Equipment Leica S2...the future of DSLR's?

Holy mole...Leica has gone ahead and announced one big gun, a 30x45mm, 37.5mp sensor packed inside a DSLR-sized body that dwarfs any current FF DSLR sensor...by 56%. The body will be released along side some fancy Leica glass which includes: "24mm ultrawide, 30mm tilt-and-shift, 35mm wide, 70mm standard, 30-90mm standard zoom, 100mm short tele, 120mm macro, 180mm telephoto, and 350mm telephoto optics (all of which will apparently incorporate leaf shutters)"

But with a 45K price tag...its sure to turn the majority off

 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like an arms race to see who can make the most overpowered and overpriced camera in the world :O

 

Craziness I tell you.

 

lol

 

hmm... digital medium format? Not sure the size of Hasselbald sensors, but those cameras have always been for the commercial photogs or rich playboys. Yay for leaf shutters! Higher flash syncs me thinks. But I think I'll pass on it until the 2nd iteration, this is only a hobby

 

Yeah...they've been around--but not in DSLR bodies.

 

Looks pretty much as ergonomic as a brick. I'm honestly confused as to who Leica markets its products at these days.

 

The proes

 

I'd agree to an extent...without the grip it is unlike most current DSLR designs, but with it looks pretty comfy. OTOH It all depends on the user.

 

doesnt look like its got enough buttons tbh.

im sure bobmcbob will buy one.

 

Well with a $45k price tag, it's not really oriented at you or I. People shooting for billboards that need the stupidly high resolution (and fashion I guess, since they do a perverted level of post-processing and need as many source pixels as they can get) would benefit from it, but... meh. They had better have some REALLY nice glass if that sensor is up to scratch.

 

You're right Eric, but it's not only for fashion/portrait/advertising photogs, but its also marketed at landscape photogs as well. As for the glass, as stated by Leica, all of the S2 compatible lenses are optimized and "designed for the highest possible performance with the new sensor"...if anyone can produce glass to stand up to a sensor of this magnitude its Leica. Now as for the cost of such lenses...well, lets just say if you bought the body the glass is a relative drop in the bucket (a good guess would be somewhere in or around 3-7K ea. depending.)

 

Hm... given how good photo stitching software is these days, I wonder how many pro landscape shooters would rather just go for a body with 15-20MP and one of those special tripod heads specifically designed for finding and rotating about the nodal point - it seems like it could be a much more cost-effective option. Heck, I was able to get a couple of great panos hand-held with some good technique, and I can't tell where they're stitched unless I actually turn off layers (and in doing so hide entire chunks of the stitch).

3-7k isn't bad for glass at all given the cost of the body. That's be, what, the equivalent of roughly $200-400 for L glass on a 5D...

 

More mp's on a larger sensor=more detail. You can stitch all the prints you want together, if your making one large print you will never get the same amount of detail from a stitched 4 image 10mp FF sensor. If this was the case then there would be no market for medium format cameras. As for lens cost--as I said, drops in a bucket.

I can see something similar to this happening within the next 3-4 years among mainstream DSLR manufacturers...possibly less.

 

I've been wanting to play with this, but I was wondering about how many degrees you rotated between each exposure. It seems like if you went too fat in each step the items in the image wouldn't like up due to perspective (I know that's not the right word, but I don't know what is). I was thinking of building something to go on my tripod that would measure off the correct angle between "steps".

 

If you want something on your tripod, Really Right Stuff sells it I think. I prefer to do it the cheap way, mark a point in the frame at the 1/3 mark (usually an edge of corner of something in the frame), shoot, twist and compose with the prior 1/3 mark as my starting point. rinse, repeat.

and it is perspective. As Firehed stated, the camera must be rotated around its nodal point, or the center point of the sensor. Otherwise you get a slightly different perspective at each shot.

 

The nodal point is not the the same as the film plane. If you're not sure, it's better to remain silent then state blatantly wrong information.

Leaf shutter in the lenses is great though, it mean crazy high sync speeds.

 

I love how people freak out when something like this comes out when, in reality, if you were wanting to do high res landscape images, you could use a large or medium format film camera and get better results at a fraction of the cost. I could see this for more high-end production studio work but I don't see this blowing the Hasselblad system or the Canon 1Ds MkIII out of the water for that matter.

 

If I had a bunch of money to blow, I would totally buy one of these and go shoot youth sports, just so I could listen to the photojournalists tell me that I'm using the wrong camera.

Then, I'd see how many soccer moms I could convince to buy one.



-monkey

 

How much?

Seems like it tries to be two things at once --a high-end large format camera in a dSLR body. It may miss both markets.