Among our meetings today at Photokina we met privately with Leica. In attendance was Stephan Schulz the Product Manager of Leica’s S-System. While Dave was excited to talk about lens delivery schedules, promotion/marketing of workshops, etc etc I was very excited to meet with Stephan and see a demonstration of soon to be released firmware for the Leica S2.
Every camera has strengths and weaknesses and the Leica S2 is no exception. We’ve been blown away by our lens tests, enjoyed the minimalist design, and found the build quality to be really excellent. However, the first time we plugged in the Leica S2 to shoot tethered we were surprised to find that tethered shooting was slow to the point of being unusable. Leica has made small steps in the last year to increase the speed and responsively of tethered shooting; notably Leica worked with Adobe to implement native-tethering to Adobe LightRoom, eliminating the lag caused by the “hot folder” method on which it was previously reliant. However, the improvements so far have been modest.
Tethered shooting is not something every photographer needs, and some tethered shooting is done at a slow pace (e.g. still life product shooting). However, anyone who has used a Phase One or Leaf system tethered to Capture One during a fashion or portrait shoot knows that these solutions provide the ability to shoot dozens of frames without thought to buffers, and with fast frame-to-frame times, and then review any of them only a few seconds after the final shutter release. The modest improvements Leica has made so far have not approached this level of tethered shooting.
I’m glad to say that the new firmware shown to us today is a large step forward. Leica has managed to include lossless DNG compression, which I think is an impressive improvement to be able to incorporate through firmware update of an existing camera system. This means each raw file will be approximately half as large with no loss in quality (think ZIP compression). All current Phase One and Leaf digital backs use lossless compressed raw files and the lack of this option/feature makes it nearly twice as hard for the S2 to keep up during rapid tethered shooting. By adding this option the Leica S2 will
- seem to have a larger buffer since more frames can fit into the same sized buffer
- transmit the raw file to the computer faster
- fit more images on any given CF card
The speed improvements demonstrated to us today based on a beta of this firmware was impressive. It still lagged significantly behind speed demon options like the Leaf Aptus-II 8 and Phase One P40+ especially when shooting five or six images in a row. However, it no longer felt so laggy as to be unusable for fast shooting – a subjective evaluation to be sure but one based on extensive experience working with photographers who shoot tethered as part of their standard work methods.
In addition, the long term plan is to also provide an update version of Image Shutter (Leica’s proprietary tethering application) which would have a mode which allowed the tethering to go directly into LightRoom (without the need for the “hot folder” method) but pull the preview which the camera generates for the LCD on-camera strait from the camera at the same time, providing very fast preview of the most recent frame.
It’s always best to wait until an actual public release to make our final judgements about final quality, speed, and reliability (the beta we saw today was somewhat buggy, but that is standard (even expected) of beta versions. Also, I still feel the tools for tethering available in LightRoom (which only recently added native tethering to the program as a sort of add-on functionality) are far behind the tools provided in Capture One (which has been tethering for 12 years as a core functionality of the program).
That said, I was quite impressed at the improvements and hope to see them in a public release soon.
Also of Note:
- The 120mm macro lens is shipping. This is great news for two reasons. First, a 120mm macro is one of the key components of each of the successful veterans of medium format and given what we’ve seen in our testing of the 180mm, 70mm, and 35mm we expect (but will wait for testing to confirm) great things from this lens. Second, with the first four lenses out the door we hope Leica will be able to get to work on filling out the line with longer, shorter, and zoom lenses.