A photo journal with the Leica T mirrorless camera

A day out with the Leica T

It’s not every day you get to walk around with a Leica camera around your neck, and so when the opportunity presented itself we readily took it up. After all, what better way to get a feel for a camera than to go out and take pictures with it?

First, a quick recap: the Leica T series of mirrorless system cameras is a first for the company known more for their legendary rangefinders. Announced in April 2014, the Leica T features a minimalist design by Audi, and is the world’s unibody camera. It’s hard not to be impressed when you hear how every unit is milled down from a single block of aluminum, and Leica seems to have spared no expense to make their camera unlike any other on the market.

The body itself features only two dials, a movie recording button and an on/off switch that also works to raise the in-camera flash unit. Everything else is set via the touchscreen interface on the back, which works more like your typical smart device than a regular camera interface. The interface takes full advantage of the ability to swipe and pinch to review images, and all your main camera functions are available within a few taps. We've covered more details of the camera build, functions and usability in our initial hands-on article if you would like to get better acquainted with this S$5,000 camera.

Here's the specs for the Leica T once more, but summarized:

• Image sensor - 16.3MP APS-C CMOS sensor
• ISO rating - ISO 100 to ISO 12500
• Shutter speed - 30s to 1/4000s
• Display - 3.7-inch Touch TFT LCD (1.3 million pixels)

And now for some images! For that, we took the Leica T with us on an evening walkabout around Tiong Bahru estate, finally ending up at Chinatown and the Boat Quay area. We've used the default Leica Vario-Elmar-T 18-56 mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH lens with the Leica T camera.

Do note that these photos were all taken on Program mode without changes to the default camera settings. Photos have not been post-processed and are copyright to SPH Magazines. These are provided for your reference only and we ask that you do not reproduce them elsewhere. Click for the full-resolution images.

Moving indoors, we noticed something about the way the multi-point autofocus works - it tends to focus towards the brightest area in the image, hence falling slightly ahead in the first of the next two images. Switching to face detect mode solved the issue though, and we found that it generally works pretty well in picking out faces from their backgrounds (as demonstrated with the second image below).

A day out with the Leica T (continued)

Like the earlier page, these photos have not been post-processed and are copyright to SPH Magazines. They are provided for your reference only and we ask that you do not reproduce them elsewhere. Click for the full-resolution images.

Closing Comments

We hope you’ve enjoyed the selection of shots from the Leica T that we’ve just shared.

We tried to include some high ISO and low light shots so you could see how it fares in these aspects, and we feel the camera performs rather well in both aspects, with a noise pattern that would probably be suitable for making black and white prints.

As we mentioned in our earlier hands-on article, the Leica T experience feels like a cross between using a digital camera and a large smart phone. Once you learn how the menu system works, and which of the menus hold the functions you need to adjust the most, you’ll find that it’s really rather simple to use. Focus is fast, and was rarely troubled except for some instances in really low light, and we’re fairly confident to say the resulting files can take adjustments in post for up to about two stops adjustment.

There’s just a few minor things that came up during our walkabout that we wish could be worked on, like improving the Touch AF so you don’t have to tap the same point to refocus when you’re taking another shot for example. Or, reworking the way it syncs with smart devices so it creates an adhoc Wi-Fi network instead of requiring both devices to be on the same Wi-Fi network (not all smartphones can setup their own adhoc networks).

When shooting at JPEG quality, we’ve found that the camera tends to underexpose to preserve as much detail as possible, resulting in some images being slightly darker than what we expected. That’s not an issue to us for the most part as we generally shoot to RAW, as well as most discerning users. However you can still choose to shoot at JPEG and dial in a bit of exposure compensation to suit your taste. On the whole, shooting with the Leica T was an enjoyable experience thanks to the light weight body and the camera's speedy response.

(Now, if only it was more affordable ...)

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