RRJackson

You basically need twice the resolution of the Leica to get comparable sharpness, so the D800 could probably do a passable job of mimicry (while being much heavier with inferior wide-angle optics and generating much larger files). The 5D III just doesn't have the resolution to match a non-Bayer M9.

This is a very compact camera with no Bayer array. It's a very significant thing for people who shoot B&W. For others it won't be as significant.

When you debayer an image you're interpolating information. Avoiding that is the reason Foveon fanatics are willing to disregard all the shortcomings of their sensor. A monochrome sensor is the "purest" form of digital capture. Everything that you see in the final photo is what the sensor saw, not some kind of interpolation. That also means that you don't get noise "clumping" the way you do with a color sensor. I love seeing these simulated B&W shots that still have (now monochrome) chroma clumps.

Because the physical filters actually remove part of the spectrum of light from what's striking the sensor and physically changes the way the camera is seeing light. It's not a simulation of what that might look like. It's an actual physical change in the capture. And you don't need to stack 8 filters. If you did the result would be a mess. You commit to a look based on what you're shooting. Once you learn something about B$W photography that choice will probably seem pretty simple to you.

Actually, that's a huge advantage because the Bayer array used to capture that color information limits the resolution being captured by the sensor as well as imposing a penalty on how much light makes it to the sensor.

Now you can properly capture the detail in the scene with no interpolated data from a Debayering process and you can learn to use your filters again. They do a much better job than "virtual" filters in Photoshop, anyway. And really, a yellow, red, orange, blue and green filter added to your case still won't make the case as heavy as the extra weight of a DSLR.

And monochrome conversion in PS or Lightroom will remove the Bayer array and the AA filter in your camera retroactively so you capture extra resolution?

This is a camera people will have to approach like B&W film with contrast filters and an eye for the kind of light illuminating the scene. People who don't take photography that seriously aren't going to have any idea how to properly use a camera like this.

Kind of sad to see how little respect so many people have for monochrome capture. There are a lot of things you can do with monochrome that don't really work in color. Deep focus shots don't really work as well in color, for example. And of course B&W emphasizes lines in a way that color doesn't, so certain kinds of composition pop in B&W that don't really have the same appeal in color.

The other thing about this camera in particular is that it's probably going to be able to capture close to as much detail as a D800, despite having less resolution as a result of losing the Bayer array.

Honestly, what could be more appealing than a monochrome digital Leica? It makes such perfect sense. If I could afford one I'd already have one pre-ordered.

A couple of things here. First off, a D800 is a 31-ounce camera vs a 21-ounce camera. And of course the lenses are smaller for the Leica, as well.

Also, no DSLR wide-angle lenses really perform as well as the best wide-angle glass for rangefinders. Even the 14-24 produces about 4% distortion at its worst where depending on the lens you can get essentially no distortion in some rangefinder glass. The Zeiss 21mm f/4.5 is a classic example of a nearly perfect optic that just won't ever happen for a DSLR.

But yeah, if you don't mind the extra weight and the limitations of the optics a D800 can produce an image you can scale down to sort of sub for a Leica image.

Crippled how?

So for a while I've really wanted a monochrome M-mount camera with a 24x36 sensor to use with the Zeiss 21mm f/4.5. With a color sensor there are color shifts across the frame, but with this camera you could shoot distortion-free (essentially) wide-angle with a lens that's quite a bit nicer than any wide angle lens available for DSLRs, IMO.

Of course Leica still doesn't offer any viewfinder options, so you'd still be stuck with a viewfinder that can only frame as wide as 28mm. I mean, you can wing it. Or mount an auxiliary viewfinder. But how amazingly cool it would be if they'd offer something like the Bessa R4's .52 viewfinder with brightlines for 21mm.

Of course, I can't afford it, anyway. ;-)

Oh, this is a thing of beauty. My goodness. It's everything a digital Leica should be. Now if I could just afford it...

Actually, it's a heritage from 35mm and 65mm film. 16mm shooters pretty much always pulled focus solo. The reason that wasn't the case with larger film stocks was because it's nearly impossible to accurately pull focus by eyeballin' it with larger "sensors." That "heritage" persists to this day. News cameramen use 2/3" video cameras now that have sensors roughly the same size as 16mm film and they can (and do) pull focus for themselves. Meanwhile, if you watch feature films being shot there's still a guy with a tape measure pulling focus unless they go "fast and dirty" with a wide-angle lens. It's not so much about film vs. digital as it is about the size of the sensor. Small Sensor = Fun on the Run. Big Sensor = Slow on the Go. ;-)

Well, to be fair pulling focus for movies is frequently done using a tape measure to determine near and far limits of DOF when you're doing the blocking. Of course that doesn't mean you release a camera with no focus assists at all and count on everyone who buys it to always have an assistant pulling focus.

The point is that the hypothetical soccer mom can buy a much better quality 4K camera for less money if she really wants to dabble in 4K origination.

Uh, I don't know if that comment is directed at me, but that avatar of mine shows me with a Nikon F5 and a 135mm f/2. As for shooting Super-8 movies, I've done that. And 16mm movies. And 35mm movies. Not to mention years of shooting video for television.

I wasn't saying that you can't possibly shoot decent video using 8-bit origination. I was saying that with cheaper 12-bit options that won't show stepping in gradients most professionals wouldn't want to.

Yeah, that's classic. "Did you see the headphone jack?" Oh, well that certainly justifies tripling the price. How could I have missed the headphone jack?

There's a huge market for 4K footage, but not for 8-bit 4K footage. Even though home 4K displays are just now starting to appear the production crowd want it as an origination format even if they're delivering in 1080p. Much better to oversample on origination. Makes the HD deliverables look much less video-y. But nobody wants to shoot in 8-bit color. That's soccer-mom stuff. Fine for YouTube, but not something to shoot a TV show/movie on.

You can almost hear their design meetings. "Now we could certainly provide 4K video in the EOS-1D X using a Super-35 section of the sensor. It would probably add $45 to the unit cost, but we think it would make the camera more attractive to consumers even though the video will necessarily have to be 8-bit. Of course we could go ahead and triple the price while designating it as a 'professional' model...perhaps that would suck enough to wear the Canon logo? Can anyone think of any other good ways to ruin it before we finalize our release plans?"

8-bit video. Man, it's almost an insult. It's almost certainly a restriction imposed by the internal data bottlenecks, but there's nothing "professional" about 8-bit video. It's like higher-resolution HDV. I mean, it's better than nothing, but this isn't going to pose much of a threat to Red. The Scarlet is a crippled monstrosity, but even it can shoot 4K at 24p in 12-bit Recode RAW...for several thousand dollars less than the Canon EOS-1D C.

The higher figure is for the height of the frame which changes based on the aspect ratio you end up using. In cinema you always use the horizontal width of the frame as the basis for calculations. That's why we call lenses "wide angle" lenses and not "tall angle" lenses.

We know exactly the crop factor. It's 2.3x horizontally and 2.72x vertically.