Reviews of the new M9

Just a quick ist of reviews I saw looking into the new M9.
Luminous Landscape. He loves it.
Jonathan Slack's review (lots of great pictures)
Dpreview. They also actually touched one.
Focus Numérique. If you read french. They have some 100% blowups of high ISO images.
Ken Rockwell. He doesn't have one yet, but still waxes lyrical.

If you know of any more let me know. Concerning reviews, I just don't understand why Leica doesn't think I am worthy enough to test one ;-) . Of course, I am far from wealthy enough to be able to afford one, so I am decidedly out of the market. Still it is is nice to finally see a nicely simplistic, well designed, rangefinder camera with a full frame sensor.

EDIT: Another nice one here from David Farkas.

Leica M9

The web is abuzz with the (obviously not by accident) leaked specs for a new Leica camera called the M9. Apparently this will be a full frame rangefinder with 18 megapixels. I scoured the (adorned with very enjoyable Cuban street photography) pdf brochure and this looks likie a fantastic camera. If you're asking about the price you are decidedly not in the market for this thing. Expect it to cost as much as a D3x. Even though the brochure is clearly real, there are some strange things. This camera's native RAW format is DNG (hurrah Leica!!!) but Leica claims the format maintains the sensor's total 16 bits per channel? That makes no sense. No current photographic sensors have a 16 bit ADC and if they did, it would be utter overkill. There are simply not enough photons to make the signal-to-noise ratio low enough to warrant more than 14 or even 12 bits considering the pixel size on a 18 MP FF sensor. You're just more accurately imaging noise, which really doesn't help you with anything but create bigger files. Not even the D3 with far larger pixels needs 16 bits as 14 bits is already overkill simply because of basic physics. Anyway, the uncompressed DNG files are supposedly 36 MB, which is precisely right for a 16 bits capture on a 18 MP sensor. Concerning the DNG files, why is there no lossless compression that is standard in DNG (lossless jpeg), but only a gamma trick similar to the one Nikon uses in its lossy compressed NEFs? This seems strange to me. Lossy DNG compression is very much nonstandard and unnecessary as the lossless jpeg compression is just as efficient, but it is lossless. All in all, this is a very interesting camera, with some interesting technology. It is going to be very light and should be ideal for street photography and also landscapes. On the other hand, this thing is going to be extremely expensive. If you need the quality but cannot grok the premium price you'll pay for this Leica and don't mind a little extra volume and weight, consider a Canon 5D mk II or a Sony A850.

Leica M8

There were two reviews of the Leica M8, a digital rangefinder camera modeled after the famous film Leicas that recently made the rounds on the web. I never saw the point of the digital version and thought it is just an expensive toy for collectors. For that price Leica should really manage to put a full-frame sensor in there, it would add almost nothing to their cost compared to what they're asking and make the camera infinitely more useful, but I digress. I saw two recent reviews posted by two different photojournalists recently that reach diametrically opposed conclusions. They're interesting reads. The first and very negative one is from Michael Kamber. He rides around with troops in Iraq and finds the M8 utterly lacking for many of the reasons one would expect. The second is from Bruno Stevens, who ascribes almost mythical qualities to the M8. While the first review is sometimes silly in its putdowns (images that have moderate noise but still good definition are completely unusable suddenly, while they are better than what you get with fast film), it is very well supported and is exactly in line with what you expect from the camera. On the other hand the second review makes conclusions that are untenable such as that the M8 has similar quality to a 6x9 scan which is just impossible for a crop sensor no matter how good the lens but he makes a good point that the unobtrusiveness of a rangefinder is great in certain situations. Of course you get the same effect with a $200 P&S. I thought that the juxtaposition of the two reviews was very interesting and really illustrates that people can have very different and often valid viewpoints of the same thing.

Update: I just read this fantastic column that is very applicable to the Leica thing.