Leica Q for astrophotography

I went out last night to photograph the Perseids meteor shower using my Leica Q. I didn't actually manage to capture any meteor strikes with the camera, but this did however allow me to evaluate its performance as an astrophotography camera. I'll compare it to my Canon 5Diii because that's what I have.

Pros:

- The lens is very sharp wide open at f1.7 which is important for untracked astrophotography. I used f1.7, 8s, ISO 800. I would have gone up to ISO 1600 had there been less light pollution.

- The light weight makes it very easy to position on the tripod.

Cons:

- The Leica Q app (for iPhone/iPad) is absolutely useless as you can't manual focus.

- The self timer automatically cancels after one shot which is extremely annoying.

- The live view image is very dark compared to the 5Diii with it's amplified live view.

- Acquiring focus on stars is inconsistent. Focus peaking is ineffective as there is too much contrast when trying to focus on a star. It will tell you it's in focus when it's not. The x3 magnification is not enough and there's not way to change this. The 5Diii has x10 magnification. In the end I only got about 50% of my images sharp.

- The long exposure noise reduction cannot be switched off (as far as I can tell). This means you have to wait the length of the exposure between exposures. I would generally switch this off on a DSLR anyway as I find that Lightroom does a better job of removing hot pixels than LENR. If you were serious about astrophotography, you would shoot separate dark frames anyway.

In conclusion, yes you can use the Leica Q for wide-field astrophotography but I wouldn't recommend it at all. There is a lot that Leica could do in firmware to improve the camera's capability for astrophotography and night photography in general, but I can't see this as being a priority for Leica. If I could just change 3 things in firmware, it would be to introduce a 10x magnification mode, to stop the self timer from automatically cancelling and to switch of LENR.

I don't understand your remark about not being able to manual focus with the app.

Can't you just turn the manual focus ring and set it to infinity? That should be ok for photographing the stars.

Sho-Bud said:

I don't understand your remark about not being able to manual focus with the app.

Can't you just turn the manual focus ring and set it to infinity? That should be ok for photographing the stars.

--
###Leica X Vario, Olympus XZ-1, Olympus SP550UZ; Olympus 2003 Ferrari Edition, Capture One 8###

Click to expand...

The manual focus ring doesn't do anything in Wifi mode as far as I can figure out. It appears to be focus by wire which is over ridden by the app. I can't see any way to manually focus with the app. Even if you turn the ring, the camera still shoots in AF.

Also, the focus ring doesn't stop at infinity as it does with old manual focus lenses. If you want infinity focus, you have to find it.

I had a similar experience as you last night. The time lapse feature was a welcomed feature but it failed to do the job. In addition to the time taken by noise reduction (can't find a way to turn it off) it fails to compensate the time taken for noise reduction. The timer keeps running. In certain cases i ended up with less the value i had put for 'time lapse image count'. These bugs made it mostly unusable and unreliable for shooting meteorites. Yes, i do understand most people are not looking to do this type of time lapse, but it would be a great bonus to do this with a camera of thus size and ability.

The self timer kept going back to off. That was annoying.

I was able to set magnification to 6x but it wasn't helpful as it is in my rx1.

I do hope they can fix these things in a firmware update. I was hoping to give up my other full frame cameras, but that will have to wait.

CocoSimba said:

I had a similar experience as you last night. The time lapse feature was a welcomed feature but it failed to do the job. In addition to the time taken by noise reduction (can't find a way to turn it off) it fails to compensate the time taken for noise reduction. The timer keeps running. In certain cases i ended up with less the value i had put for 'time lapse image count'. These bugs made it mostly unusable and unreliable for shooting meteorites. Yes, i do understand most people are not looking to do this type of time lapse, but it would be a great bonus to do this with a camera of thus size and ability.

The self timer kept going back to off. That was annoying.

I was able to set magnification to 6x but it wasn't helpful as it is in my rx1.

I do hope they can fix these things in a firmware update. I was hoping to give up my other full frame cameras, but that will have to wait.

Click to expand...

Thanks, these are a couple of things I didn't know about my Leica Q. I should probably read the manual more thoroughly.

I've tried out the time lapse mode briefly and it seems that you need to set the time interval to a minimum of (2 x shutter speed + 1s) in order to accommodate for the LENR, otherwise it just skips the exposures in between I think. I guess that makes sense rather than delaying the sequence.

The x6 magnification is also something I didn't know about. This makes a big improvement but still not quite enough for astrophotography IMO. Maybe x3, x6 and x12 would be possible with a firmware update.

I'll give it another go next time there's a meteor shower.