That's interesting. When you look at M9 firmware in a Windows text editor (the simpler, the better, like NotePad) you see nothing but Oriental characters. This seemed to mean that the bits in the firmware had been encrypted or randomized before shipping it, and that the M9 would decrypt this code before installing it. In the M8 and now the M240, you can read all sorts of text strings as they will appear on the camera screen. It took a bit of searching around, but in the M8 firmware it was possible to spot tables of information that produced the EXIF data in the output files. Since this is the last thing that Leica's engineers get around to while fixing more serious bugs, users like me or Carl Bretteville could identify why certain lenses would claim to have a maximum aperture of 1.0, signifying that this field in the tables had not been filled in. Perhaps if this kind of lapse persists in the M240, we amateur sleuths can help to spot the causes.
As an exercise, load up the new firmware in NotePad and use "find" to look for "Summilux".
scott
Yep, you caught me
28m F1.4 Summilux-M ASPH came to mind during my search
But other things were interesting too - like Leica NOT embedding the lens name into the EXIF, yet the data tables existed in the firmware, so what happened there...?... Leica fixed that in 2.0.15, but why was it messed up in the first place? There are also parameters for auto-focus, but assuming this firmware starts as some sort "off the shelf" code, the firmware writers may simply "turn off" parts of code for the M-240 and "turn on" for the Leica S/S2. Or, perhaps more interesting, did the M-240's firmware start with the Leica S2's? Seems like a stupid idea, but since both use the Maestro chip, maybe?
I'd be interested to know if Leica sent the specs and had a 3rd party customize the firmware or if Leica did / does it in-house with their own staff. Given all the customizations, I'd like to see it done in-house for continuity reasons. And looking forward, a camera like the Model T is essentially all firmware. If that is the direction Leica is headed (in terms of GUI's, etc), then I'd want 100% control over that software team.
I'd love to know how those Green Lantern guys take apart Canon's firmware and put it back together. If they can do it, then maybe some very motivated people could do the same for Leica's firmware.