LEICA X2: VINTAGE RED DOT? (MPB TEST DRIVE)
REVIEW BY NEALE JAMES
My thanks to MPB.com for the loan of kit for this feature.
I think we can broadly agree, that there’s something very exciting and comforting about the words ‘made in Germany.’ The contact lens, the printing press, the tape recorder, MP3 files; all great examples of German innovation and engineering.
And really, where would we be in photographic history without Oskar Barnack, an engineer, who, working at an engineering firm called Leitz and suffering from asthma, proposed reducing the size and weight of cameras, primarily so that he might be able to take photographs on his travels. In 1924 the first of his camera designs was named Leica, an acronym obtained from Leitz Camera. It entirely changed the trajectory and popularisation of 35mm photography, becoming the choice for many famous names in photographic history, not least one Henri Cartier-Bresson. Oh, and doctors, a somewhat unscientific proposition and wild generalisation, but in my nineteen years of shooting weddings, every consultant I have photographed nuptials for has owned a camera with red dot proudly emblazoned upon the front.
Then there’s Porsche. Allow me a possible, though probable clumsy analogy. In 1976 the famous and celebrated German sports car brand saw its new 924 model take to the World’s roads. Porsche customers and enthusiasts greeted this entry-level model with a mixture of enthusiasm and deep suspicion. It’s not entirely accurate, but the engine was a primary cause for dismay with the claim it was designed or intended to sit within a VW van; hardly the kind of statement you’d expect from a top marque sportscar. The 924. I mean, it looked like a Porsche, it was styled like a Porsche, but under the hood, did it feel and drive like one?
And so I introduce to you, the compact APS-C Leica X2, with a 16MP sensor and fixed 36mm equivalent f2.8 lens which extends from the body upon startup. German engineering with many improvements upon the lamentable X1, which should make this a far more Leica-like but pocketable classic. However, does it feel and drive like an M? Or as Alec Guinness famously said in the 1977 Star Wars movie upon entering a camera shop in Mos Eisley, is this, “Not the red dot you are looking for.”
Having test-driven Ricoh’s GRiii as a ‘vintage compact,’ the bar had truly been set sky high and in the spirit of continuing the theme of height, my first outing with the camera was to be Duxford’s Imperial War Museum in Cambridgeshire, in and amongst the most historic aircraft both military and peacetime to have graced ‘the blue’. The airfield which once served as a base for Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons also became the last resting place for Concorde 101, a pre-production test aircraft that refined the World’s first supersonic airliner and set a speed record that would never be beaten, for the fastest velocity achieved by a commercial carrier.
My father took me to see her land at Duxford on the 20th August 1977, an important date in the history of the airfield as on the day Concorde’s wheels touched down, bulldozers were waiting and moved in to shorten the runway by some distance to facilitate the building of a new motorway section of the M11 to the east. Concorde would certainly not be able to lift from this site ever again. She was here for good.
I’ll come to Concorde photographically later on in the piece though I’ll start with four images above that were some of the first I made with the Leica Q2 in the fortnight I had it.
I’d read that this was a superbly brisk-to-focus picture maker. From a camera manufacturer more famous for its manual handling and having owned an M8, I was intrigued by this claim. Sorry to report, I can’t provide a Hollywood happy ending here, because speed-of-sound performance was not my finding, personally. The images above are mainly static in style, except for the yellow-capped visitor who stood before the B52 Stratofortress momentarily taking in the enormity of this Cold War horror. I’d noticed a theme in the pictures I was making and started isolating the colour yellow in the American hanger.
The yellow-hatted chap appeared like a Hallelujah; his hat and then his eyeline being set toward the equally yellow aircraft number. I went to take a shot. Nothing. Focus not achievable. I went for another, that too failed. I didn’t have the time to start messing around with manual, so continued until, click, the shot happened. It wasn’t my planned one, but it was a picture. A split second later, he moved, and the photograph that I wanted, moved with him, out of frame.
“Argghhh,” I thought, “So close.”
Only later when downloading was I to find that this frame had produced a better-than-expected result.
And there is my main gripe with this camera. Manually focused, it’s fine. It’s practically a mini M, in my mind, but in automatic focus, you can wait a while. You’ll miss stuff. I’m actually rather pleased with the yellow-beany-man, but it was one of those lucky moments - and those are fine when you’re not expecting an outcome, but when you see a moment which isn’t based on luck that you know can work, you don’t want luck, you want a level of certainty. Speed of focus in auto is going to be a little thematic within this write-up.
I may have started with a negative, but I’ll quickly counter with a positive. The pictures produced from this camera are beautifully crisp and tonally strong in both colour and contrast. JPEG or RAW, in decent lit conditions. I am happy, very happy, with the results. In my ‘old and new’ shot above, the detail in the photograph, I think, is extraordinary. The dented lived-in patina on the engine cowling offset against the utilitarian flat though mottled concrete ceiling, works well, and the ‘perfect’ lines of the missile with decent detail in the shadows reminds me of the reason this camera has a red dot badge.
London’s Tate Modern is a venue which serves up a wonderful photographic experiential opportunity for test-driving a camera, shape, form, people and in my case, another very simple colour photographic challenge, this time red, shades and hues of.
Switching to JPEG and pushing my guidance system away allows me a second shoe-horned Star Wars reference into this piece from the cinematic moment when Luke, piloting his X-Wing destroys the Death Star with a single laser shot, fired through trusted feeling and not ai. I distinctly hear the late Alex Guinness ethereally in my ear whispering, “Use the Force Neale, let go of auto, trust your feelings.” Okay, Obi-Wan, time to switch off the targeting computer then. Pressing the AF/MF button on the back of the camera, the option to go full manual focus presents itself.
I calculate my distance from objects, and dance between fully-fully manual and the option of shutter and aperture priority. The results above show some of the pictures achieved. My image of the kissing couple left me reasonably happy, I know I’m a little top-heavy compositionally, but it was shot on the move in my defence. Low light performance above 3K ISO makes me smart in this picture though, and it becomes quickly apparent in higher ISO settings in JPEG, that skin tones take on a distinctly muddy feel. But I’m able to shoot from the hip quite happily, and because the camera is so small, it’s not an intimidating box, allowing me the feeling of complete freedom to shoot minus the concern I may somehow offend or intrude.
And that, is the best thing about this camera, the freedom it offers you. If you’ve not shot street before or are keen to try, this is the kind of camera that will make your outings enjoyably unstressful, although (a shade less finality than a ‘but’) it wouldn’t be my first choice of camera for street portraiture. For that, I like an eyepiece, which, is available for the hotshoe at an additional cost.
Right, let me talk about the AF system in the X2. To give it its dues, it is fantastic in some scenarios, usually simpler moments involving decent light (as in ‘old and new’ further up the review), but it’s mediocre and slow in more complex situations.
I’ve always found shooting through blinds with the aperture wide, at say f2.8 a pretty good test of autofocus. Here, above, I want to focus on the white fairly featureless blinds, about midway down. The first image to the left shows how the camera simply refused to photograph the open blind and fixed on the more appealing contrast of the fence. It would give or at least tell me it had found focus, the green square would say, “Yep Neale, I got that for ya,’ then inexplicably shift as I fully depressed the shutter.
Over and over and over again this happened. And then it would do it over and over some more. And more. And then it would do it… well, you get the idea. In fact, I was able to raise two children, send them to university, attend their graduation and ‘dad dance’ at their wedding receptions, before the camera managed one focused frame, just one frame (to the right) of what I’d been hoping to make. And even that doesn’t seem to have a particular place in focus I can easily identify.
This seems in direct contrast, (can you see what I did there?) to reviews I have read online. Though to be fair, none of them asked their X to shoot along a blind. It may sound strange, but this isn’t a complete game changer, just something that could bite you in challenging situations.
More low light tests in JPEG above. On the back of the camera they seemed to have bite. The reality was a wrestle in Lightroom. There’s no image stabilisation in this camera, but then this is over a decade old in terms of R&D. The underground shot is a favourite of mine in that I always come back with something I didn’t notice about the travellers at the time. The idea is very simple. Rest the camera on the moving escalator handrail and folks will be leant back in a strange intriguing unusual way, because you have of course tilted the natural view of our world when shooting. My observation here, is the chap at the back, who is standing upright in contrast to the other passengers. In reality, and I didn’t spot it at the time, he must have been at a 40 degrees angle standing on the escalator, surely? And that is the joy of street, always a surprise.
A few more images (three) from Concorde 101 at Duxford above - including the super complex flight deck, just so I can engineer a conversation about buttons and menu. Due to the streamlined front end of this beautiful piece of engineering, the aircraft had a narrower cockpit than other airliners, with far less headroom for crew. This meant buttons, dials and switches had to be squeezed in far more tightly, adding to the sense of a crowded, confined and somewhat confusing space. There are dials and options everywhere. Does that remind you of any particular camera brand, I ask playfully with a sense of tease?
The controls of any Leica are simple in my experience, and this camera is no different.
Press the menu button, these are the items you’ll find.
Resolution. Why you’d want to set it less than 16MP I don’t know, but the offer is there to transport you back to 2000, when 1.8MP was considered rather special.
Compression. Superfine or fine in RAW DNG or JPEG, or both, if you’re feeling decadent.
Auto ISO settings. Hmmmm. This is possibly one of the worse auto ISOs I have used. I’m not even sure it is connected to anything, really, I’m not. I made my own selections and decided that Auto ISO was there as window dressing only.
Metering mode. Three modes of which I stayed in evaluative, or whatever the Leica language is.
Continuous. High and low. High gives you 5fps and low, 3fps. Not the fastest but again, remember the age of this design. I found it more than adequate for this style of camera.
AF assist lamp and then an MF assist.
Image stabilisation. Oh, hang on, didn’t I say it didn’t have it? Well, strike me down Luke with a green-coloured light sabre, it does have it. It was switched on all along. We’ll never know if this made any difference because I didn’t test it seeing as the camera is now in a box and ready for shipping back to the loans dept of MPB as I type these words.
Preset film. Standard, vivid, natural, BW natural and BW high contrast. I chose standard above the others, though BW contrast does exactly what it says on the tin. Maybe I’ll borrow again and just shoot monochrome with it. Gives me an excuse to say, “You remember that X2 I borrowed?…”
Sharpening. Five levels, I went middle ground standard upon recommendation.
Saturation and contrast choices, also standard for me.
Flash sync. Start or end of exposure. It’s a simple pop-up flash and like shooting monochrome this is one to come back to, perhaps? I did fire off a couple of frames to test it all worked, and yep, I got a nice flat image. It’s directly on top of the unit and pops up out of the body via a spring switch.
Fasten seat belts as that is all you need to take off with. There are further choices for shutter sounds, time, date, format and so on, as you would expect, but the menu is simple. You’re not flying Concorde, you’re driving a classic Porsche, remember?
Dedicated white balance, ISO, AF/MF and EV buttons make for quick decision changes. Leica does that well, and if yesteryear’s greats could spend a day with this camera, I am confident they would find amused satisfaction. The lack of an on-board viewfinder would probably frustrate the bejingles out of a Cartier-Bresson, though to see what you can shoot and have a modest continuous burst rate of up to 5fps, might well have him rethinking Images à la Sauvette.
WOULD I SPEND MY HARD-EARNED CASH ON THE LEICA X2?
Now then, had I not test driven the Ricoh GRiii, I think I may have more immediately said yes, but I was somewhat spoiled by that experience. It seemed to perform better in terms of the now staples, auto ISO and focus to name just two. But there’s something very charming about this camera. I did enjoy using it and in terms of the photographs made it well lit conditions, I think the technical results are simply stunning. But is charming, emotionally enough for a purchase?
