We used the Leica M11 for a month!

[Music] what's up gang it's david we're doing something on the studio channel today that we haven't actually done yet uh we've been thinking about doing for a while it's called bitrate it's where we take a new product or an old product that and we kind of just talk about it for a bit and give our impressions so this is the leica m11 and like it was courteous enough to lend me this for a while i just got it so this part of the video is going to be my very first impressions about the m11 and then later in the video i'll have used it for a while and i'll come back with actual deeper impressions but just to give you a top-level perspective of the leica m11 this is obviously a leica camera they're quite expensive they are really really well built the m11 is very similar to the n10 in a lot of ways it looks very similar to the m10 but there's a lot of really interesting features about this camera that a lot of cameras just don't have yet like tons of dedicated cameras don't have yet so i'm sort of going to give you like a little bit of a elevator pitch on like what's new in the m11 and why i'm pretty excited about this stuff one of the biggest things about the m11 is that it has a bsi sensor that does pixel binning and that's something that's been in smartphones for a while now if you don't know what binning is it's basically like you have a sensor and you can it's subdivided into a certain resolution and then you can use groups of pixels to make like one super pixel for much better low light performance so the m11 is a 60 megapixel full frame sensor and the fact that you can get a full frame sensor and a camera this small is a pretty big deal uh for reference i've been using the fuji x100v for like the last year and they're almost the same size the x100v is a little smaller but the fact that you have a full-frame sensor and a camera this small is amazing so like i said 60 megapixel sensor like like i uh like i said um like i like i said 60 megapixel sensor uh which is pretty awesome and then you can basically use these cropped modes so you can get lower resolution there's a large resolution a medium resolution and then the small resolution you have the option of 60 megapixels of 36 megapixels and of 18 megapixels and so when you're using the lower megapixel modes you're gonna get better low light performance they get an extra stop-off dynamic range and if you want the least amount of possible noise then you can use the 18 megapixel mode because it's basically just using groups of pixels as one big pixel on the sensor you can pop the bottom off and this is actually different from most leica cameras too most like a cameras have this bottom plate that you have to screw off it was kind of an homage to loading the film and unloading your film they took that away a lot of people are gonna be a little bit upset about that but that allows for a much bigger battery which is really cool so it lasts a lot longer there's 64 gigs of internal storage and you've also got your sd card slot also usb c port right on the bottom here so you can transfer photos directly to your phone or to your computer straight from the camera so you don't even have to use the sd card slot if you don't want to which is pretty awesome but yeah those are sort of the the main things about this camera that are pretty interesting to me the fact that there's all these features that have been in phones for a while now but are just coming to cameras i never really anticipated leica to be like the innovative one that's bringing all these features to a dedicated digital camera but they are so that's amazing i'm just gonna shoot with this basically over the holidays gonna come back gonna give you my actual impressions about using the m11 and then we'll talk about it so i'll see you in the future [Music] that was for brandon hello from the future um now it's like three weeks later i think today is january definitely not the 28th oh it's 28 degrees oh the january 3rd we're still in the past from when you'll see this because of the embargo but it is january 3rd and that means that i've had this camera for like three ish weeks now i flew to california took some photos of my like friends and family in california then i went up to seattle my flight got canceled because there was an insane amount of snow but uh i was able to take a lot of photos like on the way to seattle and oregon and a few like different random places so i'm basically going to be bringing you into this room where i compare my experience with this camera two cameras that i'm very used to using very frequently and then we're going to talk a little bit about it see how to market lunch and then i'll bring you through my experiences maybe we'll look at a couple raw files just to see like how it edits what the files look like right when you start shooting uh so come along with me into the crayon all right so with me here i have like we said the leica m11 i have the other two cameras that i use the most which is the fuji x100v another digital camera there's an aps-c camera and then i've also got the fujifilm tx1 which is a film camera uh from the 90s that i shoot on all the time it's panoramic and the reason i chose these cameras to sort of compare this camera to is there's a lot of similarities i almost see the like m11 as sort of like a hybrid between these two cameras so i think something that's really going to stand out about the leica m11 to a lot of people who are maybe not used to shooting a range finder is that even though this is a mirrorless digital camera leica really wants to you to shoot this like it's a film camera it's got an optical viewfinder with some like digital elements that sit on top which basically tell you things like your shutter speed exposure all that stuff but there's an exposure meter in the optical viewfinder that is pretty much exactly the same as the exposure meter in my fuji tx1 it's got a little red circle if the exposure is good it's got a little red triangle pointing to the left if it's overexposed and a little red triangle pointing to the right if it's underexposed so kind of the idea here is that you should be able to keep your eye to the viewfinder as much as possible and you should be able to just change the exposure triangle the shutter speed the aperture and the iso in order to basically get your exposure correct now of course there is a screen and you can use the screen if you want to i think this is going to be really helpful for a lot of people who like want to shoot over their head or things like that one big thing is that it doesn't have a tilt screen and i know i talked about that before on the fuji x100v i often shoot from the hip so this has like this tilt screen that comes out like that and it allows me to shoot kind of from like this angle which is really nice um whereas the leica isn't like that leica obviously wants to keep all of their cameras as close to like the m3 style as possible and i mean they've done that here if you look at these cameras again they're like very close in size and the tx1 is actually bigger because it's a panoramic camera but overall very similar between these three cameras now if you actually use the optical viewfinder most of the time you don't use the screen like leica kind of wants you to do you're going to get like a lot more shots out of this camera they did use a much bigger battery this year like i said in earlier in the video but if you use the optical viewfinder only you can get around 1700 shots out of this camera on a single battery which is pretty insane and leica is um basically saying that you can get about 700 shots if you have the screen on so like that's a pretty massive difference and that's pretty good battery life especially for a full frame camera that's digital wow now one thing i definitely had trouble with and this is just because i'm used to having autofocus on the x100v and shooting really quickly is that the leica m11 doesn't have autofocus and i think a lot of people are going to be annoyed at that but the primary reason is because this camera is made to be used with leica's lenses from like 50 60 years ago it obviously fits all m-now lenses so you can use so many lenses on this camera and they just don't have the contacts to allow for autofocus right it's not going to do that for you but a lot of people who use leica lenses kind of swear by manual focus anyway and there's actually something called zone focusing where you start at infinity and then your finger kind of automatically knows where to go based on how far away you are from your subject i'm not very good at that yet i really want to get good at that and that's something that you sort of have to get good at if you're like doing street photography with a film camera that doesn't have autofocus or just any camera that doesn't have autofocus definitely something i want to learn but that's definitely going to be frustrating for a lot of people if you're used to having autofocus on your camera now something i also talked about before was the fact that this camera has internal storage which is awesome sometimes i would forget my sd card in my computer because i would be editing photos on my laptop and i would just go out to shoot with the camera and normally if you didn't have your sd card you just couldn't shoot photos but because this has 64 gigs of internal storage i literally found myself like taking photos and forgetting that i didn't even have my sd card in there and it didn't really matter and that's something that i'm really hoping that we see in more cameras going forward and it's kind of surprising that leica's one of the first companies to do this they did this with like another camera a while ago but it's pretty much the first like flagship camera we've seen in a very long time to have internal storage so that's pretty awesome the other thing is the usbc port that we have right here on the bottom and that's for a number of things you can charge it you can transfer data straight from the usbc port to your phone or to your computer which is amazing because you can transfer that data from the internal storage or from your sd card so that's really nice because that way you just need a usbc the usbc cable usb-c to usb cable and you don't actually need an sd card reader which is amazing because sd card reader is becoming less and less common nowadays anyway something else i actually really enjoyed was the fact that this camera has like very fine shutter speed adjustments so it'll say 1 250th and 1 500th but it actually goes in between that by half a step every single time so you can get really really fine adjustments in there if you really want to like dial in the type of shot that you want to get right off the bat and another thing i think that people maybe don't think about enough is the menu system on cameras now leica completely redesigned the menu system on the m11 so it's this really really simplistic menu that i like quite a bit it just has tons of different features and if you just go to the straight menu system you can access all of these different modes and functions so the m11 actually has a much better light meter than a lot of the cameras before it definitely better than all the m cameras before it so it's kind of exposing for the entire scene instead of just a specific area i have found that for my style of shooting the m11 overexposes on auto mode by a little bit but the nice thing about that is that you have exposure compensation and you can set that in thirds of stops so i just permanently said i want negative one ev so that it underexposes what it would normally think the exposure should be just slightly and that's just the style that i like to shoot a lot of people maybe want a more balanced exposure but that's really nice to be able to do in camera there's also a couple different function buttons and wheels on this camera so you've got this function wheel and button on the back here and then you've also got a function button on top which is really convenient because you can map different features to that button now overall this camera is going to retail for 8 995 for the body and that is very very very expensive um if you've been in the world of leica you know that most leica cameras are kind of about that price especially modern day digital leicas uh but you're definitely getting better build quality than any other camera that i've ever used before it's sort of that rule where you get 10 percent better build quality or maybe 15 20 better build quality but you're paying like five times the price now the benefit of that is that the tolerance of everything is just insanely tight like these cameras end up looking amazing for years and years and years they're selling a brass version of this camera and an aluminum version the aluminum is 20 lighter i imagine the brass will probably hold up better but they're probably both going to hold up very well the other nice thing is like when you pay that much money for a camera at least it's sort of an investment and it's holding its value right like m cameras don't go that down in price over time and digital m cameras will probably go down a little bit more than film m cameras but i still think that the m11 is probably going to hold its price for a while considering the m10 and the m10r are still very very expensive cameras even to this day when they were released multiple years ago so while i was shooting with this over the holiday i did notice that it's very very difficult to hit focus at f 1.4 or f2 and that's just because i'm used to shooting f2 on an aps-c camera 1.4 or f2 on a full frame is a whole different situation it's a lot harder to hit so i'll generally shoot like f 2.8 or f4 on this camera and it's a lot easier to actually hit focus now the actual files that are coming out of the m11 are really amazing obviously leica has a very famous color it's very flat uh it's not like kind of saturated and stylized like fuji's color is it's sort of been made to either deliver straight out of camera images or be able to edit the files a lot and the raw images have a ton of flexibility uh here's a few photos that i edited really quick during my trip and you can just see like the detail and the color and the texture on like the train is just completely different than you're gonna get from an aps-c or a micro four-thirds camera there's just something really special about a full-frame or a medium format sensor that adds that like granular texture that granular tonality that you can't really get on many other smaller sensors one minute 37 seconds later come on man oh there you go oh okay we keep moving so there's this like reflection off this building over here the cool thing about this lens that's this is actually a very old lens being mounted to this camera is that it creates really cool sun stars because of the aperture so if we if we close down the aperture a lot we're gonna get a really sick sunstar oh yeah i'm already seeing it oh yeah hell yeah i mean heck yeah look at that sunstar get that boom baby oh wow there's a 35 millimeter lens but there's some frames that i want to get that are very far away and there's no way that i'm gonna be able to like get to that with a 35 now this does have crop modes that allows you to crop in i think to one 1.8 x but i would rather just do that in post so i'm gonna get just this like beautiful scene here which is pretty awesome even though i wasn't really able to get a good picture from the start i mean 60 megapixels lets me connect me into an image later right like that's kind of amazing oh yeah okay let's walk towards the lake yeah i could probably do something with this and then look at that behind you a little closer [Music] more sun stars on if this is my camera i'd use my mouse but i'm not gonna do that dang gosh dang it that's some pretty imagery digital zoom there's 1.3 x and 1.8 x so i'm trying 1.8 x because i only have this 35 millimeter and i want to shoot that tree on that boat over there on the frozen lake okay so it's like sort of already cropped in i think i'll probably turn that off but that's good to have yeah i love that like orange reflection on the oh okay [Music] you

Channel: The Studio

Views: 183,854

Keywords: MKBHD, The Studio, Leica, photography, camera review, mirrorless

Id: XR5f7py5y2c

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022