Red Dot Forum Camera Talk: Leica M11 Monochrom

Foreign. Thank you. Foreign. Thank you. Foreign. Foreign. Foreign. [Music] Hello and welcome back to an episode of Red Dot Forum Camera Talk. Uh, as always, I am your co-host, David Farkas. I'm joined by Josh Lair. Hi, everybody. Over there, producing the show, we've got Jose Rivera. Hello, hello. And, uh, we are back. Uh, it's been, uh, been a few weeks. Been, uh, traveling and here and there. So, we are now all back in the same place. Uh, Josh had some fun times up in New Jersey at the Leica headquarters, right? Correct. Yeah, I was there two weeks ago. Last weekend, I got to meet a lot of people, a lot of new faces and fans of the show, which was super cool. And spent some time in New York City walking around, taking pictures. So, I had a blast. If you're not a member of LSI, that's Leica Society International, I would highly recommend joining. They have incredible resources online. They do great events. They've got another event in, actually, in Wetzlar in October, and I will be there for that as well. So, in Rome coming up in a few weeks. All right. And Rome coming up. So, LSI is a fantastic organization. We cannot speak highly, um, about them. And if you, if you haven't been to any of their events, you should join and go because it is awesome. Yes. And, uh, my latest trip, I was in Iceland leading a photo workshop there. But before that, more related to what we're going to talk about today, I was also in New York City a couple weeks before Josh was, testing something very special, which is the subject of our, that's correct, episode. It has been a busy month. Oh my gosh. For Leica, uh, with some new products, some big new products. And we realize there's more than what we're talking about today, but we're dedicating a full episode to be right there. This Leica M11 Monochrome. This is the fourth M Monochrome camera. Yes. And the best one yet, as one would hope. One would hope. Um, you know, this is the second we've been on the air, I think, long enough now. This is our second Monochrome camera specific. It is. Episode third, if you count the Q2 Monochrome. Yeah. Pretty cool. Well, because the, the M10 Monochrome was launched in 2020. But we're going to, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Yeah. So, what we're going to do is kind of break this down in pieces. We're going to give you a quick anthology, an overview of where we've been with the Monochrome. So, as we said, four generations about Monochrome. Yeah. So, we're going to break it down based on each generation because you may or may not have seen these cameras. We have them all here on the table, and we'll give you a quick and a high-level overview. Yes. If you want more resources, we actually have an entire episode on Monochrome. Correct. Which we did, and we covered all those cameras. We also had a specific episode on the M10 Monochrome, which is, we have 15 years of digital M, which covers that. Mess. So, we have a lot of resources available. But if you don't want to watch 12 hours of content, why not? Let's. Well, I mean, I, I don't. And I was in it. So, basically, we're going to spend 10 minutes going over that. And then, uh, Josh, you've got some great testing that you've been able to do. Yes. Yes. Well, we both have pictures to show. Uh, mine are not quite as exciting, although, in my opinion, they're just as exciting. Maybe not as interesting, but, um, David will show some images from New York. Yes. I will show some test photos. We're talking about ISO and things like that. And we'll talk about the differences and the similarities between all the other models. So, absolutely. First, as David said, we're going to kind of talk about how we got here now with this fourth generation digital Monochrome M, because it's difficult to appreciate just how capable and powerful this camera is without first asking ourselves, how did we get here? Where did we start? And I brought an interesting one. Oh, for the first time. I was like, wait. Yeah, I know. Really? Oh, yeah. Okay. Um, so why don't we pull up there? We'll just throw this lens on. The first slide. A good measure, right? Here we go. Here we go. First. That second one. Second. This is an interesting one. As Jose's pulled up the slide, uh, because the first generation Monochrome, which is what David is holding, it was the only one of the, well, so far, the only one that came in silver chrome as a production option. Looks a little. Hold on. Yeah. Perfect. So, uh, this is an original Monochrome. It is just the silver chrome variation. You definitely threw me because I know I was looking for the matte black one. And, uh, clearly you. Yes. No, I did that on purpose because this was a unique hallmark of the original Monochrome. And these have become very, very desirable and very rare. I just cleaned it up. What'd you do to it? Put some fingerprints on it. Anyway, tell us about this one, David. So, I just want to show the back here. You can see it's got the, it's sporting that little wheel. The OG digital energy. Digital Amazon. So, this was introduced in May 2012 in Berlin at the very first Das Wetzlar event. I was actually there in the room. It was swelteringly hot. And, uh, everyone was pretty amazed when Leica unveiled a dedicated digital black and white camera. Uh, this is the, the first dedicated digital black and white camera. 18 megapixels of CCD glory, based on the popular M9 full frame digital M. And it also has unique sapphire glass LCD. You can kind of come back to the, the broader shot here, and we'll talk about this for a second. So, you know, at that time, people were a little baffled. I think they were surprised and confused. That's an understatement. There was, uh, there were no rumors around about. You could go on the blogs and you could read people like, why do we need a dedicated black and white camera? Because you just, you can just click the little button, yeah, like in Lightroom or Photoshop, black and white, yeah, right. So, why did we need this? And it really wasn't until, say, a few days after that, where Leica started showing samples. I actually got a chance to, to test shoot the Monochrome. And the also unveiled at the exact same time, the 50mm Summicron, which we sort of take for granted for. But they were launched as a pair, which is significant. Also with the M11 Monochrome, because it also was launched with a 50 millimeter lens. Yes. We'll get to that. And, uh, yeah, it basically, it offered significantly higher ISO performance. ISO performance than the M9. So, the M9 topped out around. I wasn't that brave. Yeah. But we found on the M9 Monochrome, you could do 6400 ISO. So, which now, you know, doesn't sound like, it sounds so like, oh, that's where you start. Nice cameras. It was a big deal then. Yeah. Right. That was a really big deal. And, uh, yeah, this, this changed the game and became so popular that Leica has now come out with more. So, let's talk about the next one. Yes. Which is right here. Bingo. Bingo. Is this like Naked Gun? Okay. Here we go. So, what we've got here is the M Monochrome Type 246, also sometimes abbreviated MM246. This is back in the, the type designation. So, it was based on the M240. Uh, all actually technically the MP240, because this does have an upgraded 2 gigabyte buffer, which was more than the one gigabyte buffer you found on the stock M240. Uh, it was introduced in 2015 and ran for five whole years, all the way through 2020. Yeah. This is actually the longest production run of any of the Monochrome cameras. And I think it's also the best value for money of all four. Well, you know, the performance of this camera, and we've talked about this a lot. I think we didn't, we talk about this on the, like, this is still a very usable camera in 2020. What is it? 23? It's 2023. Yes. Yeah. And they're, they're like $4,000 or less. Yeah. There's a huge, um, infrastructure and ecosystem of, uh, available accessories. And they're still very serviceable. And you can still get batteries, like, all these things. So, the big change that when we went from the original, just a Monochrome, but now, in retrospect, we call it the M9 Monochrome, M9M, right? So, the M246, the, the big difference generationally, this was a really big upgrade because we went from CCD to CMOS. Yeah. And the sensor, the CCD, some seam, sorry, the CMOS sensor in the 246, 24 megapixels. Uh, both the resolution jumped from the 18 megapixel CCD, but also a dramatic increase in low light performance. Uh, so here we saw, you know, great performance up to 12,500. Which was pretty big jump again from that. Yeah. 6400 and that was kind of pushing it. 12,500. And here looks fantastic. And at low ISO, it's, you know, almost medium format looking. So, this camera, I think, is the first true modern Monochrome. We have live view. We've got the CMOS sensor. And also, this is the only digital M Monochrome that has video capabilities. It does. With this little, little silver button. Oh, the four cameras that we have, the only, the 246 can shoot Monochrome video, which is kind of a unique. It is. Very niche feature. It is. It is. We just don't see. Yeah. So, this, this is a great camera. Uh, I did a full review of this back when it came out, took it to New York City, to New Orleans. And I've always been impressed with this camera. This was, for me, I guess, for me, this is like the Monochrome, okay, that sets the standard. Uh, a lot of people, that's the M9 Monochrome. For me, I'm a huge fan of the 246. Yeah. I think it's, for me, a game changer. Yeah. Where do we go to next? And then where we go to next, talk about true modern, brings us in 2020 to this guy. This is the M10 Monochrome. And what's, there's a couple fascinating things about the M10 Monochrome, namely, we went to a new generation sensor again, still CMOS, but now went from 24 megapixels to 40 megapixels. And we saw some really big high ISO low light, uh, performance gains. So, instead of the, let's say, 12,500 of the 246, this guy can go all the way to 25,000, 32,000 ISO. Really, really changed the game in terms of what lenses you could use in low light scenarios or being able to shoot, let's say, at an f8 and hyperfocal distance at night and still get usable shutter speeds. Fantastic camera. But let's jump here because this one is also, uh, interesting because what's unusual, usually there's a color version that predates the monochrome version. And in the case of the M10 Monochrome, it actually predated the color version that was that this is based on. Like I mixed it up. Um, because they have the M10, the M10-P, the M10 Monochrome, yes. And then the M10-R, which was based on the M10 Monochrome. Well, based on each other, right? It's a little bit, um, bizarre that the, the order of that. But, you know, the M10, I think it's important also to talk about, whatever a new Monochrome comes out, it's not just a matter of, oh, it's better than the color version it's based on. It's also enjoying all the benefits of the improvement of that color platform it's based on. So, the M10 Monochrome, in addition to being the best Monochrome up to date, was also based on the M10, actually the M10-P. Yes. So, it had all the improvements that the M10-P had over the M10. And then, correct, the 246 as well. So, that's correct. Things to keep in mind because if you only work with the Monochrome cameras, then you have to think a little bit differently. Whereas if you go color, Monochrome, color, Monochrome, color, Monochrome, because you're looking two generations back. Yeah. Yeah. But this one, big advances, much better live view experience, than the 246. Uh, we have a new Visoflex, this was the 020, which also gives you GPS capability, which now we don't have, but this did. We've got the direct control ISO dial, which is pretty, pretty nifty. The new kind of unified three-button interface here, much, much more simplified. As you can see there, we call it kind of the three-button interface here. So, we went down from what, five to still no, like six. Yeah. Definitely streamlining the three things. Right. So, this is very streamlined. It also has the, uh, control wheel. And this one has the, the button on the front. Yeah. I think probably the most important structural change from M40 to M10 was the thinner body. True. With the improved rangefinder. This is the first time in a digital M that we really saw a meaningful upgrade to the rangefinder itself. You went from a 0.68 to a 0.73 magnification. Good point. Uh, you got 50 more eye relief and a 30% larger field of view. So, fundamentally, as a rangefinder, forgetting about all the bells and whistles, yeah, the M10 and everything based on it, you get a better rangefinder experience. So, the M10 Monochrome was a huge leap from the 246 in a lot of ways, for sure. Well, the M10 generation was a huge leap. Exactly. That's my point. Yeah. And of course, the four millimeters thinner and all that. So, this is, I guess, a, a true modern, real modern, and Monochrome. And still represents a fantastic value today, which we're going to get to, specifically how it compares, how the M10 Monochrome and the M11 Monochrome stack up against each other, because I think there's a lot of people who still have this in their camera bags who are contemplating the M11 Monochrome. And I think we're going to get into a deeper discussion as to the, the pluses and minuses there. And now, now where do we end? Right. Here we go. There she is. There she is. So, what we have here is the M11 Monochrome. Just introduced a few weeks ago. And, uh, it is the current M11 Monochrome. This is based on the, the M11, which itself saw a lot of improvements from the M10 generation. We now have a 60 megapixel BSI, or backside illuminated CMOS sensor. And we get some pretty extreme low light performance, extreme dynamic range, care of the M11 base. An enhanced live view experience with the Visoflex 2, which now ups to 3.7 megapixel OLED EVF. Fantastic. Uh, we have the omission of the bottom plate. So, now the, the battery is directly accessible. The memory card underneath it. We've got some nice accessories that go with that, which we'll talk about in a bit. And we also have a huge ISO range. We now go from ISO 125 all the way to 200,000. Uh, we don't recommend using 200,000, but again, that's will bear itself out. I mean, you know, you do what you got to do, people. You do what you're trying to do. That's. Yeah. Body wise, you'll notice it's very similar to the M10 Monochrome, because why fix what isn't broken? The only real big change that you notice obviously is the lack of the bottom plate. And the little, uh, focus assist button on the front is now a multi-function button on the top. Well, I think it's just as well as this. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, jumping in for a second. Yeah. One of the huge fundamental changes between M10 and M11 is the addition of custom buttons. That's true. There were no custom function buttons on any M, right, prior up to the M10 generation. And the M10, or the M1 generation, excuse me, uh, M11 Monochrome continues that trend. So, you actually have three customizable buttons on the M11 and the M11 Monochrome here. And which makes it a lot more usable. And, and these are the changes that I like. You know, we can, and we will deep dive into a lot of the more recital changes, but when Leica makes these extremely useful, sort of core functional changes, like the improvement of the rangefinder, and the improvement in the base plate design, or lack thereof, and the improvement of giving you custom buttons, I love that because, sure, that's, it's not the same saying, oh, look at all this cool stuff we can do. It's like, we understand what the core concept is here. We're going to make that experience better for you. Yeah. And what's incredible when, when you look at this camera and you look at an M10 Monochrome side by side, yeah, I mean, you really have to look carefully because they look so close. And yet, it's, it's the ability, like Josh said, we went from having no custom function buttons, just a focus assist button, to now being able to program the function button here, uh, to the side of the LCD. The top button is now programmable. And the dial on the back, the thumb dial, is actually clickable. So, you can, you probably can't hear it, but it's a nice little click when you push in on that. And that brings up functions as well. In my usage, I found, you know, uh, the ability to program these is fantastic. So, for instance, if I want exposure compensation, I would take that and click in and then roll to set exposure compensation, which means no accidental, uh, exposure compensation unless you click it in and then turn it first. Being able to set, um, manual ISO here, or set this as focus assist. All of these changes make for a much more pleasurable shooting experience. Oh, yeah. And also, I think something important to mention is when the M11 came out, there was something different that happened, which is the black and silver variations had a different material and a different weight. M11 in silver chrome being brass, and M11 in black finish being aluminum. And the M11 Monochrome, just to set the record straight, is aluminum. Yes. It is the same weight within a few grams as the M11 in the black finish. Not as noticeable with the new 50 Lux on there. Correct. But the way, but so you, when you pick up an M10 Monochrome and you pick up an M11 Monochrome, the first thing you're going to notice is that significant weight difference, for sure. Uh, which is, I think I have the weight somewhere on here. 680 grams for the M10 Monochrome versus 542 from the M11. Alba Chrome. So, about 140 grams lighter. You definitely feel it too. Yeah. It's very noticeable. Yeah. Which is nice. Other really, uh, nice features that didn't exist prior to the M11 generation. The M11 came out with 64 gigabytes of internal memory, which is kind of was a, it's like a nice perk, but not 100% there yet because, for instance, I use 128 and 256 gig memory cards. These are big 60 megapixel files. So, on the M11 Monochrome, Leica actually upped that internal memory to 256 gigabytes. Now, you can use a 256 gig card and mirror those images and do a backup setup to the internal memory. So, you're writing the same file to the internal memory and to the SD card as a backup. Or you can use it as 512 gigabytes and just roll it over when you fill up one, it'll go to the next one. Or who hasn't really been there before? Maybe Josh hasn't, but, you know, you go out with a memory card and realize it's either full or you don't have one. I haven't done that in a long time. All right. That has happened. But it happens. It happens to everybody. Yeah. And it's really, really nice to do that. The other really awesome feature that I have found on the M11 generation and the M11 Monochrome is no different. Is I can use a portable battery pack and use the camera as a charger or charge on the go. There's a little USB Type-C connector on the bottom. And I can very easily charge a battery. You can see the light is on. Maybe you can't see it. It's pretty small. Take our word for it. Take our word for it. The light is on the back. And I have actually been, kind of at the end of all the batteries with an M11 and being walking around shooting like this because the light was fantastic. And I was like, down to five percent. And this kept me shooting. Yeah. So, this is fantastic. It charges. If you have a high capacity, high speed charging brick like this, my charge, it charges about one percent per minute. So, in five minutes, you get a five percent charge. 10 minutes, 10% charge. So, if you just stop somewhere for, you know, a coffee break and take a 20-minute break with this plugged in, sitting on the table, you can go from 20% battery to 40% battery. And that really can make a difference because then you have, well, that's two more hours of shooting. That and the internal memory, uh, which started in the M11 and as you said, is again, one of those core functional changes, yeah, that just makes it a better picture-taking tool. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of features I could argue that we have a nominal benefit, relatively speaking. But some of these features, like the charging and the internal storage, will allow you to make pictures you might not have been able to make for some limiting reason, like you ran out of battery, like you're saying. So, absolutely. That I really like. Um, if you keep, what I'd like you to do is show kind of what, we'll walk through some of the cosmetic differences between the M11 and the M11 Monochrome. So, what I'm going to do is take, so you have a close-up, right? Yeah. I'm going to take the lens off of this and off of this. So, you can kind of. I'm also wearing a neutral gray shirt to not wearing my, what's the running plaid? Yeah. Of course. So, maybe I'll walk, I'll talk about it and you can show it. Um, if we get the overhead, although that one looks a little flat for us. To the front one. I don't know, Jose, how does that look? Yeah. Why does it look all washed out? No, the other, the other one. No, it is flat. Yeah. It's like a whole flat. I don't do that. Don't let me know. I don't know. That's like the desaturating Instagram filter. We don't want that. Let's do the top-down view. It's okay. Well, no, not the top down, though. Or the, the straight-on view. The, yeah, the 90 to 81. There we go. There we go. Okay. So, uh, M11 is on the top and the, uh, excuse me, on the bottom. And I have modern chromes on the top. First thing you'll notice is that all of the, uh, or the label for the model name on the hot shoe is now blacked out. They [Music] um colored red. Uh, on the two dials is now neutral color, as well as the, um, on/off red dot. So, there's no coloring at all on the top of the body. It's totally desaturated. Chill. In the back of both. I guess maybe the front first, actually, because that's kind of, because it's not dirty. There we go. There we go. That the front is the big change. What are you doing over there? Okay. Trying to get a nice handle on it. Yeah. You got it. Uh, okay. Obviously, at the front, we see no red dot, which is the first time on the M11 we've seen a red dot-less camera. As well as the blacked out, uh, lens release button, which is like a nice touch. They didn't have to do that, but I like that they did. Uh, okay. Now, let me show the back. It's okay if there's fingerprints. Still understand. No, no. They won't. Julie won't understand. Like, why are there fingerprints? Oh, package. Pretty much the same. Yeah. No real differences there. Same. Except there's a difference you can't really tell, which is we now have the return of the sapphire glass. Jose, uh, sapphire glass LCD cover that was last seen on the 246 Monochrome. And then they stopped doing it. And they were using Corning Gorilla Glass, which is fine. But sapphire glass is extremely durable. Well, I think it's the first, the first digital M with a touchscreen that also has sapphire. You are correct. Yes. So, the reason they were using Corning Gorilla Glass again was for the touchscreen functionality. And by some magical engineering miracle, they have a touchscreen sapphire glass. Pretty sweet. Um, I also want to talk on, so we talked about the differences cosmetically. I want to talk about what hasn't changed, which is the M11 Monochrome is still an M11. What that means is every single accessory that is compatible with the M11, Visoflex, battery chargers, grips, cases, what screw protectors, whatever. Every single M11 accessory will work with the M11 Monochrome. The only accessory I am not recommending proactively is the screen protector, because we have the sapphire glass. It's actually going to be more durable than the screen protector is. So, personally, I don't use them. But otherwise, because we've had some questions like, will certain M11 accessories fit? Yes. If it works on the M11, it's going to work on the M11 Monochrome. The same body, the same. They have more common than they have different. Really, just the sensor, the cover glass, the internal memory, and then some of those minor cosmetic changes are the, are the differences. Um, but otherwise, everything else is the same. Uh, with a question, I'm thinking here, is someone asked about using the 50 Summicron dual range, which if you watch the M11 episode, I talked about how that lens is now usable because there's no light meter in the camera that's on the sensor. And the answer is yes. The dual range will also work on the M11 Monochrome in either the close-up or the regular mode. So, that has really breathed new life into a lens we were previously very restricted on or had to be modified permanently to use on a digital M. It works perfectly on M11 or an M11 Monochrome, which is awesome. Yeah. And, um, we also gain for the first time something in metering that we only had on the other Leica, the Q2 and the SL2. This is the first, yes, M Monochrome camera with highlight weighted metering capability, which I love. All previous cameras had the meter on the shutter. So, that's a physical difference that maybe we didn't. Oh, because it's off there. You go. Nope. Oh, because they're both M11s. Yeah. Right here. I'm like, this doesn't look any different. There we go. There. Okay. So, if you look, I'm going to do a close-up here. So, if you look at an M10 Monochrome, you'll notice that the shutter has, uh, three gray shutter blades. Dark gray, light gray, dark gray, okay, flanked by black on the top and bottom. The, if you could actually see them in there, on the bottom, there is a light meter. So, light comes in the lens, bounces off of this, uh, reflective area on the shutter, down into that sensor, and that is your light meter. If you look at the M11 Monochrome, there's no shutter. I mean, it has a shutter. If I turn it off, you'll see the shutter. But the shutter blades are all black. And when the camera is on, the sensor is exposed all the time. The reason for that is we have on the M, back to us, on the M11 generation, M11 M Monochrome, we have sensor-based metering. Way more accurate. Both for, uh, which gives us basically the same metering that we have on the, on the Q2 and the SL2 and the SL2s. And it's far more accurate because instead of just a reflected center-weighted image, we're able to do a value of metering, center weight, or highlight weighted metering. Well, the way I describe it is, instead of having one pixel light meter, you have 60 million pixels. Right. It's evaluating the actual image that's coming in on live view and determining the exposure based on that. I did not even take this out of highlight weighted metering. Yeah. As soon as I got it, highlight weighted metering went on. And that was, what's interesting is highlight weighted metering was not a feature that was launched initially in a camera. It was a firmware update. That's correct. So, that I find really interesting because it shows Leica's commitment, and we talked about this many times, to adding meaningful features in firmware. Yes. And reiterates the fact that you need to keep your firmware updated. I have seen so many cameras coming in lately with super old firmware that come on trade-in. And I literally keep a box of tissues next to my desk so I can cry it out after I see. Anyway, that's how they come in with firmware 1.1 on it. I've seen him cry. Yes. Yes. It happens. Like, you, you know, when you're buying these cameras, you're not just paying for the camera itself. You're paying for a whole team of super talented software engineers who continue to work on improving and enhancing the user experience with firmware updates. So, might I also add my tears to this conversation, please? When I see people who are not up to date on their software, not in the camera, but in their computer. Again, we're investing all this time, effort, money into these fantastic cameras, and you want to get the most out of it. Yeah. Stay on top of your software updates. I adjust from the time that I, I shot my pictures in New York, test images, and then I just did a Lightroom update yesterday. And suddenly, there's new noise reduction algorithms. Yesterday. Like, yeah, that's how fast this happens. New AI filters. As of a few weeks ago. Um, the pace that Adobe has kept with all of these updates that dramatically improve image quality, why wouldn't you take advantage of this? Right. I don't think they're free. That's what you get when you're paying for your $10 a month subscription is this constant updates versus having to buy another version. Oh, and now you want compatibility, you got to pay. So, so please, don't make us cry. Update your firmware. And update your software. If not, I won't be here. Just tears. Just. And I have a feeling I'll be crying for a while. So, but, you know, we're trying to spread the good word here. Um, okay. So, break and look. If there's any questions of stuff. I see Blake is complimenting my beard. But the reality is, like, this is just me being lazy. If you watch enough shows, you see like the facial hair cycle that kind of shape when I don't shave. So, this is like, this is just two, maybe a week and a half of. That's the question you pick of hard work. Yes. But that's the most important one is beard related. Uh, Jose, can you let me know if there's anything we need to address before we go to the next time? I see our overhead camera looks nice now. So, okay. Yeah. Okay. Right. Jose, please. Um, all right. So, we had a question here. Can you give some advice for metering with red filters? The built-in meter overexposes inconsistently with the red filter. Have you used red filters? I haven't. I did. I did actually use red filters. What was your experience like? Awesome. Uh, so interestingly, I don't know how, how to word this, but, okay. When I was shooting with red filters on the M11 Monochrome in real life, bright sunny days, um, the visible difference to not using a filter wasn't that great through the viewfinder. Like, there wasn't the physical flag. Yeah. There wasn't, there wasn't a huge difference at the time. And I was even, you know, putting it on, taking it off. Like, something wrong with me or something wrong with the camera? Well, yes, but there's something wrong with the camera. And what I discovered, of course, is I just committed to using the filter. And in post-processing, of course, dramatically different results, which I'm going to show you. You know, just inky black skies and bright white problems. What I think is the camera basically gained out the differences. And I, I guess based because it's really changing the color wavelength of light coming in, which is going to affect the metering that it is. My best suggestion is, uh, stick to highlight weighted metering, which we talked about. Also, I found that in a lot of scenarios, actually more, less in high and high contrast light, but more in flat lighting scenarios, like overcast conditions, I found that I had to underexpose like on, on exposure compensation, minus two, minus three EV, which seems pretty extreme because on previous generations, I'd use say minus one and be good. But I think given the, the metering system, uh, and how the camera wants to balance things out, at least when it's, again, in its current firmware iteration, uh, it can overexpose a bit. I just, by and large, even on highlight weighted metering. So, I did find, just dial that back. Make sure in your, uh, capture assistance, that you have the highlight clipping turned on, which is a huge advantage when you're shooting a live view. And you can see. You're saying that again? Say that again. Turn on highlight clipping under capture assistance if you're shooting live view. Okay. That's just, that's really, really good advice. That's why I want you to repeat it. Okay. Good. And because I, I programmed in exposure compensation on the rear dial, I could very easily just dial it in when I needed it. And we've said this before in Monochrome episodes. We've said this before in other episodes that aren't Monochrome related, but do whatever you need to do exposure-wise to protect your highlights. Because, and we'll show you this, but the camera, the M11 Monochrome has, I don't know, ridiculous level shadow recovery. More than we've ever seen. I routinely have images that I will share with you that I shot four stops underexposed to protect the highlights in those contrasty scenes, pulled those shadows up, forced, pulled the whole exposure up four stops, and it looks absolutely perfect. I mean, perfect, perfect. Yeah. If I blew the highlights by half a stop, they'd be gone. So, I mean, it's really. He's being a little dramatic for everyday use, but, yeah, your point is so valid, which is when you lose even the width of your highlights, yeah, and I'll show that. I did a quick highlight test and I'll show that they're gone. Yeah. Like, they are not coming back. And it's, it is not a pleasant look when they're just gone. Whereas you can, to have shadows, you know, you, if you were walking around with him, when he was using the camera, and you were looking at his playback camera, you look like dirt. Yeah. It'd be like, just like pitch black. Like, what, what do you do? Lose the lens cap? I was like, no, that's just how you get the best results from a Monochrome camera. And every camera that we've seen, every Monochrome we've seen, you've been able to get more and more and more shadow recovery. Yes. Which by definition gives you more highlight retention because you can under expose that much more. So, it's not that you have this single capture dynamic range. You have to look at the sensor as saying, what's your total dynamic range when you account for shooting technique and processing technique? Because let's say, if I just shot in camera and went all the way to the right with my highlights exposed to the right, maybe I'm going to get, I don't know, eight to 10 stops of dynamic range. Right. You're like, oh, that's horrible. Right. But I'm really able to get, if I underexpose, protect those highlights, expose for the highlights, and just let the shadows go as dark as they need to be, and then boost everything up in post-production, I'm getting 15 stops of dynamic range. Yeah. Which is what you expect. Because that's what we saw on the M11. Right. If anything, we're getting slightly higher signal to noise ratio on the M11 Monochrome versus the M11, because we don't have a color filter array, which means we have less inherent gain at base ISO. Uh, what's, what's fascinating to me as well, kind of talking about that, is we have base ISO of the M11 at 64. But true base ISO on the M11 Monochrome is 125. Which is the lowest that we've ever seen it on a Monochrome. Right. Because the Monochrome cameras always have a higher base ISO than their color version. Yes. And this is the lowest base ISO we've seen on a Monochrome. It's, it's only one stop more. And I, and I noticed that and I said, are you sure about that? And they're like, yes, that is the true base ISO. It is not a pull. And your maximum dynamic range, maximum image quality is going to be at 125 ISO. It's really nice because it means that we can shoot wider open lenses, right? In addition to, it's also the first digital M that has an electronic shutter. Well, Monochrome, right? The M11 introduced the electronic shutter function for an M, correct? And the M11 Monochrome is the first Monochrome digital M that has an electronic shutter, which is really, really, really nice if you want to shoot at 1/16000 of a second, if you want to use a 0.95 Noctilux or a 75 Noctilux, yeah, in super bright light, wide open, whatever. So, with no ND filter on your lens. Correct. Yeah. Which is nice. It is super nice. So, there's a lot of really cool, you know, we keep, I guess thinking about other really useful features and you just start to, I guess, take them for granted the more you use it. Yeah. I mean, we also forgot the fact that M11 introduced UHS-II SD card compatibility. So, we have faster reading write speeds on the M11 Monochrome. Yeah. Electronically stabilized live view, which is super convenient. So, if you're zoomed in for focus assist on live view on the M11 or the M11 Monochrome, it's electronically stabilized, which makes it so much easier. I mean, if you haven't watched our M11 shows, because you were saying, I'll just wait until the Monochrome conversion comes out, but you want to have insight into what really the M11 Monochrome brings to the table over the M10 Monochrome, then just watch those shows or read David's review or both of them. M11 and you will understand all of the giant improvements we got in the M11. I like to save it. Myriad improvements, abbreviated. A plethora. A plethora. Yes. Right. We should show some pictures. [Applause] See all this text on the screen? They're just talking with each other. I mean, there's no. Jose, did we miss any super important questions? It's relevant. Sure. Okay. Um, can you guys simply explain how the lack of the color filter array affects the resolution of all the monochromes? I'm going to do it because your explanation, my explanation is great, way too long. First of all, watch our Monochrome episode if you want an in-depth explanation. But essentially, every single digital sensor is a monochrome sensor. It only is capable of capturing light, a light value of certain brightness. So, a color camera has a filter, literally a physical piece of material over it, one for each color, red, green, and blue, that filters the light and allows the camera to record color. Take those filters away, and there's less stuff in between the light-sensitive surface and the light. So, the less stuff the light has to pass through to hit that light-sensitive surface, the more efficient that light-sensitive surface is going to be. I'll make it really simple. Right. If you take a red filter, you can maybe see how much light this is blocking. It blocks about two stops of light. Well, 25% of the pixels in a color sensor have red. Is he already diving down? Okay. 25% have blue, which is actually three stops of light blocking. And then 50% is green, which blocks one stop. That's way too complicated. Now, I'm getting there. Hold on. Okay. Each individual pixel, because we have one, two, and three stops of light loss, the camera sensor has to accommodate, or I have to compensate, rather, by giving you additional gain, kind of like exposure compensation, but on a per-pixel basis. So, you have 50% of the pixels getting plus one boost, 25% plus two, 25% plus three. This is getting crazy. Hold on. Which means you have varying levels of noise in each channel. Yes. But it also means because we don't have 100% color data, we only have 33% of the color data for any pixel, the camera has to interpolate and spread around, basically figure out and guess what the surrounding pixels are. But it also spreads the noise, and not in a pretty uniform way. So, you're getting an increase in resolution, a decrease in noise, a decrease in ugly noise, and generally just more consistent performance. And also an increase in dynamic range because we talked about, um, because there's no interpolation required, every single pixel is capturing, uh, 14 bits of information, I believe, is that right? Okay. Yeah. Which is, uh, a lot. So, like I said, less stuff in between the light and the light-sensitive part equals better. That's that's the symptoms. So, he asked for a simple explanation. Or she. So, that's the simple. No color filter. Right. Is there going to be a quiz on this? Because I, yeah, yeah. We will be. We will be quizzing you. Uh, this will be, um, on a curve as well. Uh, other questions, Jose, before we get to the pictures? Battery life compared to the M10 Monochrome? We didn't talk about that. No. That is another massive improvement that the M11 saw. And that is of course carried into the M11 Monochrome, which is significant. Double the battery life. More than, more than double. Triple? About. I mean, 1500 shots if you're shooting no Wi-Fi, no playback, no. Well, then that's if you're not shooting live view. Yeah. No live view, no playback, no Wi-Fi. Like, if you just, like, keeping it efficient. And then, of course, you bring in a MyCharge, like David has, and you have an almost infinite battery life if you have enough of those things. You can shoot constantly. I was able to shoot roughly, what, 10, 12 hours a day in New York with, I took three batteries with me. And I think only on one day that I actually dip into my third battery. Yeah. Because I was doing some time exposures, like of cityscapes from Brooklyn, and I'm like, multi-second stuff. Um, but for general regular shooting, I mean, for me, I shoot a lot, like five, 600 pictures, real pictures, and walking around with the camera on all day, I was able to get through entire days on two batteries. Which is, yeah, that's it. On M10, forget it. It would have been 10 batteries. And a 246, I used to carry five batteries to give you some idea. Yeah. So, like I said, all the benefits we got on the M11 over the M10, we're seeing the same benefits on the M11 Monochrome over the M10 Monochrome, which is huge, huge. So, again, watch those episodes on the M11 if you want deeper insight into that. Any other questions? Any other questions, Jose? Um, not at the moment. Well, I mean, the one that just came in is fast. Is what that? Okay. Only because that's really the question is essentially, is the M11 Monochrome worth it? Or with the M10 Monochrome? Oh, well, we have. That's, that's. Well, the reason, well, the reason I'm saying it now is because that's a question that only the individual user can decide using the information that we make available, right? So, I can't ever, like, I, I sell Leica for a living, so I, I think it's worth it. I always think it's worth it because now. But, you know, what I mean? Being ridiculous. But, well, let me, uh, let me answer the question with more questions, okay? Because that's what we do, right? That is what we do. We either say it depends. We drive them crazy. It depends. Okay. I will say it depends. And here's what it depends on. And you need to ask these questions. What is it? Let's say you have an M10 Monochrome. What is it about the M10 Monochrome that is falling short for you? Is it doing everything that you need it to do to make the kind of pictures that you want to make with the experience that you want to have? If you say, I love the M10 Monochrome, it's the best thing I've ever had, right? Better than sliced bread, and it even takes pictures. Uh, then maybe you don't have a real reason to upgrade. Are you saying, well, I feel limited by battery life, or I want a better live view experience, or I want faster Wi-Fi tethering, or any of you talking about any of these things? Yeah. Right. I need more buffer memory. Uh, I need more resolution. Whatever those, whatever those little things are. And you kind of make a, you know, the plus column and the minus column. And you say, these are what's important to me. Uh, because some features people won't care about. What I'll say though, is I objectively, I don't think there's anything the M10 Monochrome does better than the M11 Monochrome. So, if you factor out cost and budget and money for a second, which is, whatever, yeah, at 11 Monochrome is a superior picture-making tool. Doesn't mean it makes all your pictures better for everyone, all the time. But just, if you look at the specs and the user experience, it is a better tool for that. You would hope. I mean, it's the right. That's the thing is, Leica.

It doesn't just throw stuff around, you know. They, they spend a lot of time and money and resources creating these upgrades and these new models. So, right, it's just like the M11 was a massive leap from the M10R. The M11 Monochrome is the same leap. It's the same, but just like the M10R to the M11. And I don't want to give too much away with our testing. You're not going to see a massive, huge jump in terms of ISO performance from an M10R, let's say, to an M11, or from an M11 or M10 Monochrome to an M11 Monochrome. Um, because we didn't see it with the color versions.

So if you look at an M10R versus an M11, their, the M11's slightly better low-light performance, but it also has 50 more pixels. So it's, it's doing both things better, right? It's giving you more information and more detail with slightly better performance in terms of ISO. I mean, noticeable, way better, but not thematically better, not like a generation. That wouldn't be the only reason. If you said, "Well, the only thing I care about is better high ISO, and nothing else," I would just stick with what you have because the difference is not that significant, right? Unless you spend a lot of time at 40,000, which some people do. If you're shooting, like, you know, music venues and super dark areas, sure, sure.

I think that's, that's a great point to make, which is, yeah, these are, this is the sum of lots and lots of incremental improvements of varying levels of significance. They give you a major improvement in overall performance. If Leica kept the same resolution, they would probably have even more dramatic high ISO performance, but nobody would buy it because everyone expects the next model to have more resolution, right? It's like, I know, you can't win, you can't win, you know? But the fact that they can give you 50 more pixels with still better, it's not the same, it's still better than the predecessor, to me, is fantastic. And I am appreciative of that.

All right, who wants to see picture time? What it actually looks like? Okay, uh, let me just pull up the old copy. I have to like slide this stupid thing. Right, yeah, because David's... Wait, what did you do? I'm just doing the thing. I'm doing the thing. Remember which side it goes? I think it's that side. Yeah. Uh, uh, something, something. Can I get the computer? Review, Jose, and I'll tweet. Yeah, we'll tweak it. Oh, that's pretty good. Oh, no, there's a little more. I had to like size this window flawlessly. So perfect.

What I did today was, my objective was to have a clear understanding of how the M11 Monochrome compares to the M10 Monochrome and the M11 at high ISO, just to give myself a clear idea of where the improvements are and how big the improvements are. So what I did was, I shot my little favorite little camera bags that appear in the store under regular lighting. So this is exactly the kind of scenario you can find in the real world, without some super controlled testing laboratory. And I just shot every single ISO, pretty much. I do full stops from base to 6400, and then I do every increment up to the max. And I do a minus one exposure compensation. I let the camera decide the exposure using highlight-weighted metering, using a 75-note look. So I'm controlling all these variables so we can just see how ISO changes and improves.

I also shot the M11 Monochrome in DNG. Now, that is another significant change to the analog generation we didn't talk about, David, which is the ability to shoot a lower resolution in DNG file without giving anything up other than the number of pixels. So you can shoot a 36 or 18 megapixel DNG on the M11 or with the M11 Monochrome. And I think these are the only full-frame cameras on the market that have this ability to shoot a variable resolution, a variable resolution RAW file without giving up anything. There's no compression, there's no loss of performance.

Well, and you can also shoot a full-size RAW file and shoot a smaller JPEG as well at the same time, if you want. Yeah, you have a lot of options here. So, I, so my point being is, I shot using the DNG, being curious how that would compare to the M10 Monochrome, because that's 40 megapixels, DNG is 36, so they're very close. And I wanted to see where the ISO differences would be. So, uh, just to jump right in here, if we take a look at, I think where, where the difference is really start to show, which is 12,500. Let's see if that's going to show me 125,000 also. So it could give me a second here. All right, here is an 11. And we find, where are you? A second. Ah, here we go. Boom. All right. So we have M11 Monochrome on the left. And wait, why are the resolutions different? Yeah, the wrong one. Standby. Easier said than done. Nope. It's because it's 125,000. I should have labeled these. I didn't. Ah, here we go. Okay. Nope, that's, I'm looking at my DNG. I'm doing great. You're doing amazing. You're doing amazing. Are we there yet? No. You guys. Nope. Why are we there? Hold on. I need to find. Okay, there it is. All right. Exactly. It's so professional. Okay, finally. Oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed. You did it. I love monochrome on the left, ISO 12,500, full resolution. And 11 on the right, ISO 12,500, converted to black and white, obviously, so we could see apples to apples. And I'll start here. So different tonality to start. But yeah, they're not gonna look exactly the same because I haven't gone crazy with the toning. Um, let's just let this load. I think that speaks for itself. Well, there you go. That is a mind-blowing difference. I mean, that's two stops right there. So this is really where the M11 Monochrome absolutely shines, which is these high ISOs. Um, above or 600 and above. I wouldn't even call 12,500 high, even for the M11. No, not really. I mean, the M11 is still holding great detail. Don't forget, by converting the black and white, you're throwing a lot of data away as well. So you're handicapping the M11 doubly so. That's what the whole point of having a monochrome dedicated camera is. You're not throwing away any data with the color to black and white conversion. It's not just lack of noise or detail, but it's also the, the tonal nuance that you're gaining on the, on the monochrome version, right? You're, you're because you don't have that noise, you're able to see more textural nuance. Yeah, I mean, look at the, uh, this leather here, like you can just see so much more in the tones. Yeah. Or here we go. This is a great example. The old, there's also a great building advertisement right here. So there's so much more detail. There's, it's so much smoother and cleaner. I mean, just look at these shadow areas here. This is basically just black. I mean, huge difference. Um, just look at that. So this is exactly what we talk about when we talk about the ISO improvements you get from a dedicated black and white sensor versus a color file converter. So if you want to know how much better it is, this, this is it right here.

Do you have anything at 25,000? That's what I was going to grab it. Yes, let's do 25, because then I think you'll see it even more. Okay, so we've got, I just, what I'm trying to avoid is grabbing the, uh, DNG by mistake. Okay. And then it's gotta be, come on, close the underexposed ones. Yeah, I'll get it. Bingo. Yay. Okay, so here we have ISO 25,000, M11 Monochrome on the left. And even in this full view, you can see how much more pleasurable and pleasant and smooth the tones and gradations are, especially in the brighter colored bags on the, on the top right. Let's take a look here. Let's give it a second to load. Come on. I think we should have that elevator music. It's your computer. I mean, this is pretty significant. Now, you could play with these in noise reduction if you want to really get down the rabbit hole, but my goal is, I mean, but look, look how smooth. Yeah, that is. I mean, 25,000. Like, I mean, they're, it's like no different than 12,000. Yeah, that's, that's. And let's, let's look at that text on the tag to the, uh, although, yeah, yeah, that's gonna be difficult because the focus points shifts slightly. What about to the other side where, here? Yeah, that's just overexposed. Okay, well, here we go. This is actually, uh, an advantage of the M11, huh? A great, great example is, you know, I'm not doing a highlight test here, so I'm not necessarily worrying about highlight exposure. But here's an example of where a monochrome camera falls short if you're not like me, if you're not being careful about your highlights, which is where you can see the tag here on the monochrome is already blowing out and that detail is gone. Where I can see I can probably save a lot of this here if I wanted to on the M11 shot. Now, this is just because the technique I'm using for this particular test isn't about highlight recovery. But that doesn't matter. The point is, I can always recover the color camera highlight. Once I lose the monitor camera, it's gone. So if this is a real-world shot, I'm also curious if you bring that exposure down just a little bit on which one? The monochrome. Yeah, let's, I'm just curious because I know you haven't done much. I can tell by the. Yeah, no, these are my purpose. You know, there's no, there's nothing. Yeah. So if we bring that down, no, that detail is pretty much gone. Or bring highlights down. Yeah, let's see. Let's see. Uh, oh, there's a little bit in there. Actually, not a ton. But this is a, no, this is great because this is actually, you know, sort of putting into to visualization why we talk about protecting our highlights on the monochrome so much because it's so. I mean, not not only that, you probably again, because these are kind of defaults, yeah, I found on the M11 Monochrome files, they, because they have so little noise and so much detail, they also can take a pretty good amount of sharpening. Oh, yeah. I mean, you could play with this. I, visually, I think to most people, because that one has, because the M11 has more noise, it can look sharper. But yeah, if you put that up, yeah, there you go. It even actually amount sharpening. You can go, let's say, 80. What's little? 75. Yeah. So let's take a look at that over here. Right? Yeah, yeah. So now we're, you know, again, I didn't really play with these files very much because I'm trying to give them the honest representation. But now I just play with a little bit more sharpening and suddenly we're starting to see even more detail than we had before without really gaining any noise. Again, 25,000, apples to apples here, same exact exposure, same everything. And I mean, the difference is, in my mind, their business is really usable and printable. And here you'd really have to be mindful about print size and you'd have to be very careful about your processing and noise reduction. Um, it's still fine, there's still detail, but there's just so much more grain. I mean, wow, look at the difference there. Yeah, it's huge. So this, to me, is what you're paying for when you're getting one of these monochrome cameras.

I want to show M10 Monochrome very quickly here versus, oops, I assume. Here we go. Let's do ISO. Because M10 Monochrome, what would you say your top of the, how high did you want to go on Leica? Was it 16,000? Nah, on the M10 Monochrome? Yeah, I mean, I'd say compare 25 versus 25. Okay, well, that's what happens. Yeah, I probably aren't going to show real pictures too. Let's go, uh, let's see. Let me find. Just want to find the right thing to show you. Okay, there's M11 Monochrome. [Music] And there we go. Okay, so what I'm going to show you now is 25,000 ISO again. And this time we're looking at an DNG file from the M11 Monochrome versus a full resolution file from the M10 Monochrome. So here we're getting very similar resolutions. Um, and here I can see still more noise in the M10 Monochrome. I get a little more detail because there's not nearly as much sharpening on this. I can definitely add that if we want. I would apply some. Something. Yeah, there's nothing. Okay. Uh, there we go. Maybe a little more fair comparison here. You also can, uh, yeah, on, um, on M11 Monochrome, you can also dial back some of the noise reduction as well, which is another, you're also picking up detail. There we go. Oh, let's see. Okay, so M11 Monochrome DNG on the left. The exposure is different too. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Uh, it's actually not different. It's just the sensitivity. The sensors are interesting. Interesting. Okay. Um, because more dynamic range is going to look different. Sure. More detail and less noise and, and more information in the shadows. Yeah, of course. And again, here I'm actually throwing away half my resolution, huh? With the M11 model, right? Because I'm handicapping it already by shooting an DNG, which I don't have to do. I'm just trying to do it so you get some parity here. But this is, uh, this makes sense, right? Because I would expect M10 Monochrome files to be almost as good as, as downsizing. Let me see that just for one second. Yeah, because I'm curious because clearly there's a difference here, right? Could you hit D for me? Yeah, thank you. David. David's gonna. David's at a play now. Let's just hold on. He hasn't seen these files yet. So you got, I gotta give him a. But, but I've worked with a lot of these. Yeah, of course. I just want to like, yeah, get a little, just, this is the fun part. Let's see. This is this is how the, how the sausage gets made. Oh, the vegan sausage gets paid. Thanks. Wow. I mean, but there's no, no, I haven't done anything. That's the point. See what's amazing to me is like, these files can definitely take more. Yeah, uh, in terms of, you know, they're very, very malleable. I think more than the, the previous generation. So it's almost like doing it a disservice when you don't have it processed. That's fair. I mean, I understand that's what everyone likes to see, right? Well, it's always, I mean, just the fact you're looking at the file means there's inherently some processing going on. Of course. That's, you can't escape that. That's what. Okay, your name is playing. I'm just playing around. Okay. You're ready? I'll do a comparison view. Okay, so now we have M11 Monochrome DNG on the left and M10 Monochrome on the right. Now we're just, we're just having a little fun. Yeah, I mean, you can see there's even when you're trying to handicap the M11 Monochrome, it's still doing better than the price. So I've actually pushed this file around and processed it and it looks amazing. It's amazing right now. This is sort of sort of apples to apples because we've got the DNG. But remember, that's only 36 megapixels. Let me, let's, we want to see maybe for the last, um, ISO. Yeah, I'll show. So copy, copy those settings there. You just need to find the, uh, is that it? Yeah, yes, it was hit previously. Having a Lightroom lesson going on. There we go. You know what I'm doing? Okay, thank you very much. Okay, okay, okay. Let's, let's see what that looks like. I never know what I'm doing. I'm just kidding. Uh, okay, here we go. Now we've got M11 Monochrome on the left, full resolution. So DNG versus M10 Monochrome. And I think tonality looks a little closer on them. That's fair. Yeah, that's all we're aiming for here. I mean, the beauty of this is now we're using all 60 megapixels we have available to us of the M11 Monochrome. So we're going to have more detail, and that's why it looks larger, right? Um, more detail without any more noise or, um, any other loss of performance. Yeah, I mean, that's right. Now you can see, yeah, a big advantage. So that's, that's a pretty significant difference in print size capability as well, for sure. Um, another thing I want to show, because I think we get the idea. I did a quick highlight test. What I was curious about is really just how you have to be careful about exposing your M11 Monochrome shot. So what I have here is a base ISO image from the M11 on the left and the M1 Monochrome on the right, using no exposure compensation, highlight metering, so just kind of out of the camera. And the point of this test is to demonstrate what happens when you start to lose your highlight detail on the monochrome and why you have to protect it. Just look at the way it's just vanished. This is an incorrectly exposed file. That is, according to the camera's meter, if you will, properly exposed. And this is the reason why we always use highlight metering and underexposure. Because if you don't, and you're not mindful of your highlights, if you're not following David's advice and using your clipping, you're not going to get this detail back. And I'm not just losing the white, I'm also losing all of the detail in the way. I mean, look at the R and Vetslar here. It's half gone on the monochrome shot. So the secret to saving that is to underexpose and then bring your exposure back using your tools in Lightroom. Because all that detail lives in the shadows, whereas once it's gone on the highlights, it's gone forever. And this is even more obvious at higher ISO settings. For example, if I go here, I did the same test at 6400 ISO, where you're, you're crunching a dynamic range even more. And the higher you go in ISO, the more important it is to maintain your, wow, your highlight. So all the clippings going past the A. Yeah, so you're getting serious. In series. So again, M11 Monochrome on the right, M11 converted to black and white on the left. No exposure compensation, just, you know, regular exposure, what the camera thinks. And you are losing so much highlight detail on the line. I mean, look at that. Right, exactly like you said, past the A, all this is pure white. And this is gone. Whereas if we expose forward properly, actually, this is a great example. So now we've got M11 Monochrome, both times, except on the left is what I would call a proper exponent. And why don't we take the, the underexposed one and and actually bring up the shadows and bring up the exposure? Just bring up the exposure and bring the highlights down. I think. Drop the highlights because now we can. So we're pushing the exposure up. Yeah, you can go up more on exposure here. We go. That's it. Real-time editing with David and Josh. Boom. This is how we do it. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I'm having fun. Okay, keep going, keep going. So now what do we have? There we go. Now look at that, right? And that's it's clearly not with any care or, yeah, but look how much more all the highlights are there, right? You literally went from an image where half your highlights are gone and this image would be very difficult to do anything with, to all of our highlight detail there. Yes. And no, I did a very haphazard post-production. Yeah, you can bring the shadows. I'll bring the tone curve down. Bring the tone curve down. Yeah, there we go. Now my point, but that's the point is not, this is not a Lightroom episode. This is about proper technique. And if you don't follow the technique, that's exactly what happens. Which you lose your ability to control every aspect of your exposure because you've thrown away your highlight detail. And that can dramatically impact the resulting image.

Now, I think you've seen enough test images. Let's go back to us. Look at some questions. And then David, I want you to start showing some, that's exactly my plan. Look at you. I'm on it. You're on it. I am on it. Boom. Jose, fire away. Okay, um, so somebody asked, will the larger 60 megapixel sensor allow me to print larger than that of the 40 megapixel of the M10 Monochrome? Yes. Yes. I mean, more pixels means a larger print without interpolating the data. So yes, you can print larger natively from a higher resolution sensor. It's not the only factor here, but that is one of the factors. More is more. More is always more. More is always more. As far as memory cards, do you recommend 256 gigabytes, 128 for SD card? Yeah, yeah. So I found with the file size that I just feel comfortable with 256 these days. 128s are fine. 64 is pretty small now. Uh, the file size, that's something else I should touch on because a lot of people look at, if you look at a folder of those images, of the RAW images, actually, here, let's pull up that might, uh, test shots here. Remember here? Okay, because I just want to show that, uh, uh, file size. Okay. And I'm going to sort by file size. So just take a quick look at the screen here. And, uh, this, you may not be able to read that, but you can see this is almost, this one's almost 100 megabytes for that. And I, I sorted by size. So I'm going to just go to the other side. And that didn't work. I'm going to go back to the top. And the smallest one is 30 megabytes-ish. A lot in the 40s and 50s, and more 50s and 60s. So all of these images, every single one of them is a different size, ranging anywhere from 35 megabytes to 100 megabytes. That's going to depend on the ISO that you shot. The lower the ISO, actually, interestingly, the smaller the file size because there's less noise. But also, if you're shooting a blank wall or a clear sky, it's going to take less information, uh, than say, a bunch of trees or whatever, right? More detail. Yeah, more detail means bigger files. Yeah, higher ISO means bigger files. And I just want to touch on that. You can come back to us. You don't have to stare at the screen here. That's exciting. I know it is. So exciting. So I want to address this because a lot of people think that that means the files are lossy. They are not. Um, the M11, M11 Monochrome use lossless compression. Lossy compression, like we saw back in the M8 days or M9 days or whatever that was. Yeah, you could tell there was lossy because every single file was exactly the same size. These are different based on the amount of information and how well it compresses. So if the file is not very compressible, it's bigger because they don't want to throw away any information. So, uh, do not be scared if you see your pictures at 40 megabytes for a 60 megapixel camera when you're expecting them to be 80 megabytes because that's what it says in the tech specs. Yeah, uh, this is real world. There they are. Lossless. I guarantee it. They are pure 14-bit files. I guarantee it.

So now David spent a significant amount of time using the camera in New York City, shooting a ton of different stuff. I will do my best to not spend have him spend the next 48 minutes showing photos. It's like a family slideshow after a vacation, okay? But there's some good stuff in here and stuff I'm hoping that you show a variety and talk about the experience behind what made the image, some of the chat, maybe some of the challenges you faced, um, working with this camera, especially being brand new to it. Sure. And how you approached some of these more challenging situations and how you learned the camera as you were using it. Wow. Go. No pressure. Go. No pressure. Okay, so let's take a look at the computer. Well, before, is there any other last minute questions, Jose? Um, okay, good. Just wanted to make sure. Abandon questions? I don't know if you've noticed that, David. Banding? We'll take a look. Yeah, yeah. I didn't see it in my testing, but, well, I, um, I should touch on this. Okay, we should touch on this. This is, this is a, not an elephant, maybe it's like a donkey in the room. Um, this is a problem that I have experienced. Here's another monochrome we didn't talk about. This is the Q2 Monochrome. Uh, there is an issue with Lightroom and the Q2 Monochrome that I also saw with the M11 Monochrome. You know what I'm talking about with the lens profiles? But it then, why didn't I see that in my testing? You weren't trying hard enough. Did they fix it? No. Or maybe it's only certain ones, right? The 75, because it's so long, has very little lens correction dialed in. But especially as you get into wide-angle lenses, 28, 24s, 21s, um, there is a built-in automatic lens profile based on the six-bit code that goes into Lightroom. You start monkeying with the files and suddenly it just becomes a swirly, crazy, banded mess. The easiest way to get rid of that is turn off the lens profiles. Like the M lenses are so well corrected, it's almost imperceptible difference between on and off, but enough that it creates this strange banding pattern if you leave it on. And, uh, when I created a preset for the M11 Monochrome, as I do for all the cameras, issue with, I disabled that, and I don't have any lens profile whatsoever. And I don't think if you look at the pictures, that they're missing anything. Yeah, except for the banding. Why do we see them? Why don't we see them? Just to make sure you turn that off in, in Lightroom. In Lightroom, yes. Yes. Under, uh, lens corrections and under automatic profile, you just, you don't want to turn off, uh, lens detection in the camera because then you're not going to have it in the metadata. Here you get still the metadata without the profile. Just, just turn it off. Yes. Okay. All right. Show us.

So one of my first pictures I took, my first night, uh, was this. I didn't really know the capabilities of the camera, so I was just sort of testing things out. This is 50,000 ISO, uh, with a, I think a 24. You can, um, wanna change? Nope, just hit I. Oh, yeah, never mind. Never mind. Okay, sorry, sorry. Here, looks like a 24. You wanna do it? Uh, was it an info one or info two? Info two. Oh, here. Lens. There we go. That's better. Bingo. All better now. Okay. Um, right. I can, I can save you all the hassle. I didn't shoot anything in MDNG or SDNG. Everything I shot was LDNG based on the testing I had already done with the M11 and the real-world shooting I've done with the M11. I found that there's no real benefit to it. There's no detriment either, but I prefer larger files because like I said, more is more. Yeah, very well said. So this is 50,000 ISO. Um, it's pretty remarkable because earlier generations of monochrome cameras, as you got up, even the M10 Monochrome at 50,000 ISO would be pretty flat. It start, the highlights and the shadows would definitely tend to mush down into gray. And here we have nice whites, nice blacks. And loading, you're passing computer, bro. I haven't found anything in develop module. That's why I need to be in development. I think. Well, it's fine. Okay, you're good. But you can see that it's not noise-free, but the noise that is there is very uniform. It's very easy to deal with. Yeah, it's a tight pattern noise that doesn't exactly cause smudging or smearing. It just looks like grain, right? Like you can still see a lot of high-frequency detail in this hedge, for instance, or in this door, in the numbers, or the sculpture here. It's really nice. And this kind of set the tone for me that, wow, okay, 50,000 is actually pretty usable. It's not as malleable. Um, I just need the keyboard that was going to make things so much easier for me. Thank you. Color some smooth. Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna switch seats and I guess we decided. Okay, now this one is, this one is interesting because this is the Empire State Building. You might have seen it before. And that's the moon. But even under exposing dramatically, I still could not capture the moon. The moon is basically daylight exposure because it's reflecting the sun. Um, but I think this came out pretty good in terms of, uh, detail of the Empire State Building. Look at this high-frequency information here, uh, in the spire. And what's really fascinating, and the reason I wanted the keyboard, is who here has eagle eyes and can see the amount of exposure compensation? A horse stops. David. Four stops. You're a maniac. And remember, this is at 10,000, 10,000 ISO. And with math, we can figure out that this is equivalent to ISO 160,000. That is insane that this still looks like a real usable image with that equivalent ISO, uh, four stops of exposure compensation. And just to show you where we started, that's how dark it was when I shot it because what I wanted to see is maybe I could get the moon, but I really couldn't. Instead, I was able to get all of this, this detail. And look, I could run it four stops dark and get a lot of nice nuance and a totally clean file. I'm just getting no information whatsoever in the shadows versus, yeah, now I'm actually really getting a really dynamic image. Uh, so that one was again, that first night, and it really was impressive to me of how much, uh, file manipulation this could take. Uh, another example of that would be, David, sorry, before we go on, in your testing, do you notice a big difference between the noise and the M10 Monochrome and in, in the M11 Monochrome? Like, was there a better noise? So, not a, not a massive difference. I think that we're looking at maybe a half a stop better of absolute noise. Well, I think what they're saying is the pattern of the noise difference. Yeah, my experience is maybe slightly tighter, yeah, because the resolution, yeah, and I think maybe because the BSI sensor helps. It's better. I mean, it's more pleasurable and there's less of it, but it's not like that. And it's not less of it, but if I take the, the M10 Monochrome to 32,000, which is kind of where I think the maximum is, I think that it's pretty close to where the M11 is at 50,000. That, that's really the difference. But what I was pointing out the difference in that 50,000 ISO shot is the, it doesn't get as muted or smeary, where the highlights don't get tamped down and the shadows don't get pushed up. Uh, it maintains a more dynamic image at higher ISO. Even if the noise isn't significantly better, I think that the tonal range is improved at ISO. And that's where you really see it. In, I'm going to say that the 10, 20, 40,000 ISO range, I think it's significantly better than the, the M10 Monochrome because it has a much more dynamic, more malleable files at those ranges without falling apart. And I think that's a really important point, which is high ISO performance isn't solely measured by the amount of grain or noise. Sure. There's more to it. And there's more improvements we get from a camera like the M11 Monochrome at high ISO then just, oh, it has less noise, right? All of those things Ava just talked about that make that image a better, technically better photo, but not necessarily creatively, but technically better as you increase high ISO over cameras like the M11 or the M10 Monochrome. Sure. Okay. And another, it will go back. Yeah, go back to that. Here we go. Another thing that I think the camera has inherited from its M11, uh, base is, and, and this, I don't know if anyone else has found this, but I have certainly found it. When I'm using wide-angle lenses and even moderate apertures, do not believe this. This is not actually shot at F13 because I, I'm not a maniac. One of, one of the thing considerations you have to take, uh, on the M11 or the M11 Monochrome, given its what 4.3 or 4.5 micron pixels, is you cannot stop down as much. Um, you should not stop down as much because diffraction is a real thing that will rob your resolution, rob your Christmas of your images. I would very rarely suggest going to F8, and most of my test shooting I did at 5.6 because it is noticeably sharper than F8. Um, if that's a problem for you, maybe an M10 is better, or maybe DNG on the M11 Monochrome is better because essentially you're able to shoot at a larger pixel size that with the bin pixels. And that's probably true of vintage lenses as well, which, well, no, I did some. I, um, you can go back to us, Jose, for now, if you want. This is actually a really good, and I'll make it sure. Sorry to keep jumping around. Okay. No, and people have asked this really since the M10R came out, which was the first 40 megapixel color that we saw, is, oh, now I, I can't use my vintage lens anymore because they don't work as well on a high resolution sensor. And that really is it. Really the way to think about it, because those lenses are not about outright performance, and they really don't perform any worse on 40 megs than they did on 24. If you enjoyed the look on 24, you'll enjoy it on 40, and you'll enjoy it on 60. I've shot the 12 Noctilux, the steel rim vintage, whatever, on M11, SL2, and I love the performance because of what it is. If I want outright performance, I'm either going to use an SL with SL-mounts or a 35 Apo, a 50 Apo, or 75 Noctilux. I'm not, my expectations, I think our expectations are going to change based on the lens we're using. But to me, it's quite joyous to use the vintage glass, and even more so on the M11 Monochrome because you don't have to worry about chromatic aberration, color fringing, color vignetting. So don't be discouraged by the high resolution and think, oh, I can't use my older lenses. Just know that they're not going to be sharp, but they're not sharp on an M10, or they were a lot of them weren't even sharp on film. So, you know, just understand that's not what it's about. Something I noticed on the M11 that carries through the M11 Monochrome. There's this perception, oh, if I want starbursts, I need to shoot at F16, F22. Not true. Not true, dear readers. Because at, I don't know, this is either F8 or 5.6, the M11 and the M11 Monochrome is an absolute starburst machine. If you put on a wide-angle lens, uh, 18, 21, 24, 28, and you stop it down just a little bit and point it at a bright light source, boom, starburst. Uh, I, I don't have an explanation for it, but it works basically every time. And people are always asking me how I get these fantastic starbursts, and am I shooting it? It's not fake. It's all fake. Yeah, that's a filter. That's it. You better be careful. Again, that's called sarcasm. That's called sarcasm.

Okay, so again, here we are. Uh, this is 6400 ISO. And you notice it's only a hundredth of a second because I hadn't really figured the camera out yet. And I'll get to that. So there might be some small, you know, people movement or something like that. But plenty of detail here. And you say, well, it looks a little grainy for 6400 because it's not 6400. Uh, it's 6400 plus three exposure plus 46 shadows as well. Plus 46 shadows, right? So you can see the amount of of tonal updating I've done. And again, I'll give you a reset. Everyone wants to see what out of camera looks like. It looks flat, except for the bright lights. And in here, you'll notice basically there's no tonal separation. But happening, I don't know, my mouse just decided to go crazy. You'll notice there's no tonal separation between the buildings and the sky in the darker areas, right? It's pretty flat. And this is what Josh is talking about. The people, you notice they just sort of blend in together. You can barely see anything on this dark background. And yet, when we go back to our processed footage, what a difference. There's tons of information in these shadows. Look, there's a mailbox there you couldn't see. And you can see the difference between the buildings and the sky. You can see branches in the sky. So there is so much information in these files, even at higher ISOs, that it just started to blow my mind and change the way I thought about how to shoot these. In my mind, I'm trying to shoot for the highlights and make sure I don't blow anything out, but also it's a real way to extract the most amount of information. Uh, yet another example. This one even more dramatic, right? Because it's only 1250, 1250. Um, and here we are plus three. And the amount of detail. This looks like I didn't push it at all because it's 100% clean. This pattern is not noise. This is actually a very, very fine mesh they use to keep the pigeons out of the library. And, you know, the level of detail is just absurd. Well, in the subtlety of the tones, yeah, in the stone. That rhymes. Uh, I was really, really nice. I mean, you didn't lose anything. No. And if I go back and reset this, this mush, well, it just doesn't have a lot of tonal separation. But this is exactly what you need to start with to get that final image that looks awesome. Because what am I doing? I'm protecting the highlights here and here and here. And when I process this image out, now I have lots of detail in these highlight areas, but I'm also getting all that shadow information and the highlights together. So it's not that it's, you know, some miraculously wonderful picture. Um, this one I just wanted to see what I could do with the 35. Hello, Rose. What did you do, Josh? I wanted to see just how sharp I could get with a 35 Apo at low ISO. So this is 200 ISO. No monkey business here. This is pretty processed, pretty flat, actually. And this just gives you a little bit of an idea of what that combo is capable of. I'm going to make it full screen. I'm going to attempt to make it full screen. There we go. And it is. There we go. Look at the tonal information. When people say, what does a monochrome look like at its, like, peak performance? Take some reflecting, lightly reflecting metal with paint chips and scratches, and every little nuance and detail, and all the tones are just on display. And pair it up with the lens like the 35 Apo or the 50 Apo, 75 Noctilux, and at low ISO, this camera will just stun you with the amount of detail. So that was kind of, kind of cool. Um, once I actually got the hang of things. XA also kind of here in flatter light, it's going, it's going, it's going, eventually. There you go. So this is flat light. This is not my favorite. It's those white skies and muted grays that I'm not a huge fan of. Um, but, you know, it's what it is. When, when the light comes out, everything just looks a little better. Like that. I do have a shot. I think. Yeah. So talking about, uh, electronically stabilized live view. This is taken with the 90 macro LMR M and an F4, which I thought was a great companion to the camera because you don't need a lot of aperture, and it's nice and small. So even at F4, it, uh, it's great. And you can see here, I think this one shot probably at 5.6. Beautiful bokeh because I'm so close. It has a pretty high magnification ratio. And what did I do? I, I upped my ISO knowing I could get really clean results. This is 2000 ISO in daylight. I was also using a red filter for those keeping track, and a thousandth of a second. So I was able to have a really nice sharp result, even with 90, even at minimum distance, and with electronically stabilized live view, I was able to go to 100 focus in without it shaking all over the place. And I think that's where, you know, it really counts. So there's tons of nuance, uh, in the highlights here. And this one, again, shot pretty spot on, but really fantastic, underrated lens. We talked about that in our Underdog episode for sure, and a macro episode as well, and the macro episode. But, um, yeah, just great nuance, great detail. Again, most of these, you'll, you'll find that I have some kind of exposure compensation. And when you want to get fast shutter speed like for action, if it ever changes, come on. Oh, your computer's so grumpy today. What did you do, Josh? I didn't know anything. What do you do? It. There you go. So here, uh, I was able to get a thousandth of a second, you know, really nice, uh, just with the 24. And, and freeze all the action with, with plenty of, of detail. Although even at a thousandth of a second, the ball is moving pretty fast. Yeah, the ball is moving pretty fast, but, you know, I just love the kind of using an M like an M is not really made to be used, I guess. Here, you know, moving carousel. And anytime that this is the light had changed on us. It went from kind of a flat light to the more dramatic direct light. And you can see everything just, the contrast pops, all the details pop. And, um, it just looks really nice because it's a monochrome. All right, let's jump ahead a little bit. Um, maybe show like a few more, and then we'll, yeah, yeah, take some questions. Wow, what is happening? Maybe I will go back to libraries. Give it a second. I feel like Josh upsets your computer. Don't, don't blame me for this. You upset the computer. Don't blame me for that. Don't blame you for this. Yeah, all right. So for a lot of this stuff, let me do this one. And these aren't even like the, the interesting pictures. These are more, you know, here we're just trying to test everything. What is going on? I don't know. And again, you can see almost four stops exposure compensation on this one, and it looks perfect because we're at base ISO. Tons of of nuance, plenty of detail in pretty much everywhere. But we're able to see detail in this, in in a lit sign. There's actually still detail. Right. If I reset this, you'll notice I shot it to protect the highlights. As you can see, there, those are the brightest part of the image. This is a bright part of the image. And then when processed, I mean, look at the shadows. You can barely make out those even people here. And now when we reset it back to my processed image, it just has so much information available to you. So it would make me very, very sad if people didn't extract the full information. There was a question about what a red filter looks like in red filter conditions, and that would be this here. So, uh, eventually it's going to come up. There we go. Yeah, that's the typical look that you get with a red filter. So we've got that just inky sky with a lot of contrast. And interestingly, because I noticed a little quirk here, because the camera has a secondary light meter on the front that's estimating the exposure and then comparing it against the actual exposure in the camera, where you see the stuff at F16, that just means I had a red filter on and it's knocking it down two stops, if that makes sense. Although it's really like three stops here. Uh, but gobs of detail, information, texture. I mean, every single brick is on display here. But this is the 50 Apo. I mean, this lens in 2012 was introduced to take advantage of the resolution increases and resolving power of the original Monochrome, and it works just as well on the M11 Monochrome as it worked back then, which is pretty extraordinary. And then I'm going to really skip ahead, um, because I have a lot, a lot of stuff, but if you want to see this, it will actually be in my full written review. A little teaser here. So I had the opportunity to go to a boxing gym. And let's see if I can find. I can't see. Is it that? Is that? Wow. Thinking I don't like it. This is your computer, man. Yeah, I think it's time for a new one. I think it is. I think it's time for. There it is. I like that shot, but that wasn't what I was looking for. Uh, there was one there.

was like a fighting. Where is it? Hold on. It is. This okay? So, this is towards the end of my testing. As you saw, I kind of fast-forwarded here a bit, and I adapted the way that I shoot. So, even though there was a decent amount of light in here, I knew that I had moving subjects. And instead of going to the usual, uh, auto ISO and shoot at, you know, 250th of a second, I knew I needed faster shutter speeds to stop this action of these guys sparring. So, I actually set manually on the dial, 1000th of a second. I set my lens, obviously, as manual. I set it to F4, and then I just let the ISO go into auto and run up to whatever it needed to. And in this case, 16,000 ISO. And it just, it's pretty amazing the level of detail and and the look of the images that you're able to get. It's a very, you know, well, it feels very natural to me. It doesn't feel like a grainy digital noisy image. It just feels like a nice, cool, yeah, indoor shot. Like it's like if I describe this photo to you with words, this is what you'd expect it to look like. I think in your head, this is how you kind of visualize it. Yeah. But how many cameras could I walk in there and shoot at 16,000 ISO? Uh, currently, well, yeah, yeah, especially. And that, that's interrupted, but not mentioned that lighting in there would have been attractive to try to shoot in color. Now, this, yeah, let's take a look at that.

Now, this is some more shot, 40,000 ISO. And this is what I was talking about when compared to the M10 monochrome. Because I really believe if you look at 40,000 in the M10 monochrome, it doesn't have the richness that this has. Yeah. Well, just look at the tones, like in the arms and the skin and the shirt. I mean, it's harder to see on YouTube, but I'm standing in front of the giant computer monitor. I can tell you, uh, even the boxing glove. Can you zoom in on the gloves? Well, it's back in library. It might take a second. It's okay. Let's give it a second. Let it, let it load. I mean, that is great. There's so much 40,000 ISO. I don't know. Could you imagine going back in time, talking like an 80s photojournalist who was shooting, you know, Tri-X 800 and saying, like, "Oh, you're gonna shoot at 40,000 ISO and look at, look at the detail on the hair?" Second, gotta let it load. There you go. There. Yeah, that is remarkable. 40,000 ISO. Is this shot pushed at all? Or how much, like, how much did you push this in post? Let's see. This one, not, no, not much. Well, 50 shadows. That's something. Yeah. So, let me reset it just so you can see where we started. There we go. Nice and flat, which is exactly what you want to start with. It's actually cleaner. It's more like the test shots you showed. Right? Yeah, yeah. So, if I zoom in on this one, you'll notice that there's actually more information here, and it's cleaner. There's actually less noise, right? I'm introducing some noise based on my processing, but I'm also able to extract out more detail and and rich. Yeah, and the noise is, is very, very, um, very tight, powdery, very smooth. So, this is great. I like this one a lot. The tones are really nice. Yeah. And then, draw, like, one more. Okay. And then let's get back to this. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. Well, they're gonna, they're gonna read your review when it comes out in 2020. Let's not go there. And, uh, they're gonna see all these images, plus they're gonna be able to do them on their 4K cinema displays. They will. They will. So, let's take a look at this. So, this is a 120, uh, ISO, 125 base ISO, handheld, 15 seconds, right? Handheld. Actually, um, do I have it here? A little, yeah, yeah. Uh, I use this. This is exactly what I use because this exact tripod. This is a little, uh, Leofoto tabletop tripod, and I carried around all day in my bag just so I could shoot that at night. This is taken from, uh, from Brooklyn, past, kind of in Brooklyn Bridge Park. And, yeah, this is, uh, the biggest challenge actually for shooting these shots is, uh, New York City airspace is extremely busy, even at at night. So, you would get always these little, like, light streaks of airplanes. I had to keep shooting basically around the airplane traffic. But let's zoom in and take a look at the extraordinarily, extraordinarily, extraordinary level of detail. You know, it is, uh, it is stunningly nice and nuanced. And you look at the cloud. I missed the dust, okay? But all the buildings, everything like that. This is the 35mm you would expect. You would expect, uh, this level of detail. Yeah. I think there's actually birds. Yeah, look at that. There's birds sitting there. Look at that, chilling. So, that's 15 seconds. So, you can do it. Another advantage, uh, and you can come back to us real quick. Another advantage of of the M11 generation is also the much longer exposure. Correct? You've got 60 minutes versus 16 minutes on the on the M10 monochrome. So, not that I went to multiple minutes, 15 seconds. Yeah. And interestingly, um, earlier, uh, the way I was actually able to get, and it might have been this shot too, the way I was able to get longer exposure times was I didn't have any ND filters, but I did have a red filter. So, I used, I used a red filter as a three-stop ND. That works, uh, which got me from like five seconds to 15 seconds. Nice. Well, he has a lot of images, but you're going to be able to see them, a lot more of them, in a lot more detail when he posts his M11 monochrome review soon, which is going to be awesome. So, definitely stay tuned for that. We'll talk about it obviously in the next show as well, mentioning it again, and it'll be on Red Dot Forum. So, and I will drop a link in this description. I'll edit the description to have a link to the M11 monochrome review when it's published. Yes, it's 92 done. All right. That is a very specific number. Okay. Uh, there's probably about 80 quadrillion gazillion questions. I want to show a cool thing. Can I use that before we do? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, this is the insert cool thing. That's right. Not that one. Well, there's two cool things I want to show, but first the box. And I need the gloves. Oh, I brought two toys because, you know, I can't, because I always like to geek out about cool stuff that we get on trade. So, as a nice break from our monochromatic programming, I have a monochromatic one cool thing. Something I almost never see in this magical box. It is not, it's impact. It has color, both in and on it. Oh, here. We, we can show stuff here now. Okay. You want me to demonstrate it for you? You're not allowed to hold it. Oh, oh. How's that? My gloves on because I'm gonna hold it over there. You're gonna hold it. This is one of 450. A camera based on the M10-P and a camera that kind of came and went where it just was announced, they sold through them, and we just never saw them again. I think I've been lucky enough to see one or two pre-owned since it was launched. There we go. This is the M10-P Reporter. Um, again, only 450 these were made. This is a pre-owned example that is flawless, complete box and everything. I didn't bring all that with me. Um, see if we can share it. Yeah, put it on top of that. There we go. I got it. You got it. Yeah. Can you do the close-up, um, like the overhead or, yeah, the overhead? Yeah, yeah. There it is. Look at that. So, it's got the aramid fiber coating. It still has the original factory screen protector. Um, I just got excited about this because again, we've really almost never see these pre-owned, especially that are this clean. So, if you're a fan of that sort of reporter style, this is the rarest of all your reporter variants. We saw the SL2-S Reporter, as well as the Q2 Reporter. So, that's the first cool thing that I brought. And the other thing is actually the exact opposite. And it's a lens that David and I just spoke about, which is, if you watch the show, you know that we both liked using the classic series lenses. 28mm Summicron, 35mm Summilux, steel rim, 90mm Tele-Elmarit. And then the 12 Noctilux. Um, the 12 Noctilux being probably my favorite, although I haven't, I'm joining the steel rim, but I, I haven't had as much time with it as I would have liked. Um, the thing about the 12 Noctilux is they're a little on the pricey side for a new lens, and even pre-owned, um, they're quite rare to see. And when they do come in, they don't sell for that much less than new. But I got one recently. These in the bag that I actually, I like it because it is not very nice. It's the only way to put it. Normally, you get these lenses in their mint box, complete, you know, things I like. This is the exact opposite. You can see it doesn't even have the box. And I didn't use it. I swear. No, this is, this is actually like a David Parker special. So, this is a 12 Noctilux. It's literally just case. Not even the original case. I can hold this case. Captain Hood. But look at the wear on the barrel. It is lovely. I love this patina this thing has on it. This thing. So, this is priced, of course, a thousand dollars less than buying a new one, but it works perfectly. And the glass display, you see the glass is flawless. Tested it out. And it does have the metal back cap, which is a nice thing. And it has the hood, the original hood. Um, so, if you ever wanted a 12 Noctilux, the classic series reissue, and you weren't overly concerned about cosmetics, you just wanted one that was priced well, this is the one for you. I know I always show like super mint, perfect everything. I think the official word for this is, I love that. That's so cool to me. And I got, I, at first, I was disappointed when I saw it, that I was like, you know what? This is probably one of the very few that exists that actually look like this. Like, this is pretty sweet. Guilt-free. Yeah. Exactly. You can use it guilt-free, and you can use the heck out of it. And someone already got all the things in downtown, right? So, yeah, you don't have to worry about keeping it perfect. Um, anyway, those are my two cool toys I want to show, just to break up the monitor now that we have not me a little bit. Um, we should probably take some questions now that we have that. I do want to show the custom setting things. Custom setting things. Yeah, the like being able to set this here. Yeah. You're welcome. Let me take your keyboard. Give them space. All right. All right. What do we got? Can I take a look? Take a look at the overhead. Okay. There. Here we go. Maybe, uh, so I just want to show first of all, there's live view going on. What I, I want to demonstrate the the function buttons because we talked about that as something that was actually usable. So, if you push and hold one of these buttons, you'll notice that you can change these functions. The the default is live view, I believe. So, if we just click that, live view turns off. Click it again, live view turns on. You will also notice that it's much more responsive. And not that you can necessarily hear it in our studio, but there's no click clunk clunk when you switch from live view from an M10 monochrome, uh, on and off because the shutter is already open. So, it's basically always in live view for metering. Now, it's just live view for capturing. Uh, and then the wheel, if I click in here, you can see that you can program it to whatever you want. So, right now, it's an ISO, but I found that the exposure compensation worked really well. If I can get to that, let's see here. Exposure bracketing, exposure compensation. So, with exposure compensation, click, and you can easily set exposure compensation with one motion because it's just click in to to set. Click it again, and you're done. And then the top one is your last custom function button. So, push and hold on that, and here it's set to focus aid. So, that works pretty well also. Um, you can change these around. Let's say that I always know that I want a live view, I could reprogram, let's say the function button to be my M ISO. Okay. And if I change the top dial position to M, now I can manually set whatever ISO I want right on the screen, very, very simply. Um, and like all the other cameras that work in this generation, you can either use the dial, you can use the direction pad, or you can use your finger on the touch screen, which is pretty handy dandy. Uh, like other cameras, it also has the the touch interface. So, you can access drive mode, self-timer, things like that. You can access your exposure metering, which right now is set to multi-field, but I'd highly recommend highlight weighted metering. And the thing we were talking about, uh, with the capture assistance, I'll show that as well since we talked about it. Yes, the highlight. Uh, so here on page three, under capture assistance, and here we went over this in the M11 menu episode, so you can look at that. It's the same, same thing. But basically, your info profiles, you can go into each one, and you want to have clipping turned on. And 253 is is just fine. So, now it would show dial up exposure compensation. And if we cycle through our info displays, still not clipping because it's, did you break it? I broke it. Oh, it's not, yeah, it's not anything. It's not brightness. There we go. There it is. There it is. Okay. So, that's, that's the clipping warning. But it only shows when you have pressed the shutter. Okay. That's a little difference between it and the SL2. Well, unless you have exposure, right? Yeah, yeah. Crazy. Would be impossible to shoot, right? It would be impossible to shoot. So, that's kind of our recommendation here. Uh, yeah. Um, gonna come back to us. I want to just quickly, um, someone had mentioned they said you were, they were surprised you're shooting at F-16. David was not shooting at F-16. It was not. Keep in mind that the aperture data that Lightroom or any software is displaying is just a guess based on a calculation of a few variables. It doesn't, sometimes it can be raised, sometimes it can be close, sometimes way off. So, no, David was not shooting in F-16. That was just the, and in fact, usually I found in my catalog if there's F-13, F-16 numbers, it means that I was using a red filter. So, it thinks that the exposure. Imagine, if you're at 5.6, that's 8, 11, 16, three stops from from 5.6 to F-16 here. Yeah, that's why it's estimating differently. Jose, any other burning questions we need to answer as we sort of wind and as we say, friends do not let friends shoot at F-16 ever. What do we got? Did you find you needed less post-processing time than with the M10 monochrome? No, no. I mean, my personal findings, and keep in mind that I'm, I'm approaching this also from a from a testing point of view. A lot of what I was doing as I was shooting, I was also spending a lot of time working with the files on the spot to basically then extend and test differently as I kept going. That's why my shooting technique changed over the course of a few days because I was adapting the shooting technique to the processing technique and trying to get the best balance of the two. And that's what learning your equipment is all about. Absolutely. Having a mastery. I mean, mastery, that's an egotistical sounding word. Having a, yeah, no, I know that's not really what I meant. Having a firm grasp of the base technical sort of performance and operation of your gear, both camera and computer, so that you can work your technique and photos to get the most out of it. It just comes with practice, you know. Even David, who's the best in the world at this, it still took him time to go from getting this brand new camera, yeah, testing it, messing up, making bad pictures, fixing them, making better pictures, you know. And he, but he understands that he's going to have to go through that process to get to where he needs to be. It helps when you shoot a lot. The more that you shoot and the more experience you have, I guess, with a wide variety of cameras, yeah, is that it, it allows you to hone in a little bit faster and find your, I call it a performance envelope, right? So, this is the performance envelope of the camera. What does it do at low ISO? What does it do with high ISO? What kind of shutter speed do you really need to freeze action? You've determined, you know, I quickly found that street photos that I shot at 250th of a second are not super sharp because people are moving. And based on the pixel size of the camera, it shows more motion than it would say if I shot an M10-P. So, you have to take those lessons and learn them and just be able to incorporate into your your shooting of what you actually want to accomplish. Yeah. But to answer the original question that Jose asked, actually, I found that the files are flat. And you saw it in Josh's test. Yeah, the files out of the camera are flatter. They're flatter than M11 files compared to black and white, and they're flatter than M10-M files, M10 monochrome files by far. These are some of the flattest, deadest files I've ever seen, which is a good thing because they have so much dynamic range and malleability. Um, so I actually had to do more processing and more experimentation to figure out what was really going to work best. And, you know, in that way, I'd say that once I figured out the technique, I enjoyed the results more. There you go. But it took me a while to get there. Yeah, as it should. You know, this is a specialized, high-quality tool that requires a specialized, high-quality approach, technique. That's the fun part is figuring that out. I mean, I decided to have Noctilux. It took me a year. That's a challenge to master. That's right. I'm like shooting in a ton in the days of the iPhone 601. So, I do not have stabilization, right? But I love that journey because I was able to grow very familiar with it and understand how to use it. And that was, and now I can take it on using very relatively easily. And that, that's so rewarding when you get to that point. You just got to go through that journey with your equipment to get there. And that's one of the things I tell people is who just want to get it, get in and out of stuff and trade in and trade out. Like, no, you're gonna, you're gonna give it time. You got to give it time to become friends with it. It's a relationship, right? You know, you have to, like, you have to be one, be one with the camera. And you have to understand what it can do. It's also the same thing, you know, in terms of jumping around with different lenses and experimenting with lenses. At a certain point, like, settle down and take it a little bit easy. Especially with something very different. Something very different. So, maybe change less things at once. If you're going to change out the camera, keep the lens the same and see how they work for you with the new camera before you just make all sorts of wild changes. I, I could tell there must be a lot of newer viewers in the chat because we keep getting questions about like future products. Like, what is, what's coming up? If you don't, if you haven't watched the show at all, you would know that we don't talk about it. We don't bother speculating or not theorizing or guessing. We don't know what's coming. We get excited about everyone. This was a great example on the M11 monochrome. We were, yeah, we didn't know it was coming. We're like, "Oh, cool." It's what we said. Trip to New York to spend 40 hours a week straight photographing so we could have enough content. I mean, this definitely caught us off guard. But we like that. We know we're, we're giant, like, nerds. So, David, just about the, the shooting experience, yeah, being out in the field. Somebody asked, could you not set the exposure compensation to zero and if you have the blinkies, bring down the ISO until the blinkies are gone instead of always shooting at minus three stops? Depends what shooting mode are you talking about? Shooting in manual or in, because so maybe in manual for that. Yeah, you'd have to be in manual for that because otherwise the camera's just gonna compensate by changing the shutter speed. Yeah. Um, I typically for most of my shooting, I shoot an aperture priority with auto ISO. That's generally what I do. If I was shooting that long time exposure, of course, I set it manually on ISO and I wanted low ISO to get a longer shutter speed. Typically though, I, I don't shoot in manual. I find I do like assisted manual, which I kind of covered a little bit, which is you set your aperture and you set, let's say, a thousandth of a second on your shutter speed dial, and then you use auto ISO to give you the right ISO for this shutter speed and aperture combination. Because in a case of shooting action, I want a fast enough shutter speed. I want to control my aperture for depth of field and look control. I'm controlling focus, but things are moving so quickly, I don't want to have to readjust my ISO if I shift, you know, and my subject is under a light or they're in the shadow. I just want the camera to do it for me. And what I'm making sure is that I'm not blowing out the highlights. So, I'm using highlight weighted metering and I'm using exposure compensation again, in addition to that, to kind of guide the camera where it needs to be. It's not perfect. No one is claiming it's perfect. Yeah. It's far from it. But is it a great tool? It's sort of like, you know, insert auto analogy here. This is like a high-performance track car, right? And it operates very in a very narrow bandwidth. So, if you, you know, rev it too high or whatever, you blow the engine. If you push the highlights here, they blow out. Yeah. It's a high-performance machine that once you know it, and once you understand it, is capable of incredible results. But if you just leave it in first gear, you know, and like floor it, like you're not getting 111. You're just not going anywhere. Which is fine. Which is fine. And I think we should, as we're coming kind of to the end of our our time, I think we need to have that discussion. Sure. Of who is this right for? Hmm. What case? Let's say, if we come from an M10 monochrome, is it worth coming to an M11 monochrome? Yeah, which we talked about a bit. Yeah. But, you know, again, we come back, the difference between an M10 monochrome and an M11 monochrome is there image quality differences? Yes. Is it night and day? Not exactly. Yeah. I would say, what do you think? If I was comparing, if, okay, if I had an M10 monochrome, it would be a lot easier for me to justify buying an 11 monochrome than if I had an M11. I wanted to buy an M11 monochrome. I'm talking about replacing one over for the other, not having them both. Because the improvements from the M10 generation to the M11 generation are massive. And that jump is huge. And you'll, it will improve your photography. You should take advantage of those features, even if it's simply a matter of the better battery life getting you that last photo at the end of the night. Sure. M11 to M11 monochrome, the gap is a lot smaller. That's going to come down to how intense is your black and white photography? How much time are you spending above ISO 6400? And how comfortable are you both learning a new tool and also, I mean, post-processing in general? Because as David mentioned, this is a more specialized tool that requires a higher level of specialized technique. Not, you shouldn't be scared. I mean, it's fun. It is part of that process, but that is an important thing to understand. I think the M11 is more right for most people than the M11 monochrome. Even more right for most people that want to shoot a lot of black and white because you don't have to worry nearly as much about your highlights. You don't have to worry about using color filters. You can still keep the color file if you want, and you don't have to post-process it nearly as much. And your out-of-camera result won't require as much work. Yes, on average. But if you are a passionate black photographer, if you want that high ISO performance to the nth degree, if you want to use color filters, if you want an incredibly malleable file, you can get into Lightroom or Capture One or whatever and just go, go to town on with both global adjustments and selective area adjustments, then yes, I think the M11 monochrome would make sense for you. How's that? That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm gonna agree. I mean, I think you're maybe selling the M11 a little bit short in terms of of what its capabilities are. That's fair. Probably. Uh, M11 is really, really, really, really, really, really good. Right? You can look at my review samples for for M11. I mean, dynamic range is phenomenal on the M11. Highlight recovery is the best of of any, like, at the date. Um, shadow recovery is up there with with the S cameras. So, you're looking at 15 stops of dynamic range on the M11. We're talking about the color version. I just want to be clear about that. The M11 has actually has over a stop of highlight recovery, which we hadn't seen before. Um, it's an easier shooting experience to shoot the M11 than it is the M11 monochrome. You're obviously gaining all those technical advantages except for, you know, 64 gigs instead of 256 gigs of internal memory. You don't get a sapphire glass screen. Um, but you do have the ability to process a different version of black and white based on three color channels. So, you have a lot more information to work with if that's what you like to do. And you can use either Lightroom, Photoshop, you can Silver Efex, Capture One. There's a lot of black and white presets for color cameras. Um, and the ISO, I think, is really strong on the M11 up to say 16,000. Yeah. A lot of that also depends on your personal comfort level of grain, yeah, of using noise reduction. Personally, I, on the M11, I'll shoot at 50,000 for what I'm doing. For me, it's like a lot of social media, small stuff, texting. I mean, I don't, I'm not printing huge. Sure. When I'm, when I'm in those situations anyway. So, for me personally, I think I have a higher threshold than you might. But, you know, as we saw, the M11 files have a lot of detail. More detail. They do. I mean, monochrome files too, out of camera. Out of camera, right? Until you start work. Somebody had commented, "Oh, the M11 files look sharper." Like, they do out of camera because there's more grain and more inherent contrast. Exactly. Whereas the M11 monochrome, you have to get there. And we simply, this is not a Photoshop Lightroom episode. This is a camera episode. So, we didn't go deep diving down all those paths. But you can do a lot with the M11 monochrome that you can't do with an M11 if you're willing to put that work in and that practice in. Yes. I think that sums it up. It sums up well. And, and I would also say that if you have an M11, it makes it easier to get an M11 monochrome. Well, right. That's the other, that's the flip side of the conversion. If you're going from M10 monochrome to M11 monochrome, you have to get a new viewfinder, a new battery, new charger. Well, it comes with a charger, but all the accessories are different. Except for, like, by the way, I'm sorry, and if you haven't seen it because you don't have an M11, I adore the M11 charger. I mean, this thing is tiny, tiny, tiny. And it takes USB-C, which means I can use my laptop charger for it and I don't have to carry an extra brick with this thing. I love it. Right? So, versus M11 to M11 monochrome, everything's the same. I mean, it's an easy argument. Just say get an M11 and the M11 monochrome if you want to have one of each. If you were someone that had an M10-R and an M10 monochrome, yeah, that makes sense. It's all the same stuff. But, you know, going from the M10 monochrome to the M11, you're gonna have to keep that in mind because a lot of the accessories, most of the accessories are going to be different. Not thumb supports though, those are the same. And not memory cards, lenses, straps, flashes. I don't need a different strap. I know you don't. You can actually, wow, use your same straps. Uh, any, uh, closing? Hopefully that was clear without hope. So, I mean, two, it depends. Just remember, there's a lot of monochrome content on the channel. If you just want to learn more about what make monochrome cameras unique, why we choose them over color cameras, and all that stuff, we've got a bunch of content about that. David has done a number of showdown articles on Red Dot Forum over the years where he's compared the monochrome versions to their color equivalents at all the different ISOs in great detail. If you really want a deep dive, and unlike the tests we showed here, I spent a lot of time working with those files to get them to visually match. Yes. Yes. Which is easier said than done. And at varying ISOs, what goes, so much of work. Yeah, to get those done. So, we've got, I know because I saw a lot of questions about monochrome cameras in general in the chat, we have a lot of resources available on the channel, on Red Dot Forum for everyone who's curious to learn more about that. The website he's talking about on Reddit for, on the website, and then Red Dot Forum, the YouTube channel, two different things, same people, two different things. Sign us out, David, please. I see so many words. I never know. But there's, there's, we've answered all the questions. So many words. This was, as usual, informative and humorous. Wow. Wow. Informative and humorous. That's, that's the double whammy right there. That's, that's what we aim for, you know. Wait, wait, the triple whammy is, was it entertaining? Well, I think that if we inflate, there's the implementation. What is that movie? Are you entertained? Anyway, sign us off, please. All right. All right. Jump out of that window. Thank you. So, uh, just again, as a, as a reminder, um, I will be publishing a full, in-depth M11 monochrome review, uh, where I do explain in a fair amount of detail the difference between monochrome and color sensors, as a rehash, also all of the generational improvements from the, um, 10 generation to the M11 generation, how they apply to monochrome, as well as a full, way too many pictures that you can dive into, uh, to your heart's content with all the tech specs, and you can see, um, image quality for yourself with all different lenses. The, uh, the other thing we, we need to announce as well, yes, Peter will be, so bad if you go to the website, I will find it. We have a super, super cool workshop lining up. A little last minute, but well, that's in jail. Okay, that's not last minute. If your schedule allows for it, Jose, can you go to the old screen arrow? There. Here we go. Bhutan. Yes, June 15th. Two spots remaining. It is going to be incredible. And it's, not roughing it. This is five-star luxury accommodations and with amazing mountains and Buddhist temples and all sorts of fun things. So, yeah. And the photographer, Michael Turek, who's leading the workshop with us, is super talented, really, really interesting guy. And he does a lot of really cool specialized analog photography and double blended exposure stuff that's really, really interesting. So, we have two spots left. If you want to go to Bhutan for a week in June, any questions, obviously, just let us know. Okay. Okay. Come back to us. So, check that out. Sign us off. We are done. Okay. Um, right. So, if you like the video, you know what to do. Give us a thumbs up. It helps us. Uh, if you're not already subscribed to Red Dot Forum YouTube channel, please do so. There's something down there that you can do that. And click the notification bell so you know when we post new content like this wonderful episode, or who knows when we'll do another one sometime in the future. I think the 16th. Anyway, we will be doing, we will be back for another exciting episode of Red Dot Forum camera talk. So, please stay tuned for that. Do subscribe. We're awfully close to 20 something thousand subscribers. So, any more is is good. Lets us know that we're entertaining and informative. Big thanks to Josh for everything he does and his encyclopedic knowledge and wonderful testing technique. Big thanks to Jose for making sure we are in focus and cameras get changed and keeping on top of your questions. And big thanks to you for tuning in and spending your Saturday night with us because without you, we wouldn't be here. So, big thanks to you. And you can find the latest Leica news, M11 monochrome reviews, other things, a lot of other reviews on red.forum.com on the website, as well as all of our archived live videos are here on Red Dot Forum YouTube channel in the multiple playlists. And you can browse by category. If you have any questions in the meantime, drop them in the comments and we'll see what we can do. And, uh, until then, we'll see you in the next episode. Good night, everybody. See ya. Good night, guys. Thank you.

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