
There’s a secret sauce. The images are sharper than they should be. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re almost pixel level sharp, like a Foveon sensor. Look at this.

Load it up at full resolution. It’s sharper than science says it should be.
Now, regarding manual focusing: I have always maintained that as long as there is a split prism or rangefinder, I don’t mind it. I have issues when there isn’t. The Leica, of couse, has a rangefinder. And, remarkably, it has one of the best manual focus live view systems I’ve seen. You put it on live view, and then you move the focus ring, and it punches in so you can get perfect focus. Then it zooms out again. You don’t press any buttons or anything. It’s not focus by wire either, so you actually are focusing where you’re focusing. That’s totally usable.

Focusing at 1.4 is very difficult, at least on a 50. At 2, it’s pretty easy, so I’m limiting myself to F/2 and slower until I get an electronic viewfinder to take out.
Full frame cameras are still substantially larger than mirrorless ones, so I’m still on Micro 4/3rds. But, the M10 and M11 are the smallest full frame cameras out there, and they have the smallest lenses. Hence, I’m still good for size.
Limited depth of field with full frame cameras is very easily achievable, even on wide angle lenses.

With the relatively limited f/2 I’m using with both the 50 and the 35, it’s about equivalent to what I was able to do with the manual focus micro 4/3rds lenses I had, which were very difficult to use. I do think that in most photos of people, f/2 is unwieldy, so made a good choice in keeping the 25mm and 17mm 1.2s on micro 4/3rds. Now, here’s the thing. Those are good lenses. They’re excellent in the dark. But they’re big. This was fine when I had no alternative system, but now I can have a smaller system with similar bokeh levels. And, in terms of performance at night, the 25mm 1.4 has a similar light transmittance. Do I need the 1.2? Probably not. Those lenses are good though. I think I can probably get by with the 20mm 1.7 and the 25 1.4 frankly.
We’ll see how the kit changes during the trip to Peru.
In the mean time, I’m going to keep shooting with the Leica since it’s different and sometimes that’s all you need.
