Used. It is most choice.
I actually find that I use the EVF far less than I thought I would because the perspective control feature seems to absorb small camera leveling errors with glass finders. But when you do need the EVF, you can switch on the familiar artificial horizon and get things close to perfect.
Responsiveness
The M11 is a very responsive camera and does not hesitate to take a picture when you press the button. This is the cardinal virtue of Leicas; there is no “can’t” when it comes to exposures. The camera does not care if the exposure is off, the focus is not wrong, the flash is not ready. This does require presence of mind in making photographs, but it is not some Zen master exercise. It is more like any SLR of the 1970s.
Connectivity
A huge improvement with the M11 is the Leica Fotos software, which is actually better than Sony’s trashy Creators’ App. Fotos runs on iPhone and Android, and it is very good at acquiring a camera connection – it almost feels magnetic. It can run the camera remotely, import photos from the camera, or simply accumulate GPS data that it can then sync back to the camera (which will then write it to JPGs after the fact). Like a lot of things Leica, Fotos does not have every feature, but it covers the 80% you need, in a highly polished fashion.
Conclusion: Is it a Nice Thing? Should we have nice things?
It is hard to take a Leica seriously as an über luxury good in 2025, when sellers of everything have discovered that pretty much every consumer good has a price elasticity of demand of zero. Fifteen-dollar hamburgers are a bellwether. An M11M camera, arguably the most specialist of specialized cameras, costs as much as the planet’s median personal income. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But you could probably rationalize it. In the West.
If you actually use an M11M for 7 years and sell it for 40% of the purchase price, totally within the realm of realistic outcomes, the cost of owning it is actually pretty modest – around $75 per month. That kind of money is discretionary for a pretty wide band of the population; it’s about the same as a hardcore Starbuck’s habit, a monthly cellular bill, or the sum of all your streaming subscriptions. It is less than a lot of people spend on film/developing/scanning.
Even the gross purchase price – painful as it is – is about a year of car payments (hint: keep your whip an extra year after it is paid off). That’s not to say that your charge bill won’t be staggering the month you buy it. I found it a good excuse to unload a bunch of old gear. And unless you are in a hurry, you can score a used M11M for up to 20% off if you are ok with one with a few thousand shots on the clock. This will not quite trade in as high later unless you have all the trimmings, the original receipt, and the birth certificate of the original owner, but you pay a lot less upfront.
I would also tell you that unless you are a hard-core black and white person, walk away. A Monochrom is difficult to afford, difficult to learn, and difficult to justify. If you are happy with converting color pictures to monochrome, it’s a waste of money. If you are some kind of deviant who is chasing performance comparable to a 6×9 film camera, or think you are seeing something unusual (and desirable) in the look of the Monochrom images, it might be a different story.
Giving metadata to film
Statement of the problem
One of the enduring mysteries of the darkroom lies in taking a pile of film, developing it, and getting everything into the right order for prints, scans, or negative pages. The problem with film is that even the most sophisticated data imprinting systems don’t really do the job well – assuming they count dates past 2018 (which is when most data backs stop incrementing years). The metadata we are thinking is: camera, lens, date, place. Leave the notebook behind. For any of the techniques below, you can use EXIFtool to write custom EXIF data to time, date, and location fields, but you can also do that manually using your digital asset management software.
Punching film (order of exposure)
If you are trying to keep film in date order, and you don’t have any other clever way of doing it (face it, you don’t), there is one easy option. You can use a hole punch to punch the leader of the film, preferably *after* you shoot it. You can use any code you want – number of dots, binary positions, different-sized punches. The best way to do this is to rewind with the leader out – and then punch the leader. If you are using a point and shoot, the alternative is to punch the film right before you load it. For example, the first roll gets one punch; the second, two; the third, three; and so on. The advantage of punches is that they don’t wear off when you develop the film. Just be careful not to cut the punched part off when you go to develop it. A related trick is using twin check stickers like in a photo lab, but hole punches are more foolproof and will never have a label get loose in your developer.
Title cards
A second way to attack recording is to use title cards. These could be a sheet of paper with critical information on it: camera, lens, date, roll number. Take a picture of it. A related technique is to open a blank document on your computer, type that info in 72 point, and take a picture of that. Title cards are not very easy to use in the field, but if you’re shooting one roll of film per outing, they are easy to incorporate. And since most rolls of film will accommodate 37 frames, it does not eat into the capacity of your film. You can obviously introduce cards mid-roll, but that does eat into capacity.
Anchoring time and location with a cellphone camera
The final way might be the most diabolical. If, on every roll of film, you duplicate one picture with a cell phone, you have a recording of the date and approximate location (thanks, invasive cellphone tech!) for at least the roll. If you duplicate every picture, then you essentially have recorded the time and location just as if you had a data back that performed that function. Back in Lightroom, you can clone the GPS data (and time data) from your phone pictures back to your film scans, either approximately (a frame per roll) or comprehensively. At a minimum, just one shot per roll helps you put rolls in the right order. Voilà.
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Fujifilm GFX100RF: metastasizing Leica cult
Congratulations to Fujifilm with the GFX100RF and creating a Leica-M-like gatekeeing fanbase where questions about features are met with “you just don’t get GFX.” You’ve made it to the big time. It’s such a familiar pattern from the Leica M world – and an attitude absent among Q fans.
Yes, old man, I will be just like you.
Sensor-driven infirmities become dogma
And questions are legitimate. Fuji seems to be unable to admit that it was wrong about 36x24mm (FX) sensors. Back when the X100 and Xpro came out, Fuji was insistent that full-frame was meaningless because Xtrans was so good. When the rest of the world shifted to FX sensors in high-end cameras, Fuji was left holding its lens cap in its hand. So it decided that it would make a “medium format” sensor (44x33mm). In the digital world, that still has a crop factor versus film medium format, where the table stakes are 55x41mm (“6×4.5”).
Fuji arrived at a 4:3* “medium format” sensor in the GFX (note: it’s probably a Sony IMX461BQR). That had two huge consequences. One, you can’t use 35mm-format lenses with their 43mm image circle. Covering a larger circle drives a lot of compromises – like having slower lenses. Using a large sensor in a small body means that you lose advanced video (due to heat) and sensor stabilization (due to packaging). Despite the five-head of this camera, there is no room to stick the mechanical bits you need to shift a sensor.
*4:3 is an obsession among Japanese camera makers, and the only only other use of it is in old-school CRT TVs.
When people question the feature set, the Fujifan reaction has been to treat it as a tenet of Fujiculture: whatever Fuji does not provide is invalid. This is right out of the playbook employed by toxic Leica M fans. For them, whatever Leica did not put in an M was – tautologically – unnecessary. Metering, auto-exposure, TTL flash, etc. And so it goes here.
Oh no, did Leica somehow achieve greater bang-for-the-buck?
But when you look over the fence into Leicaland, even techno laggard Leica, in the Q3/Q43, has video up to 8k and 4k60p. It also has image stabilization. And it has a lens that is 2 stops faster (Q43) or 2.5 stops faster. This is a tough pill to swallow where Leica traditionally has been the company defending outdated specs for astronomically higher prices.
(Digression: please don’t argue that “medium format” makes f/4 into f/3.2 – that’s a depth of field conversion, not applicable light gathering. No matter what the sensor size, an f/2 lens still admits 4x as much light as f/4).
Leica can do all of this because it uses a 3:2 Sony 61mp sensor (IMX455), which is yes on video, yes on IBIS, and only needs a 43mm image circle from a lens. The packaging thing that people don’t seem to understand is that every imaging chip has an apron that is not sensor. Hence, the GFX sensor (49x40mm overall) takes up radically more space than a Q sensor (41x31mm overall size). That’s just a function of sensor area. A sensor that has 1.7x the area has at least 1.7x the footprint. Check out just how low the top cover of a Q is.
The Q3 is $1,300 more than a GFX – and that is not a huge premium for a Leica that is more beautifully designed, does more, and likely will be supported longer by the manufacturer. You can rail all you want about Leica and how much it costs, but this is a situation where Fuji’s Instax-looking design and short attention span for product support is worth examining.
The Q43 has a lot more appealing field of view for general use (43mm vs 28mm), but you will pay $2k over a GFX.
Any faith worth having can withstand questions
So is it ok for people to question the GFX100RF’s price and feature set? Yes. Will Fuji’s superfans clutch their pearls? Yes. Should we care? No.
Not every audience for a camera is monolithic, and some portion of your audience is going to want a $5k+ camera to be a multipurpose tool, at least theoretically, to mentally justify the spend. This is no different than any other object of male desire that needs to look at least nominally useful. Those casual consumers are the only people who contribute enough volume to get a GFX camera made. Let them ask. They are the ones spending their vacation money. The typical camera-maker sycophant corps has no skin in the game.
To the bottom line, at the end of the day 102mp is great, but you don’t get that in 3:2 (90mp) or 16:9 (76mp) with the Fuji. And over 60mp, it’s a pretty marginal real-world difference, especially if you are giving up things in the bargain. It is ok to interrogate that.
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The M11-D and authoritarianism
If you fancy yourself liberal, or even classically liberal, it cannot escape your notice that politics worldwide have been moving in a populist, nostalgic direction (especially in the United States). A lot of this revolves around seeking life like in the Before Times.
Whether things were actually better in the Before Times is highly dependent on who you ask about the Before Times, and even in the selected audiences where the Before Times have a favorable rating, the view is through rose-tinted glasses. Polio was a thing. So was losing all of your teeth before age fifty. If you weren’t in the politically and socially dominant group, you might be limited in your job, your mobility, or your relationships. In some situations, and for some people those Before Times were positively life-threatening.
In photography, the Before Times were a camera with no screen, in many cases no meter, and in every case thirty-six available frames before a cumbersome (and for Leica, finger-poking) film changing process. You would either turn your film in to a lab or develop it yourself. You might wait days or even weeks to see what you shot. Any way you slice it, there was a non-zero chance that your photos would be lost in a mishap or that someone blinked. I’m not sure I’m one of the people that sees that with rosy glasses. I do relentlessly shoot film – but rarely in any context where missing a shot would mean missing some critical moment in life.
What is the psychology of a person who is drawn to a digital camera with no rear screen? It’s honesty hard to say because the intersection of the sets “really rich” and “wants this” is pretty small. The sample size just isn’t there. You could speculate that there is a group of people who want to cosplay film photography using a crippled digital camera. There is a group of people, potentially overlapping, who can’t keep their fingers off that playback button. A possibly related loud contingent lobbied to get video removed from Leica Ms because they could not keep their fingers off that button as well. And we cannot discount yet another proponent group, which talks about how much better their pictures are when the camera forces them to go slow and think about basics. To which I would say, just get a film camera. Maybe a 4×5 view camera.
Some commenters on, and admirers of, the Leica M seem to be asking for guidance: how to be a photographer by using something that (at least visibly) only has the controls that a 1986 Leica M6 does. If we follow this formula, roll back to the past, use the tool prescribed from on high by Leica, we will prosper. Most people who own Leicas, at least as measured by the LUG and Leica’s official forum, fancy themselves to be rational, liberal, and not susceptible to control. They would never admit that they may come under the thrall of a strongman, a schismatic bishop, or a camera company out of central Germany. And yet some number will pay a large sum of money for a camera that may not be fun for them – on the promise that being controlled control will liberate them to make great art.
Maybe it’s hard for people who are not “Leica M people” to understand things like the M11-D because they don’t understand Leica’s role as a substitute religious experience. In fact, it has many of the makings of a religion, with the same kind of missionaries that relentlessly defend Apple products. Leica has an origin story in an asthmatic microscope technician with a message. Leica M has a canon: the M5, CL, and M240/246/262 are some kind of Romanist apocrypha. It has a creed that has evolved… at the speed Leica can commercialize features. You don’t need X. That is, until Leica produces a product with X. Witness the march [metering, TTL flash, autoexposure, electronic viewfinders, 24x36mm sensors, etc.]. It has its saints (Cartier-Bresson and Korda being examples). It has its holy shrine (“next year in Wetzlar” was the cry from Solmsian captivity). And it has its dogma: the Decisive Moment® seems the most oft-repeated verse. The interoperability of the M11-D with Fotos, a phone-based app, though, seems like calling muskrat “fish” during Lent. Digital is digital, and there are certain dispensations and accommodations.
And yet, who are we to judge? Leica is already something of a rarified taste; you must really want a certain feel to want a camera that is heavier, less convenient, and spectacularly more expensive than most modern ones. Some of us are in it for the small lenses and superb image quality, but what is the clear line between that and wanting something that pretends not to be a digital camera at all?
Olympus Pen F: solving problems no one had?
The Olympus Pen F series of cameras is unique. And “unique” has many connotations in English, some not so complimentary. The Pen F, FT, and FV are variants of a half-frame SLR body that takes a variety of lenses. They deviate from conventional SLRs in ways that are apparent – and maybe not immediately so. These cameras are lovable but also irrational.
Size and weight: zero sum
It’s not really small. The first thing that people need to get out of their heads is the idea that a Pen F-series camera is smaller than a 24×36 camera. Not by a long shot. The Pen is far larger than a Contax T, a Minolta AF-C, or a Rollei 35S. In fact, it’s only 10mm narrower (side-to-side) and 4mm shorter (top-to-bottom) than a Canon VL2 rangefinder with a 35mm f/2 lens that shoots a frame double the size of the Pen’s “single frame” and has at least six times as many lenses that fit it. A Pen is, however, smaller than typical 35mm SLR.
Why is the size not smaller? What kind of gets lost in all of this is that the major dimensions of a camera, especially an SLR, are dictated by the frame size and whether it has a mirror. A “half frame” is half the area of 24×36, but its linear dimensions are only smaller by 30% (18×24). The picture below provides some scale; that width difference is indeed just 1cm.
Also not shocking is the fact that even with the frame scaled down, the 35mm cassette and takeup mechanism are the same size as a 24×36 camera. Smaller 35mm cameras manage to get the canister and the takeup immediately to either side of the film gate; the Olympus, weirdly, has this (because, oh, yeah, we forgot – a rotary shutter has to retract to somewhere).
No, the lenses aren’t really that small either. Compared to a 35mm SLR, you could make this argument. Compared to a 35mm Leica thread-mount camera, this is false. a 35mm f/2.5 Voigtlander pancake has the same diameter and half the height of the 38mm f/1.8 Pen Zuiko (in no small part because the VC lens sits partially inside the camera body). The 90mm Pen lens, likewise, is very similar in size to a 100/3.5 Canon LTM lens.
Pornoprisms and the rotary shutter club
Porroprism. The Pen uses a porroprism (no, not pornoprism) to deliver the viewfinder picture. Porroprisms are derived from binocular design and allow an optical path to be twisted on its axis to get around corners. You might know this same general idea as a periscope. The Pen uses this to get light from a side-flipping mirror, up the right side of the camera across the top deck, and into your eye. The byproduct is that the top of the camera is flat. Olympus penned this as “revolutionary” and derided “old style pentaprisms.”
The reality was that the porroprism was the only way to solve for a situation where the reflex mirror flipped to the side rather than flipping up. This, in turn, was the byproduct of a frame that was 24mm high and 18mm wide: if you reflected straight up into a pentaprism, the mirror box of the Pen would have been just as deep as a full-frame 35mm SLR – because 24mm worth of mirror height would have to flip up (because the image height is the same as a full-frame camera.
The porroprism system is not bright. Sorry. I have a bunch of Pens, and even the FV has nothing on a full-size 35mm SLR. Why? The porroprism system has many more parts and many more air-glass surfaces. For light to get into the eyepiece on a Pen, it passes through:
- A main reflex mirror (1 front-surface)
- A focusing screen (2 air to plastic surfaces)
- A lower prism (2 air to glass surfaces)
- Another front-surface mirror (on metered models, with a 50% light loss)
- A 2-component condenser lens (2 air to glass surfaces)
- A second prism (2 air to glass surfaces)
- An ocular lens (2 air to glass surfaces)
On a conventional SLR:
- A main reflex mirror (1 front-surface)
- A focusing screen (2 air to glass)
- A condenser (maybe)
- A pentaprism (2 air to glass surfaces)
- An ocular lens (2 air to glass surfaces)
On top of the insanely complicated porroprism system in the Pen that unavoidably degrades brightness and contrast, a most conventional SLRs do not compromise the entire viewfinder brightness for the sake of a meter. Some feed off the roof of the pentaprism and some look though semi silvered spots in reflex mirror. But it’s rare that there would be a first-surface mirror that had 50% reflectance/50% transmission.
The porroprism concept would not have worked on a full-size 35mm SLR, nor would it actually work on anything that did not have a “portrait” frame orientation relative to film travel. It might have done something to mitigate the awful size of 6×4.5 SLRs, but no one actually tried that. But at the end of the day, the porroprism was an artifact of an arbitrary choice of film format. It was the one way that Maitani could design a small half-frame SLR, and it is not portable to most other formats.
Rotary shutter. Olympus did not exactly invent this; the rotary shutter was long in use on cine cameras and even some full-sized 35mm, like the Unisex, er, I mean, Univex Mercury. This is a questionable innovation, and its use is really driven by the body-consuming porroprism path. Most 35mm SLRs are built around something like the Copal Square S shutter. The shutter is a flat unit; the mechanical drive is a box affixed to one side. None of this impedes the optical path, which goes straight up into the pentaprism. On the Pen, you can’t use that space because part of the viewfinder is there. The rotary shutter hardware in a Pen sits fairly flat. The advantage of a rotary shutter is that it can synch at all speeds; the disadvantage is that it can only spin so fast. Consider also the sensitivity of something whose timing relies on sheer speed. A conventional metal SLR shutter runs mechanically as fast as its synch speed. So it may sweep the frame at 1/125 of a second, but the effective speed is 1/1000 because only a fraction of the frame is being exposed at a time. This is one of the reasons why the Copal was one of the most popular focal-plane shutters of all time. It isn’t high strung.
The optics of optics
Lenses. One of the big draws for the Pen are its tiny lenses (compared to full-sized 35mm SLRs). That said, it’s a fairly closed universe. Lenses run from 20mm (~30mm in 35mm format), and conventional primes maxing out at 250mm (~375mm). Most primes take 43mm filters, which is convenient.
But there is nothing that wide-fiends would recognize as more than a moderately wide lens. The two zooms are constant aperture but do not really save much space.
In retrospect, Maitani’s decision to put the lens mount lock on the lens (and not the camera bayonet) was a poor choice. In theory, you should be able to fit any SLR lens to something with a register distance within .15mm of a Leica M. But the locking mechanism in the rear apparently has made this unattractive. So your choices are adapting M42 lenses (of which super-wide is rare), or Nikon or Olympus super-wides, which are generally so big that you may as well use them on full-size cameras.
Perhaps most infuriating is the inability to mount Leica lenses. The register distance of a Leica thread mount lens is 28.80mm; the register of a Pen is 28.95. It should have been possible, in theory, to put most (but not all) LTM lenses on the table. In theory, though – Leica-mount lenses still have rangefinder cams that project behind the lens mount, and some wides have protruding rear ends. So at best, maybe 50mm and up, plus retrofocus wides.
Those gripes aside, the Pen lenses are fantastically sharp. Having tested quite a few of these out, here are some short takes:
20mm f/3.5 – awesome wide-angle (like a 28mm or 30mm).
25mm f/4 – a sleeper of a wide, sold for very little, the equivalent of a 35mm lens. Fairly dim viewfinder image on the FT but passable on the F and FV. Unlike the 2.8 version, this is tiny, about the size of the 38mm.
38mm f/1.8 – the base lens on the FT and the normal bundled lens with an FV, this lens is small and sharp. It does not give up much in terms of speed to the 40mm f/1.4, and it is a touch shorter.
40mm f/1.4 – the “upgrade” on the FT, this is actually super-bright on the FV. It does not have great bokeh, and it does have lanthanum glass that will need bleaching every now and then.
100mm f/3.5 – surprisingly sharp and cheap 150mm equivalent. Not much smaller than a 35mm rangefinder 100mm lens.
50-90mm f/3.5 – a strange and wonderful fixed-aperture zoom, this actually has remarkably low distortion. The rotating front is not great for grad or other filters that themselves rotate, but this deserves far more play than people give it.
Replacing some old problems with new ones
The Forever War Roll. The Pen series actually exacerbates one problem: the roll of film that never ends. This was originally sold as a feature. In the long view, it is probably actually a bug. It is pretty much a given that you lose interest in a roll of film when it is about 80% done. Search your feelings. You know this to be true, no matter how long or short the roll. On a 24×36 camera, that might mean frame 19 on a roll of 24 or frame 29 on a roll of 36. Unfortunately, when your roll of film could be 72 frames, as on a Pen, that means you could be in the pain zone with fourteen frames to spare.
Scanning. Half-frame was never a favorite of photofinishers; even in the minilab era, 18×24 wreaked havoc on printing to normal sizes. For scanning, Pen negatives are manageable with a Pakon x35 series scanner (since you can tell it an arbitrary frame size and it does all 72 frames in one continuous process). They are not so manageable with higher-resolution film scanners because very little scanning software is designed around anything outside of “mainstream” formats (24×36, 6×4.5, 6×6, 6×7, 6×9).
Optical printing. One thing to bear in mind is that optically printing half-frame usually benefits from shorter enlarging lenses than 50mm; for 18×24, they are typically 40mm. You should also be aware that most brands of enlargers don’t make (and in many cases never made) negative carrier inserts in 18×24. That said, without the urge to pixel-peep, you might actually enjoy the prints.
We still love the Pen F
None of this is to say that the Pen F is a bad camera – in fact, it is an extremely cool platform that is fun to use and actually manages to make very sharp, well-exposed images. It is, however, a system whose marketing hype outruns the utility of its innovative features. In the end, if this piece sounds like razzing, just bear in mind that we only do it because we know the Pen can take it!
The Machine Planet 