Review: Leica M-P (Typ 240)

WIRED

Is the best at photographs.

TIRED

$8,000 for a camera that isn’t made for quick focusing, action photos, videos of anything that moves, high-ISO shots, or fiscally responsible human beings? Tack on another few grand for a lens? You're paying more for them to remove the red dot? You're insane, or maybe just a camera snob.

There's this routine you go through when you review a camera. The first thing you do is take it out of the box and shoot whatever mundane object is directly in front of you. It's a throwaway shot, a test to make sure the camera is operational and meets the minimum requirements for calling itself a camera. For this reason, many camera reviewers' SD cards are half-full of pictures of laptop keyboards, pens, coins, coffee cups, and desk flair.

The first thing I shot with the Leica M-P (Typ 240) was a sandwich. The camera's battery finished charging around lunchtime, and I was eager to see what the Leica hype is all about. Also, there was a sandwich right in front of me. It was supposed to be a throwaway shot. It was something else entirely.

It was, quite simply, the greatest sandwich photograph I will ever take.

After devouring my delicious subject I dove into the M-P's menus, flipped the film mode to black-and-white, set focus to infinity, and half-assedly aimed a shot out the office window. The result made me giddy. I couldn’t wait to use this camera to take deliberate, composed photographs.

When everything is in focus, there are no throwaway shots with the M-P. Everything looks like a frame from some Wim Wenders documentary about the human condition. There's an OMFG combination of crisp contrast, smoothness, sharpness, warmth, and dynamic range in everything the camera captures. The photos have a distinct presence, a heaviness, sometimes a dreaminess. The lens I used, an amazing 35mm/F2 piece of glass, certainly helped.

When everything is in focus, there are no throwaway shots with the M-P. Everything looks like a frame from some Wim Wenders documentary about the human condition.But here's the stone-cold reality of the situation. Leica cameras—and Leica lenses—cost a ton of money. This one has a 24-megapixel full-frame sensor and three diagonal inches of scratch-resistant sapphire glass covering its 920K-dot LCD display. It costs close to $8,000, and that’s without a lens. That wonderful glass I tested it with, the Summicron 35mm/F2.0 aspherical prime, costs $3,350. The lens costs more than any camera I’ve ever used.

If you’re looking strictly at specs for the cost, the Leica M-P seems like it was made for suckers. A full-frame sensor? Great, that's the least it can do. Spending a little bit more (relatively speaking) gets you a medium-format camera with a lens. The M-P has an ISO range of 100-6400, and I saw some grain starting at ISO 1600; tripod and a slow shutter speed worked better. Flagship full-frame cameras from Canon, Nikon, and Sony have its ISO performance beat by several stops for thousands less. The M-P’s burst speed of 3fps is laughable compared to those other cameras, and that’s without continuous autofocus.

In fact, this camera doesn’t have an autofocus system at all. It’s a rangefinder, so you’ll need to use manual focus for everything. It’s not like manually focusing a DSLR either because there’s no through-the-lens viewfinder. You use the porthole on the top-left of the camera to line up a small, sometimes hard-to-see overlay with your scene by adjusting the lens. If the two images are lined up just so, your shot is in focus. It takes practice and a bit of luck, especially at wide apertures. Sometimes you’ll need to move the camera away from composing the shot, set focus against an easier-to-see background, and then reframe the shot. Sometimes, even if you think you’ve focused perfectly, you’ll find blurry details when you review shots on a bigger screen. And while it shoots lovely 1080p video at 24fps, the fact that you have to focus manually by handling the lens limits what's feasible to capture with it.

The M-P forces you to slow down, concentrate on getting the focus and exposure just right. And that makes the results more gratifying.

That may sound like an absurd amount of tradeoffs for an $8,000 camera. But here's the thing: This camera takes the most beautiful pictures I've ever seen, and shooting with it is a zenlike experience.

Less is more with the M-P. The missing features and knobs and labyrinthine settings of other full-frame DSLRs doesn't detract from the camera. Rather, their absence enhances the experience of using it. The M-P forces you to slow down, concentrate on getting the focus and exposure just right. And that makes the results more gratifying.

There are only a few immediately accessible physical controls. The most-prominent is a shutter-speed dial on the top, which lets you dial in speeds ranging from 1/4000 sec. to 8 seconds. There’s also a bulb mode setting that tops out at 60 seconds and an “A” that sets it to aperture-priority mode. Aperture adjustments are done with the lens. ISO adjustments are done by pressing the ISO button to the left of its screen while adjusting the thumb wheel.

The M-P lacks a dedicated exposure-compensation dial, but you adjust the EV by pressing the unlabelled front-facing focus button while scrolling the thumb wheel. For everything else—picking JPG or RAW (.DNG), metering modes, film-simulation modes, exposure bracketing, setting the timer—you dive into the menus. Those are also refreshingly minimal and straightforward. You won't have a problem finding anything.

The M-P is smaller than a full-frame DSLR, but it’s built like a tank.

It doesn’t take too long to get the hang of the traditional rangefinder focusing scheme, but there’s another way to do it. For a brighter, more magnified experience, you can turn on focus peaking while using Live View on the bigger LCD screen. You hit the focus button on the front of the camera and scroll the thumbwheel to magnify the view. Once the edges of your subject are highlighted in your choice of red, blue, or green, it's in focus. It feels blasphemous to frame and focus shots like this on such an old-school camera, but it helps in many cases.

The M-P is smaller than a full-frame DSLR, but it’s built like a tank. It’s a sturdy, weather-sealed die-cast magnesium brick of a precision-engineered photography machine weighing in at 2 pounds with the 35mm lens attached. Two-handed operation is a must, and it’s not the lightest load on your neck. There’s no handgrip, but the camera itself is fat and has a faux leather surface to help with the handling.

Overall, it’s very similar to the Leica M, which has the same sensor, control scheme, and video capabilities. There are a few differences, though. The M-P has that sapphire-glass screen. It also has a 2GB buffer, which lets you capture 3fps at full resolution for eight seconds before it stops.

There’s one more difference: No traditional Leica “red dot” logo on the front of the M-P. It’s supposed to make this camera inconspicuous. It’s supposed to fool thieves who know how much a Leica costs and scan crowds for red dots. A few things make that plan ridiculous. First, there’s a sizable “Leica” etched into the top of the camera in baseball-uniform script. Second, Leica lenses say “LEICA” on their front-facing rim. Third, this camera looks unmistakably like a Leica. If Leica really wanted this camera to be incognito, it should have gone the Chameleon XLE route.

It's hard to believe, but this camera will please everyone. It will please the people who buy it for its photographic excellence. And it will please the people who don't buy it because more-versatile cameras cost a helluva lot less. Beyond the beautiful images, the difference with the M-P comes down to the experience of using it. This camera gently grabs you, drags you outside, and begs you to take a bunch of great pictures with it. Sure, the time needed to get your focus just right means it's a bad choice for action photos or quick snapshots, but it's an all-star otherwise. For street scenes, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and sandwich photography, it doles out pure magic.