Leica Q2 Monochrome first impression

 

I have had the Leica Q2 Monochrom for just over two days now, not exactly a long time but I want to document want I have found out about this camera. There have been some good things and bad things about the camera so far. But before I start on this first impression, I had to state that I am not a fanboy for any camera manufacture, cameras are tools that I use. The Nikon F2 is my favorite camera of all time so I will always compare cameras to that in some way.

 

 

The Leica Q2 Monochrom is my first Leica and I bought this camera purely for the monochrome sensor. I would not have bought the camera if it was a normal color sensor, ie Leica Q2. When it comes to digital color photography, I am more than happy with my Nikon Z6. So it is all about the Monochrome sensor.

 

 

 

The unboxing of the Leica is something very special. I love the way the box just falls open like a present in a fairy tale. Everything about the Leica box and the initial opening of the box, screams attention to detail and premium quality.

 

 

The main black box reminds me of a jewelry box.

 

 

 

Every accessory that comes with the camera has its own silk bag, including the battery and cables. Almost overkill, to be honest with you.

 

 

I have bought a lot of new cameras throughout my photography, starting with the Nikon D700 and upgrading during the progress of my camera. The list of new cameras that I bought include, D700, D3s, D4, D4s, Df, D5200, D500, Z6, Fujifilm X100, Fujifilm XT1, Fujifilm XE3, Sony Nex5, Canon G7 Mark II, Ricoh GRiii and Pentax kx. None of those cameras can compare with the unboxing of the Leica. The experience is completely different and feels like it was designed to give off an aura of luxury. I enjoy the process of unboxing the Leica. But unboxing a camera is very different from using it.

 

 

My first impression of the Leica Q2 Monchrom was slightly quizzical. The camera was still in its little plastic bag but the camera felt much lighter than I had expected. Maybe it was all the stereotypes that I have heard about Leica in the past, but I expected something heavier and substantial. The metal body felt great in the hand, the lens aperture ring felt really nice when changing the apertures, just like my old film cameras. Overall I would say that I liked how the Leica Q2 Monochrom felt in my hand but I did notice that the camera felt a little slippery and the fingers of my right hand didn’t have a good place to grasp the camera body.

 

 

Just looking at the camera,  and I really do enjoy the design aspect, especially the minimalistic button layout. There are basically only 5 buttons on the back of the camera. Three buttons on the left side of the camera, one above the LCD Screen and one in the direction pad button on the right-hand side of the camera. This is perfect for me. My Nikon Z6 has so many damn buttons and I have never even used half of them. Making a camera more simplistic in its design is a great idea and it makes me want to pick the camera up and play with it. The design and engineering of the Leica Q2 Monochrom are really damn impressive. I also really love the milled-out billet at the back of the camera. My thumb falls perfectly into that space, so I doubt that I would have to buy a thumbs up to use the Leica Q2 Monochrom.

 

 

Inserting the battery and memory card is really nice. I like the way that the battery works with the latch building into the battery, so it is kind of like a magazine clip for a gun. Really smart but I also guess it will make getting third-party batteries nearly impossible now. Even if you could get third-party batteries, would you trust them to be able to maintain the weather sealing of the body? I am not so sure. I usually buy third-party batteries for my cameras, as they are much cheaper and I tend to go through a lot of cameras batteries at the end of a day’s work. Even the massive Nikon D3, D4, D5 batteries don’t last a whole day of shooting at work. I will most likely buy another battery for the Leica Q2 Monochrom sometime in the future but I need to first see how long the battery lasts.  During my first two days, the battery seems to be holding up well and I haven’t needed to charge the battery yet.

 

 

Starting the Leica Q2 monochrome for the first time, I got really scared. I turned on the camera and the back LCD screen flickered and then slowly played an animation. The opening animation was cool but I was worried that the camera would take that long to start up each time. Thankfully that is not the case. I do wish that they would modify the animation and Leica logo to be monochromatic as well. It is kind of jarring to see a black and white screen, then you turn on/off the camera and the red Leica logo pops up. I think it would be much cooler if the Logo was black and white as well. But thankfully the start-up time is really quick once you have watched the opening animation for the first time. I was really worried that this camera would turn out like the original Fujifilm X100 and be very slow to start up.

 

 

I absolutely love the diopter of this camera. It is engineered so well. With the diopter being hidden in the camera body, it would be almost impossible to accidentally change it while carrying the camera around. I have accidentally changed the diopter on my Nikons before and trying to adjust the diopter and take a shot under pressure is not easy.

 

 

Not everything is perfect with this camera though, and I have had more than a few hairpulling moments with it, and I had to turn to google to figure out the problem. So let’s take a look at some of the things that are not great. The first issue that I had was with the camera lugs. I didn’t want to use the camera strap that Leica provided. It is a neck strap and I hate neck-straps. I will never use a neck strap every again. I prefer to hang a camera strap across my body and have the camera hang down, towards my waist. Just like a Backrapid strap. I use black rapid straps at work but for my film cameras and the cameras I use in my own personal photography, I use the Peak Design camera strap as it is comfortable and it is easy to change cameras quickly with this strap. When I wanted to connect the Peak Design connectors to the Leica Q2 Monochrom, I noticed that the camera lugs had no rings. The rings were attached to the camera strap. I had to borrow the camera lug rings off my Nikon F100 so I could connect my camera strap to the body. This is not cool. It is the first camera that I have ever bought and there were no rings for the lugs. This is an extremely expensive camera, so they surely could have included a set of rings in the accessories. Very few photographers that I know these days, still use neckstraps. Maybe Leica shooters still use neckstraps but I would guess that most photographers, in general, have moved away from them.

 

The second problem that I ran into was the actual body of the camera. I found it to be a little slippery. When trying to connect my Peak Design camera strap to the connectors, I was really worried that the camera would slip out of my hand. There is not as much leather/rubber on the camera body and a lot of the metal parts don’t give you a lot of purchase for your fingers to grip on. Once again, this is an expensive camera, so I don’t want to drop it. The first accessory that I ordered for this camera was a grip. The grip gives me something to hold on to when I am using the camera and the camera is just more comfortable to hold. I think Leica knew this, that is why it is selling grips for the Q and Q2. Now the grip does take away from the aesthetic aspect of the camera but it is a fair trade-off as I am more confident when holding the camera now.

 

 

The last major issue that I have with the camera so far came up after I updated the firmware. Leica’s documentation is shockingly bad, I would go as far as to say that out of all the camera manufacturers, Leica’s is the worst. They simply don’t communicate with their customers especially when they change things. My first evening with the camera, I shot the camera with the original firmware. It was just a quick walk outside to test the camera and make sure it works. After my quick walk outside, I downloaded the new firmware, followed the instructions, and updated the firmware. This process left me more than a little frustrated. The firmware update did a hard reset of the whole camera. After the update, you had to watch the introduction animation again, you had to enter the date and time again. Any settings that you might have changed will be gone and you have to set the camera up from the very beginning again. WTF? This is not 1999. This is really some poor software engineering. How difficult would it have been to copy the user’s settings to the memory card, complete the update and then copy the user settings back to the camera as the update finishes? It would have taken more than a few lines of code.  No other camera manufacture does this. For all their mechanical engineering skills displayed with this camera, Leica is clearly a long way behind the other camera manufacturers. Even the menu systems are strange. I had to google the shutter speed settings for the auto-iso section in the menus. If you have to google how to do something with your camera, this is a bad design. There is no explaining this away. Overall, I would say that the menus are worse than a Sony camera system. The second major issue with the firmware update is that Leica changed some of the controls and didn’t document the changes. In the old firmware, if you wanted to enter movie mode, you double-tap the button in the middle of the d-pad controller. Once in movie mode, you can use your shutter button to start and stop recording a video. A good solution for a camera with minimal buttons. Well in the new firmware, this does not work.  While showing the camera off to a friend, I could not get into the video mode. Once again, I had to google the problem and read an answer in a forum post. This is horrible communication from Leica. Even their online manual has not been updated to show the changes that the firmware has made. To be perfectly frank, this is incompetence personified. From a company that pays so much attention to the actual mechanical design and construction of a product, this kind of incompetence is completely unacceptable.

 

 

But all those problems aside, a camera really should be “set it and forget it”. Once you have initially set up a camera, the menus systems should almost never be used again and this is where the Leica Q2 Monochrom excels. Once I set the camera up for the second time, I have not gone back into the menu system. It is set up the way I like and I can control the important parts of the camera with physical buttons. The physical part of the camera is really nice. All the buttons feel great, the dials are nice and the lens is really smooth for manual focus, once you figure out how to do it. Shooting with the camera has really been a pleasant experience now that it is set up.

 

 

The viewfinder seems really good. I would say it is on par with my Nikon Z6 viewfinder but I did notice some slow down using it at night. I know there is a boost mode in the menu system that should improve the frame rates but I don’t know if that would work at night, I need to test it sometime. But overall, I really like the viewfinder. It is so nice to see a black and white image in the EVF while composing. It makes seeing the scene so much easier.

 

 

I would go into too much detail about the quality of the pictures that this camera can produce as I need a lot more experience with the camera but so far I am really happy with it. The resolution is crazy, the amount of detail recorded in a shot is insane and you can do some crazy levels of cropping and still get a usable shot. The digital zooms is a real option here with the resolution provided, but the only negative with the digital crop modes that the camera provides is that the crop only applies to the jpeg, so if you are just shooting raw files when you view the shots on the back of the LCD screen, you will not see the cropped shot, just the frame lines on the raw file. So I actually shoot both DNG and Jpeg, so I can view how the crop photos look like in the back of the scene. I have no use for the jpeg files except for viewing images on the back screen. But the raw file does maintain the crop when you import the file, so when you view the raw file in your image editor such as Lightroom, you get the cropped image but you can undo the crop if you want. This is fantastic as it allows you to reframe the shot if you got something wrong.

 

 

 

 

As for the actual raw files, they tend to come out of the camera a little flat for my liking, but they are extremely editable. With a little bit of editing, it can produce an image that is very film-like. I hate the term “film-like” but in this case, I think it is true. I have never converted a color digital file to black and white and thought, wow, that looks like film. But with the Leica Q2 Monochrom, I am taking photos that look a lot like the images I would get out of my Nikon F2 and that is exactly what I want. I have added an orange B+W filter to introduce some more contrast to my shots and it has helped a lot.

 

 

The contrast autofocus system seems to be very good so far. It is just as snappy as my Nikon Z6 autofocus system. I was a little worried about the autofocus system because I remember how bad those old contrast systems used to be. But the camera is quick to lock onto a subject and more importantly, it is accurate. I haven’t had any files where the camera told me that it had focus and the raw file was soft and out of focus. I did notice that the focus could hunt a little in the dark while Macro mode but trying to shoot a macro shot of a spide in near darkness would make almost any system struggle.  But overall, the autofocus has been good so far.

 

 

 

 

The image stabilization is also really good. I have taken some photos in extremely dark lighting conditions with the iso at 12500 and a very slow shutter speed and I got sharp images. I heard some rumors that the image stabilization on the Leica Q2 systems softened the image but that seems to be false so far. I am very happy with the stabilization that the camera seems to offer.

 

 

The last thing I want to touch on in this first impression is the high iso abilities of this camera. I am used to shooting at high ISO at work. I am often shooting at ISO 8000 at some venues so I have a good grasp of noise patterns and what to look out for when it comes to shooting in very low light. The Leica Q2 Monochrom blows away all my expectations when it comes to high ISO. I have actually set the camera to use auto ISO and to max out at 12500 for the auto settings. At ISO 12500, the noise pattern is very similar to the noise I would get on my Nikon Z6 at iso 3200. That is just insane. So I simply don’t worry about the camera using auto iso now, because the noise in the image is something I just don’t worry about. On my Nikon cameras, I don’t use auto ISO because I want to make the decision of when I am going to go up in ISO because there is always a trade-off but not with the Leica Q2 Monochrom. In some of my shots, I actually think that the files look better at higher ISO settings. Over 12500 ISO, there is more noise in an image, but it is not bad. It is not film-like in the grain structure. Not even close to film grain, but it is not bad-looking. But I would prefer to make the decision myself when going above 12500 iso. With the crazy high ISO ability of this camera and the stabilization offered, there is no limit to what you can capture with this camera.

 

 

 

Lastly, I want to talk about editing the photos. The raw files are slightly different to work with when compared to color digital images. The way you edit them is different. I am still trying to figure out the best way to edit images but now that I have an orange filter on the camera, editing images does not take very long. The biggest issue that I have is that I am under-exposing most shots to save my highlights and then boosting the shadow details in the post. This can cause some issues if you want to increase the contrast and boost shadow details but it is not too difficult to get around. I think that the raw files themselves are incredible and there is so much information captured in them.

 

 

So after a few days with the Leica Q2, was it a wise decision to buy this camera. All my friends told me that I am crazy to pay so much for a black and white camera, but I think it has been worth it. Not just for the images that this camera can capture, as I don’t think I have captured anything good yet with it, but I like how this camera has excited me. I am constantly picking up the camera and playing with it. Hold it up and looking through the viewfinder. The camera has made me feel very excited to just go shooting again. The only other camera to do that for me was my Nikon F2. I think Leica has some problems with its software engineering and I probably will not update the camera’s firmware again if they release an update but the mechanical design and craftsmanship in the physical camera is something awesome. Very few digital cameras have left such a strong first impression on me. The only other new camera to impress me this much was my Nikon D700, many years ago. I am not sorry that I bought this camera and I look forward to learning more about it over the next few months.

 

 

 

 

 

Shaun

I should give some context to the last paragraph of the blog post. A new camera really doesn’t excite me that much. I remember that I bought the Nikon Z6, just before Covid-19 hit China and I didn’t take it out of the box for nearly a week. To me, a camera is a tool. Something I use for work, so when a camera can transcend that and makes me want to use it all the time, then it is something truly special.

 

 

Some updates for the Leica Q2 Monochrom. I will combine all of these blog posts into a final review but I am not at the point where I can write a final review for the camera yet.

Leica Q2 Monochrom and the rain

Leica Q2 Monochrom Viewfinder

Leica Q2 Monochrom Vs Film

Editing Leica Q2 Monochrom raw files