I cross-posted this on a few Leica S related forums hoping to read how other Leica S users feel about the new camera.
Now that Photokina-storm is behind us and we’ve all had a little more time to let everything sink in, here are some of my thoughts and questions (to Leica) on the new S. The more I think about it, the more I like the new camera, but I have some questions/suggestions. The final version is still at least 6 months away, so I guess there’s enough time for the design team to sit down and evaluate some of the feedback from potential customers.
This write up by David Farkas is quite interesting:
» Photokina 2014: Day 2 – Everything you need to know about the Leica S (Typ 007)
The pictures on this website (in Dutch) made me think about the video implementation as it was presented at PK’14.
Leica introduceert Leica S-E en Leica S met 4K video #photokina2014. | Leica in Nederland
Video/motion:
- Why not CinemaDNG instead of Motion JPEG? This should give considerably more headroom in post. Of course there’s a lot of data to be chewed on, but Motion JPEG seems too limited.
- Why not HDMI 1.4(a) out for external 4K recording? HDMI v1.3 cannot carry 4K signals and will be quite out of date in 2015 and beyond. Lots of consumer electronics come with the new HDMI standard already.
- 4K recording from the whole sensor would make the camera much more interesting, even if this means pixel binning/line skipping. The look from the complete 30x45mm sensor would make it quite unique and wide angle lenses would stay wide angle.
- Looking at the picture of the video camera rig I can’t understand why they’d have designed it like this; looking through the optical viewfinder makes no sense since the mirror has to be up for video-shooting. Why not make the flash-shoe take an EVF so that is an option for more ergonomically handling in video-mode?
- As for sound, I don’t think the use of 3.5 mm jack connections is going to be enough for professional sound. Balanced XLR is what will be necessary if sound is recorded directly on the camera.
- I think Leica still has a lot of work to do concerning video in the new S. I suggest they take a long, hard look at the video specs of for example the €1500 Samsung NX1. Again, to really be of interest to the motion/video crowd in 2015-2019 (2-4 years for the next completely new S to arrive) the video specs need to be much better implemented and certainly be more modern than the newly announced S.
I’ll leave it at that for now, with one more minor remark about the hyperfocal distance read-out on the top-display, I think the order should be reversed so that it reads back/focus/front instead of front/focus/back. To me, this seems much more logical from the POV of the camera operator. Maybe Leica can make the order of appearance a menu option.