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.

Review of the new pocketwizards

Rob Galbraith has an extensive review of the new pocket wizards flash remotes, the MiniTT1 and FlexTT5. These new versions actually transmit TTL info to and from the camera. They also have a new "hypersync" mode that allows you to sync flash and shutter wirelessly at very high speeds without getting black banding. Cool stuff!

Excellent D3x review

Thom Hogan has a very good review of the new D3x up on his site. As you would expect he says it is the best DSLR made to-date but presents doubtful value to most photographers. Might be right for some, mostly landscapers with a lot of money to burn.

Rockwell likes Lightroom 2

Check it out.
Quote from his review:
"Now, with Lightroom 2's ability to do local corrections, it's probably all that even serious photographers need."

Well said indeed!

LR 2.0 review

Dave Girard from ars technica just posted a review of LR 2.0. I have always enjoyed his reviews and this is bound to not be an exception. If you're still on the fence on whether to get LR 2, go read this and you'll get lots of objective info.

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.