Meet the Leica CL, an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera with a 24 megapixel APS-C sensor. It uses Leica L mount and sits alongside the Leica TL2. The CL differs from the TL2 by offering an electronic viewfinder and a traditional control layout. Find out what else it's got going for it in our 90 second 'First look' video.
The reviews, by and large have been very positive. Its internals are based on the TL2. As a TL2 user, I can attest that the IQ is really tops. But why no USB nor HDMI ports? I inadvertently forgot my SD card for the first time since I have been shooting digital going back to the old Nikon 995. If it were not for the 32GB built in memory of the TL2 and the USB port to retrieve the images, I would have been out of luck. These ports, while seldom used are still a relatively inexpensive feature that should remain as a standard digital camera feature. Leica, what were you thinking?
Unfortunately Leica is still insisting on what we want and keeps delvering other things. What we want is a camera with the size of a Leica Q with M lens mountability.
The Leica M10 pretty much fits the bill. Same height, only 7% wider, about the same thickness as the Q. Unless you meant a camera the size of the Q but with a built-in EVF. Here, you have to ask yourself whether (a) it is possible to create a good hybrid rangefinder-EVF or whether (b) there is a market for a non-rangefinder, ie, EVF-based, manual focus, M-lens based 'system'.
"What we want is a camera with the size of a Leica Q with M lens mountability."
That may not be technical feasible right now without compromising quality. The Q is smaller than the M in large part because it has a leaf shutter embedded within the lens itself. This makes the lens bigger but the camera smaller. Regardless, the overall package ends up being smaller because there's no space wasted for the lens mounting mechanism and everything is optimized for a single lens. That, plus there's no space used up to make the Q weather resistant like the M. And finally, the Q is much lighter than the M because it's made of magnesium and aluminum instead of brass.
I for once am (or rather was) looking at the Fujifilm X-T20 or the new X-E3 as a second smaller camera system and find them quite appealing but their stupid X-Trans sensor raw format is not supported by my workflow software. This is an absolute dealbreaker for me as I will not change software or spend more time to convert their format. I am not debating about the horrendous price of the new CL but realistically it is an equally capable camera, with a raw format I can use, and at least some Leica's lenses seem to be still the best out there. So possibly maybe I might be one of those idiots getting one ...
Why does anyone pay $2000 for a different colour for their car? And I am not talking about aftermarket, just the colours that are found in the list of extras for cars.
It may be pricey, but I'd hardly call it a "piece of crap." There are a lot of expensive things out there in the world that people choose to buy. I have a friend who is a successful business owner, and she buys herself $5000+ handbags. She has a whole collection of them. I don't say to her, "Why do you buy these overpriced pieces of crap." She's a good person, she works hard, she donates to charities, and she can buy whatever she wants!
Agreed, overpriced. The X Pro2 for me fits the bill nicely and is of a similar design to this Leica. Although I think the X Pro2 has been better thought out with regard to layout.
All the rear buttons are on the right side, so you can still look through the finder and fiddle with the buttons, plus it has a hybrid finder, good for street photography. And I like the idea of engraved ISO, speeds etc on the top plate, this Leica, although initially nice is just something else to go wrong, especially in cold weather with the display can be affected IMOH,.
I handled a Leica Q the other day, testing it etc until I took a few high ISO photos in good lighting... oh, my, the noise, the banding! "Piece of crap". Piece of crap!
"..."Piece of crap". Piece of crap!..." That seems too be a standard phrase in your vocabulary. Noise and banding? Where did you test it? In your imagination? No reviewer has made any negative comments about the IQ. It has become the standard backup camera and in some cases the only camera for well known photojournalists. My only objection to the Q is the 28mm lens. I would have preferred a 35mm lens, but that is a matter of personal choice. Piece of crap? Possibly a case of crap for brains.
jsevidon Are you equating criticism of a product with a verbal attack on a person?
noirdesir Yes it does, have you noticed the price tag of that thing? It's unacceptable and indicative of Leica's know-how and marketing in the digital era. Enough said.
No, my point was whether other people reporting banding also use the term 'piece of crap' (or similarly strong language) to describe the sensor/camera?
jsevidon Since you presented no arguments, make sure at least that you don't make insulting comments in the future towards members just because you don't like their opinion. Capisci? Otherwise you might become the subject of some strong language yourself, just to taste your own "medicine".
noirdesir Snap out of it. Your point is pointless. You're nitpicking.
Trying to ascertain whether your use of language is commonly applied to the product or whether you are pretty much alone in using such words is pointless? When somebody offers an opinion about a product it is pointless to find out whether others share that opinion as well?
It's a nice looking camera, but it saddens me somewhat as it's a missed opportunity. The CL paired with TL-series lenses would yield image quality that would rival a Fuji X-Pro2/X-T2 with the X-series lenses. But it's $1,000 overpriced from being able to compete with Fuji, and there's no reason for it.
So, you really think that Leica could turn a profit with a tenth of the sales of, eg, Olympus or Panasonic using their pricing while neither Olympus or Panasonic really manage to?
@noirdesir: Turn a profit? Absolutely. Leica's market share is a result of their prohibitive pricing strategy. There's nothing wrong with keeping the M-series expensive and exclusive, but the CL and TL cameras are clearly aimed at the consumer market. And as the CL and TL cameras and lenses don't require anywhere near the work hours as the M-series, so the profit margins are already high.
And Pentax, Samsung, Olympus and Panasonic market share is also a result of their prohibitive pricing?
Leica originally started to loose market share roughly around the 1970s due to Japanese companies bringing out better products and undercutting them (the rise of the SLR at the cost of the rangefinder played a part in this). Leica wasn't making obscene profits in the 1960s, and they could not have kept their marketshare by simply lowering prices. They were outsmarted on the technology side and the production efficiency. Their answer to cheaper rivals was to escape into a premium niche. They hung in there for a while until they missed the next technological leap, autofocus in the 1990s. They had to retreat into the rangefinder niche and when digital came around they barely managed to jump on that train in time. During all this, they almost went bankrupt several times.
Do you really think that Rolls-Royce's problem in the 1990s was that they should have lowered their prices?
Leica's net profit margin is maybe in order of 10% (their records are public). They could hardly half their prices (or even just cut them by 50%) and be anywhere near profitable.
And while lower prices might increase sales, that hasn't really worked out for Samsung, Pentax, Olympus or Panasonic and they are starting from a volume level that is in the order of 10x larger. Even if you make a competitive product, you rarely gain significant marketshare quickly. Fuji has been making their own digital ILCs for about five years by now and that is also roughly their marketshare number in percent.
And that is just the demand side, scaling up production from 10'000 units per year (Leica at the beginning of their digital ILC era) to 500'000 (current level of Olympus for example) is a tremendous undertaking requiring a lot of capital. As I said in my previous post, Rolls-Royce Motors had essentially zero chance of becoming a BMW, let alone a Ford on their own.
I own the old Leica CL. FF camera with the 40mm f2 Summicron-C and 90mm f4 Elmar-C. -Both M mount lenses performs excellently on my Sony A7R2. - The Leica CL news made me overly excited, but then I found out it's not the same M mount as the old CL and not FF either, it's an APS-C only.- (The old mechanical FF CL is smaller than the new electronic CL APS-C) :/
Hoewer, I like the new Leica CL design, with a much less bulky adapter opens up new options for the M type combination too. - Very nice!
CCD FTW... Yes...I was referring to the camera...those lenses are rather nice. Apologies too btw, I was mixing up the GX85 with the low end GM series, my mistake - I do like the GX85...
That aside,I'd still prefer the Leica CL, especially with the 55-135, and a soft spot growing for the G9 with the 200mm F2.8 (I like teles)...
Leica seem to make cameras for two groups of people.
1) Those who want a 'back to basics' shooting experience so they can concentrate on photography not technology
and..
2) Those who wander into the camera shop and want the most expensive camera that will match their Rolex and Porsche lifestyle.
I wish I could justify the cost but when a Fuji X-E3 is ~ 1/3 of the price including kit lens or the same if you include the X-E3 body plus 18mm F2/23mm F2/35mm F2/50mm F2 and still have spare $$ for batteries and a nice hipster leather case to house them all!
Horses for courses and all that...
I'm off to find a nice red dot to put on the front of a X-E3...
a missed opportunity to offer a fairly priced camera to the masses and help move from a boutique camera company to one that has more relevance for more people and moves products in a manner that can use economies of scale in production
the top is ugly and quirky and should have been a straightforward shutter speed dial which is the quickest and most sensible option that fuji and leica are both using
the 18mm lens with that silly tiny optical element in front looks as cheap and needlessly slow as some nikon one lenses that sadden me no aperture dial?....bah humbug!
leica almost went bankrupt .... the romantic notion of a elf workshop is sweet but inaccurate ... a certain number of sales are necessary to offset development and tooling with each model... further they rebadge popular models from othe makers like panasonic ,,,in the past minolta to help profitability
the hand assembly and finish of leica is commendable but they still use factories and workers like every tech company on earth
Sure, and Porsche cars also don't cost more than their Japanese competitors. The point is that if Leica matched the prices of their Japanese competitors they would go bankrupt 10x faster than it would take them to match the sales numbers of their competitors. Look what happened to Samsung or what is happening with Pentax, and even Olympus and Panasonic. Even they, who were/are at least an order of magnitude larger than Leica, have factories in lower-wage Asian countries, have struggled to be profitable for the last decade.
@ noirdesir - Are you sure they don’t cost more? Pretty sure they do. Not sure how you believe they are the most profitable, but aren’t more expensive? They certainly don’t sell anywhere near as many cars... So unless they are made with pixie dust I don’t believe what you are saying is true.
Again with trying to match other brands? Not sure what your point is here? Leica are doing things differently to Olympus and Panasonic. They chose to sell less volume with higher margins by offering more bespoke products. Not really that complicated.
Leica 'chose' to sell low volumes at higher prices (higher gross margins but not higher net margins, as in profit per total revenue) because that was the only 'choice' they had. Leica went almost bankrupt in 2005 just before they released their first digital ILC (the M8) in 2006. Their sales were in order of few ten thousand units at a time when the total camera market was about 80 million (https://photographylife.com/a-few-thoughts-about-the-camera-market), ie, a marketshare of less than 0.1%. This is not dissimilar to Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Aston Martin, though their sales were even lower for a while (falling below 1000 cars per year). Bentley has grown tremendously after the investments made by VW after its takeover almost twenty years ago. So has Leica over the last decade.
But neither of those companies really had or has the option to attack the mass market straight on.
it does not have to be either or leica has its reputation from a time when their cameras were the camera of choice for a great number of photographers for photojournalism,street shooting or who just needed an excellent picture taking machine in their lives even up until 1980s with the excellent leica cl \cross produced cle with minolta with both a summacron and a rokkor version of the tiny gen the 40mm f2 [ ive got the rokkor]
leica prices have climbed at about 4 times the rate of inflation ... that s one method of survival ,,, but i can imagine a less restrictive selling strategy beyond rebadging panny compacts
leica tred into dangerous waters precisely because they chose to drift into the rarified area of boutique items .... hasselblad tried that bs and they were almost shamed off planet by their glittery garbage like solars and lunars . thankfully hasselblad has returned a degree of sanity and excellence ... and sales are up
leica could drift back to their roots by offering a camera like the cl but not the cl which is a clumsily designed overpriced and not full frame camera they have partnered with minolta and with panasonic .. but the best thing they could do work together with fuji to make a full frame body with a hybrid viewfinder with a m mount with contacts for a few af lenses
fuji offers excellent electronic aids for mf of m mount lenses ,,, peaking split image and magnification, leica has a red dot and a rep for great optic and superb workmanship leica needs to offer something better and a non rarefied price .... fashion is fickle .... but great machines and those who use them persist ....and so can leica by coming a little closer to earth
The leaked photos were awful and made this camera look ugly. In hand, and shot by DPReview's team, it looks great. Interested in adding it to my bag. I will try it out at Ginza as soon as I can.
If it would be my camera, I would be a bit careful when taking off the lens and exposing the sensor to incoming rain drops, however small. Obviously a demo model to be returned to the factory... ;-)
Fuji have APS-C sensors, and glass that is every bit as good as Leica - which you would expect from a manufacturer that produces optics that cost more than a luxury car.
Leave Leica to the status whores who have too much money.
What 'luxury' car is less expensive than the most precious of Leica cameras? I'll wait.
As to pricing, this is expensive. Do you remember that Fuji's X-Pro 1 debuted at 1800$ USD? Or that its follow up did pretty much the same? This is 1000$ more than that, from an upmarket brand. It seems in line with other product pricing, which means that people that buy it can't be gear churners and have to be pretty careful in their purchases.
I was referring to industrial Fuji products as opposed to Laica - it may be a novel thought that these companie have greater revenue streams from non-photography products.
And good work comparing the Xpro to this camera. If you are going to compare products then it should be like for like.
Because I obviously have to make it absurdly clear; Fuji manufacture medium and large format lenses, high end lenses for cinematography, precision optics for industry, interferometers (which requires extraordinary precision), satellite optics, broadcast optics, lenses for endoscopy - the manufacturing techniques for all of these types of optics filters down to the relatively simple optics that are used in miniature formats (which includes full frame).
Those shots were misfocused. Lens Rentals shows the Summilux 50 ASPH to be the 2nd sharpest lens wide open of ALL 50mm's no matter the age or price or size. The only sharper lens is the Summicron APO 50. The M9 showed all the problems of improperly aligned rangefinders, the poor skill of many photographers, and the willingness to believe anything bad of Leica by anyone else.
That is a pin-sharp lens. The same is true for the X100 article. The X100's lens isn't bad, but is blurry wide open whereas the lens Steve used is sharp. The problem again, is focus.
These errors don't crop up anymore because people can check focus precisely through their LCDs or EVFs.
You may well be right; but here's the crux of my issue, they slap a badge on rubbish entry level cameras and then charge a fortune for them. Then we have the Thambar at $6,000 and change...
I know this is going to look like I'm moving the goal posts, but upon its release I said I would buy the Sony DSC-RX1R II I can't afford that either, but my view hasn't changed.
No problem. We apparently think differently and that's okay. I'm perfectly interested in the CL, but that is because I really dig the simplicity of operation and handling that only Leica offer. I have no idea why no one else spend as much time making a camera sleek to use. Whatever. I'm obviously not the target for a GFX (which I have), X-Pro, any Sony, Nikon, or Canon, though I don't mind Canon interfaces that much.
I don't think the CL is a rubbish camera. It is a Leica, which means it has a set of strengths and a set of weaknesses, each of which will rub different users different ways. I happen to LOVE Leica and go with their good and bad flow. I did this too with Nikon. But I'm not going back.
Of course. I don't believe that Leica are superior. I think their interfaces are and their use of DNG makes life really easy, as does the ease with which you can manually WB, or do anything really. But I'm not going to pretend that you don't get better ISO than an M10 or SL with a D750 or similar camera, or that AF-C speed isn't dismal.
But I think Leica have done awesome, especially for such a small camera without a fab of their own.
What are the those subtitles for that cover a massive part of the image with an opaque block and cannot even be disabled? (That's a question about the video, not the camera, obviously.)
The subtitles were hardcoded into the video before it was uploaded to YouTube. Are you complaining that the block of subtitles obscures the view of the subject?
Ha! They're there for accessibility (people who are hard of hearing or deaf) and for those web users that browse videos like this at work, or during breaks from work when they're not able to play the videos with sound.
YouTube closed captioning is an option, but since our videos end up in various places (including embedded in social channels and sometimes on Amazon pages) we generally hard-code them. I hope it's not too obtrusive.
I'm all for accessibility, and I don't mind some amount of obtrusiveness either, if that is what it takes. Publishing hard-coded captions on a platform that supports closed captioning, though, seems a bit unprofessional, especially for a renowned site about photo and video gear. The clips make an even more unprofessional impression as soon as you click on the subtitles button to see whether they can be switched off, and what happens is that Youtube adds their own automatically generated subtitles on top of the hard-coded ones ;-) And yes, I found the subtitles a bit too obtrusive (at least on the 1360x768 laptop I watched it on), otherwise I wouldn't have minded...
Yes, I can read... But perhaps I'm a bit slow on the uptake, because I don't see how one has anything to do with the other. What bars someone who plays an embedded Youtube video on some social channel or on an Amazon page from seeing subtitles provided by closed captioning?
Or do you mean you produce them for other, non-Youtube players, too, which don't support closed captioning? That would be no technical reason, either, just one of how much work you'd be willing to invest in order to make a professional impression with the videos you publish on your own platform.
Yeah, that's the point, really. While YouTube has (half-way) decent 'CC system, we can't guarantee that closed captioning is supported on every platform where these videos end up. Our overview videos, for example, are sometimes hosted on Amazon product pages, and Amazon's embedded video player does not offer CC (as far as I'm aware).
I'll confess that the moment I can't afford much of anythibg (it's been a hard 6 months), but that in no way alters the fact that this camera is massively overpriced.
For the kind of money Leica charges, their cameras should be like their lenses . . . capable of better image quality than the competition. 24 MP has been around for more than 5 years now. I would think Leica would offer at least 30 MM image quality.
Yeah, the 7D Mark II shoots at 10fps, it's built like a tank, you can buy sports/wildlife telephoto lenses for it, and its price is about 1/2 of this Leica. But the Canon is both built and weighted like a tank. This Leica, while expensive, is a very cool camera.
Leica has released new firmware for five of its camera models, making significant changes to the way existing features operate while also adding totally new functions in some cases. The updates affect the M10 rangefinder, the Q compact and the new CL, as well as the TL2 and the T/TL.
November was, as it usually is, a fairly quiet time for the industry. Well, except for Leica, which always likes to set itself apart - the company launched a new model mid-month.
While it shares a name with one of Leica's most popular and affordable cameras of the 1970s, the new CL is separated from its namesake by more than just years. We've been using one for a few days - click through for a detailed first-impressions report.
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