Leica Diary - Everything within Reason

Ever since the release of the Leica M9 in 2009 I wanted one of them. But, at the time I didn't have the funds to acquire such a device…. until recent.

Last week I bought myself a Leica M9 (black) along with two Zeiss lenses and an additional battery. The glass of my (second) choice was the Zeiss Biogon 2.8/28mm ZM T* and the Zeiss C-Sonnar 1.5/50mm ZM T*. These lenses were second choice, because I'd rather had the Leica versions of those lenses, but these are kinda hard to get your hands on (extremely long waiting lists).

UPDATE: In the meantime, I acquired a 35mm Summicron-M f/2, and a 50mm Summilux-M f/1.4 Asph. The Carl Zeiss C-Sonnar 1.5/50mm ZM T* is for sale at this moment.

The following posts should represent my experiences with the Leica M system camera, and I hope to address both the good and the bad things about this legendary camera system.

Note that this 'blog' holds the oldest post first. The reason for this is that you can read it in a chronological fashion. So the updates will be at the end.

Entries in crash (1)

Monday

Sep192011

SanDisk Memorycard Issues with the M9

Monday, September 19, 2011 at 17:39

Everyone following the latest Leica M9 news, knows that there are some issues with the Leica M9 and certain SD memory cards. Worst-case scenario is that you didn't record a single photo in a whole day shooting.... The (visual) symptom is that the red light on the back of the M9 keeps flashing (and flashing, and flashing), and that the camera locks up eventually.

To resolve this, you need to remove the battery fro the M9, and re-insert it. After that you can see what the last properly recorded photo was, and hopefully, it wasn't a photo you made last month....

Today I noticed a little side-effect from this behavior; It seems that the filenames recording lags behind as well. After the SD card error, I changed to another SD card, and resumed shooting. At home I noticed that a lot of my photos had a '-2' in the filename after the import in Lightroom. So I guess that the M9 forgot to count/remember the earlier filenames that did made it to the disk, and started with a (incorrect) 'last-known-good' filename number on the new card. Might be that this doesn't occur on the original card, since the camera should see that the filename is already taken, and it increases the filename count. It could also be that it just overwrites a properly recorded image before going bad. -> mental note for the future.

This camera still amazes me in images quality etc. (which is good), and in buggy software (which is bad of course).

Leica M9, Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 1.5/50mm ZM @ f/1.5

Update on Friday, November 11, 2011 at 22:08 by

Willem

Leica released a firmware update (v1.174) to address this issue.

Willem |