For many photographers, owning a Leica is a dream, and perhaps the most desired model right now is the M11. However, this camera comes with some notable issues, as this video finds out.
Formerly of The Verge, cinematographer and DOP Becca Farsace is no stranger to testing some of the best cameras on the market, so she’s in a good position to offer her thoughts on what constitutes a dream camera for many photographers, the M11. However, when you drop the best part of ten grand on a camera, you don’t expect it to arrive and suddenly find it freezing up.
A quick search online shows that Farsace’s freezes are not isolated incidents, and from my own, singular experience of playing with a Leica, these cameras sure don’t like having their buffers overwhelmed while loaded with a not-premium SD card. In 2019, I visited Leica’s Paris store for the launch of the SL2 and managed to all but brick the camera within a few minutes of having it in my hands. As I mused back then, it was possible that the SL2 was so disgusted at having such a cheap piece of tat forcibly inserted into its beautifully machined, elegantly styled interior, that it registered its objections by taking its ball and going home.
For the second issue, I’ll let Farsace explain, but it won’t come as much of a surprise!
Is the occasional freeze acceptable? Let us know in the comments below.
Any device freeze-up scares me. Imagine losing a once in a lifetime shot. I have had some strangeness with a lens adaptor in the past like this. It made me worried that it would freeze up at just the wrong time. I guess that is not so important for planned settings, but for things in the moment it could be a sad face moment.
Leicas biggest differential is not the sensor size or software speed. Since the GFX has larger files, Sony and Canon and Nikon have faster/bigger buffers it is incredibly naive to argue that the freezing is not an ugly bug on a very expensive camera.
Coming from the software development side this is even more egregious because it points to lack of basic testing and QA. Talking about cards in terms of "premium" or not is like talking about cables in audiophile terms. Every aspect of their behaviour is quantifiable, Leicas problem might be with slower cards with points to sub par and bad software.
The very least you can expect is for them to take the most popular cards and sizes and test those before launch. They clearly did not do it enough because people are reporting issues with good quality cards.
I went looking just to be sure im not only projecting my experience into others and found this comment to represent the sentiment of a few Leica owners and its appalling to me:
"Like all Leica digital cameras, one suffers from the occasional freeze"
Pinnacle of quality indeed.
It's a bad situation for sure -although my M10 and M10 Monochrom never freezes. What I don't understand is why Nikon, Canon, Fuji and Sony don't create a "better" Leica M camera. All of those companies refuse to create a small, simplified manual focus camera. Between the high cost of Leica cameras and the occasional freezes there is an opportunity to create a superior version of what Leica produces.
This. Absolutely this. And while they're at it, why not a 35mm fixed lens full-frame camera? If Fuji keeps running out of X100s, surely it's clear that there's a market. Could even go head-to-head and make it APS-C.
No. There is only ONE problem with the M11 and that is I do not have one. 😢
The freezing issue was fixed in firmware over a year ago, so it seems dishonest or irresponsible to make a big deal of an issue that no longer exists and then spend less than a second of the video saying they fixed it in firmware - kind of clickbait move.
The whole video seemed out of place - why review an expensive camera (as if that's not known) and merely conclude that it's too expensive and you can't do selfies with it?
Becca since like the feel of Leica and prefer 28mm and think you want to shoot an M6 with film, I suggest you do what I do. I own an M6 TTL with .85 magnification finder. I really really prefer to shoot with a 1:1 finder, which Leica has never made. So I use a viewfinder magnifier (1.25x or 1.15x) to bring it up to about 1:1. The .85x viewfinder has no 28mm frameline, but here is a trick you can do that no one ever seems to point out. With the finder magnifier in place and both eyes open, when shooting horizontally your brain will see the outline of the camera to give you a pretty clear location of the sides and top of the 28mm field of view. You can then shoot seeing peoples' faces, expressions, etc clear as can be. Also your focus will be more accurate. Note this is a bit like watching a movie in a theater from the front row; you see details great but getting the whole screen in view requires some scanning back and forth. To see the whole field easily but with less detail, you can add an auxiliary 28mm viewfinder on top, or M6 could also be had in .58x magnification, which is great for 28mm (but little else). The M11 is .73x only, which is almost useless for 28mm.
If shooting 28mm vertically with the 1:1, you can look around the corner to find the 35 frame to get a rough idea of the view.
Another approach is to ditch the viewfinder magnifier, and if you don't wear glasses, you can see the 35mm frameline fine with .85x and shoot with 35mm, which is the most popular lens among Leica photogs I believe.
Meanwhile if you get good scans, use photoshop and the newest Topaz Denoise tools in post, you can (often) get sharpness, detail and grain-free images with film that rival digital. But without battery dependence and with no freezing. And your grandchildren can inherit your M6 and shoot with it in the year 2095. (my other Leica was made in 1930 and still shoots fine)
I have an M11 with updated firmware and have never experienced any freeze-ups. I would like to warn readers of this posting that this is not true and qualifies more as clickbait than anything else.
Worked for 15 years heavy shooting with Nikon and Hasselblad. NEVER had a single freeze 🕶️