LEICA RELEASES A FULL-FRAME COMPACT CAMERA (FOR ZILLIONAIRES)
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FINALLY, THERE’S A compact Leica camera for the everyman—so long as the everyman is cool with spending $4,250 on it. Still, this is cheap for a Leica, and the specs and features live up to the brand’s legacy.
If you can afford it, the brand-new Leica Q looks like the ultimate more-portable shooter for anyone who doesn’t want to lug around a big-bodied DSLR. The sensor is gigantic: a full-frame 24-megapixel imager with a burst mode that captures 10 frames per second without autofocus enabled. The optically stabilized lens is a speed demon: It has a maximum aperture of f/1.7 and a wide-angle fixed focal length of 28mm. If that super-bright f/1.7 isn’t enough to capture images at the fastest shutter speed of 1/16000, rest assured the ISO ramps up to 50,000.
In short? This is going to be a fun camera.
The Leica Q doesn’t have an interchangeable-lens body, and it isn’t a rangefinder, either. You’ll need to use its eye-level electronic viewfinder or 3-inch touchscreen LCD to frame up your shots. Autofocus should make this model more appealing over the M series, provided you can afford the price of entry. Leica claims the contrast-detection autofocus system built into the Q is “the fastest in the full-frame compact class,” although the company doesn’t offer raw fraction-of-a-second numbers to back that statement.
While Leica is known for tradition, the Q also has a few modern spins to go along with its touchscreen. The camera has built-in Wi-Fi and pairs to iOS and Android apps, letting you offload images to your mobile device and control manual settings wirelessly. The Q also shoots HD video at up to 60fps in MP4 format.
Remember that the word “compact” is relative to its sensor size. The company stresses that these cameras are “made in Germany,” and this is not a little pocketable point-and-shoot. It’s more like the size of a mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera, and it’s bigger than its chief rival, Sony’s full-frame RX1, which costs less than half the price. At 5.1-inches wide, 3.14-inches tall, and 3.6-inches deep, the Q is a bit chunkier than the 4.5 x 2.6 x 2.8-inch Sony. It also weighs close to a pound and a half, while the Sony is only a pound.
But in terms of specs, the Leica Q looks to have it trumped. Despite the same-resolution sensor, the new Leica doubles up the 5-fps continuous-shooting speed of the RX1 and has a brighter and wider-angle lens than the Sony (35mm, f/2.0). But as always, with Leica, the sticker shock hurdle remains: A camera for the everyman doesn’t usually come with such an enormous price tag, and convincing a more general consumer to pay that much will be a considerable challenge.
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