Fabio Riccardi
New member
Fabio, is surely among the industry's leading thinkers and software originators producing innovative tools we need and value. His work, Lightzone, the product of personal efforts works and works well.
His innovations are original based on a paradign that guided distinguised photographers of the last century. Like Bibble, Raw Shooter, DXO and RAW Shooter, his software resulted from visions of imaginators with little funds but dreams and their own brains.
Now Lightzone competes and stands proudly, side by side, with the brilliant work of Aperture, Bibble, C1, DXO, Lightroom, Raw Developer, Raw Shooter, SilkyPix and more. His words fed by experience, skill and knowledge, should give pause to detractors and instruction to Leica and all the other companies.
Hi Asher,
the M8 is a fantastic camera, I didn't mean to diminish it in any way, and most of the times it can produce just superb images. Fortunately aside from some black syntetic matherials, there are very few objects in nature that have a high reflectivity in the IR spectrum, so the concerns are pretty minimal, unless you're really in goth fashion photography...
I actually totally understand the concerns of Leica engineers and where their "problem" comes from.
With very sharp lenses as the Leicas the interface with the sensor is critical, if you have ever studied in detail images from the older Canon 1Ds (I have looked very closely to lots of pixels while developing my own RAW converter) you will notice lots of chromatic aberration with wide angle lenses, the sharper the lens the higher the CA. These aberrations totally disappeared on the later Canon cameras (1Ds mkII, 5D).
IMHO this is due to a too thick IR filter on the older sensors, which would diffract light at various angles depending on the wavelenght, especially for wide angle lenses.
Engineering is the art of compromise, you want to use sharp lenses on digital cameras that were not designed for the purpose? Well, they have to come with something that works, at least most of the time. If I would have worked in the Leica engineering department I would probably have made the same choice.
I think that the real "problem" with the M8 is people expect a lot from it and they're looking way too close to its (very sharp) pixels. Maybe no other cameras has been scrutinized so closely before. If you look at the weird stuff that the Canon Or Nikon (or everybody else's) engineering departments have produced in the last few years, you'd be surprised that it works at all. Still people take lots of great pictures using that stuff.
It is a new product (just like LightZone but it is really promising. The M8 is a camera that you can "feel" in your hands, where the attention doesn't go to the bleep of the autofocus but instead your eyes have to *see* what you're doing. Many photographers underestimate the power of their eyes and get trapped in a maze of meaningless technical information, histograms and what not.
The Leica M8 can help photographers to reestablish confidence in their own eyes and start taking pictures again.
Now please, if they could produce a full 16 bits DNG file instead of a silly 8 bits gamma encoded one.
Cheers,
- Fabio
His innovations are original based on a paradign that guided distinguised photographers of the last century. Like Bibble, Raw Shooter, DXO and RAW Shooter, his software resulted from visions of imaginators with little funds but dreams and their own brains.
Now Lightzone competes and stands proudly, side by side, with the brilliant work of Aperture, Bibble, C1, DXO, Lightroom, Raw Developer, Raw Shooter, SilkyPix and more. His words fed by experience, skill and knowledge, should give pause to detractors and instruction to Leica and all the other companies.
Hi Asher,
the M8 is a fantastic camera, I didn't mean to diminish it in any way, and most of the times it can produce just superb images. Fortunately aside from some black syntetic matherials, there are very few objects in nature that have a high reflectivity in the IR spectrum, so the concerns are pretty minimal, unless you're really in goth fashion photography...
I actually totally understand the concerns of Leica engineers and where their "problem" comes from.
With very sharp lenses as the Leicas the interface with the sensor is critical, if you have ever studied in detail images from the older Canon 1Ds (I have looked very closely to lots of pixels while developing my own RAW converter) you will notice lots of chromatic aberration with wide angle lenses, the sharper the lens the higher the CA. These aberrations totally disappeared on the later Canon cameras (1Ds mkII, 5D).
IMHO this is due to a too thick IR filter on the older sensors, which would diffract light at various angles depending on the wavelenght, especially for wide angle lenses.
Engineering is the art of compromise, you want to use sharp lenses on digital cameras that were not designed for the purpose? Well, they have to come with something that works, at least most of the time. If I would have worked in the Leica engineering department I would probably have made the same choice.
I think that the real "problem" with the M8 is people expect a lot from it and they're looking way too close to its (very sharp) pixels. Maybe no other cameras has been scrutinized so closely before. If you look at the weird stuff that the Canon Or Nikon (or everybody else's) engineering departments have produced in the last few years, you'd be surprised that it works at all. Still people take lots of great pictures using that stuff.
It is a new product (just like LightZone but it is really promising. The M8 is a camera that you can "feel" in your hands, where the attention doesn't go to the bleep of the autofocus but instead your eyes have to *see* what you're doing. Many photographers underestimate the power of their eyes and get trapped in a maze of meaningless technical information, histograms and what not.
The Leica M8 can help photographers to reestablish confidence in their own eyes and start taking pictures again.
Now please, if they could produce a full 16 bits DNG file instead of a silly 8 bits gamma encoded one.
Cheers,
- Fabio
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