Build Quality

It's made of brass, in the way that important things used to be. Pick it up and your hand will immediately understand that this camera will probably outlive you. The shutter sounds like a small but very confident door smashing itself shut and rewinding. It feels solid. The viewfinder is bright and clear and populated with softly glowing framelines that tell you, with authority, approximately where your photograph will be.

The whole thing radiates the specific confidence of something that has absolutely no idea what a software update is, and really couldn’t care less

Lenses

The M8 has a 1.33x crop factor, a number that must have been selected specifically to inconvenience everyone. The 28mm becomes roughly 37mm and the 24mm becomes roughly 32mm. You will do this math in your head every single time for about three months before you realize you really just don’t care.

The two lenses I’ve used are made by Voigtländer, the 28mm f/2 and the 21mm f/4. They are German lenses made in Japan named after someone who died in 1797, and priced in a way that suggests they've successfully negotiated between "I want Leica glass" and "I also want to pay rent this month." Both are excellent. The 28mm wide open has character, which is a word photographers use when a lens does something slightly wrong in a way they've decided to enjoy.

The IR Filter Issue

Leica shipped this camera in 2006 without an internal IR Cut filter, funny enough they then (for free) shipped IR cut lens filters to everyone who bought an M8. I’ll show a with and without filter comparison below. The IR cut filter helps bring more true to life colors.

Focusing & Exposing

The Leica M series are all rangefinder cameras. Meaning that when you focus there is a rangefinder patch, two overlapping images in the viewfinder that collapse into one when the focus ring lands in the right place. It feels tedious at first, and then it becomes faster, and then it becomes something closer to a reaction.

The base ISO is 160, which in bright daylight means you'll be fighting high shutter speeds if you want to shoot below f/4, the kind of constraint that sounds minor until you're trying to shoot wide open on a sunny afternoon and the camera, with it’s famously weak shutter, is suggesting 1/8000

The rear LCD is useful for checking composition and essentially useless for judging true exposure. The image it shows has only a passing relationship with what the raw file will contain. The histogram, however, is as honest as a squirrel.

Metering & Auto Shutter Speed

How does the metering work? Heavily center weighted metering that tends to protect highlights.

Drawbacks

10 MEGAPIXELS. Ten megapixels is…not a large number. However, after reviewing my first set of files, I was honestly impressed by the dynamic range and size of the files. They will never hold water against the modern 42, 50, 61MP sensors, but 10MP is more than you think.

IR CUT: The sensor allows a fair amount of IR light in, and needs the help of an IR cut filter. Without it, synthetic black fabrics turn purple.

BATTERIES. Proprietary Leica batteries, priced accordingly, in the spirit of a company that has decided its customers have already made certain peace with separating themselves from their money like a bad case of food poisoning and it’s host.

FREEZING. Shoot too many frames in quick succession and the M8 simply stops to think about things until the battery is removed for a few seconds and the camera resets.

Image Quality & The Raw Files

The M8 has a CCD sensor, and CCD sensors render the world with a certain romantic and “real” palette. The colors all seem to shift a bit (especially without the IR cut filter), and the textures seem soft.

The ISO ceiling is, in practice, 640. anything above that and the noise is almost aggressive enough to consider a restraining order. Black and white files at slightly higher ISOs are still manageable, especially artistically.