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JwRosenthal
·In 2015 I was moving to work with the US Embassy in Kuwait and had movers pack up all my things. After that move I was never able to locate my Leica camera and thought it was gone forever. I was able to locate all of my other photography equipment and fortunately I put the lens, Summilux 50 onto my Sony 7ii so it was safe and sound.
Well for the last couple of days I’m been cleaning out my garage in the hopes of building a home gym. Going through some of the boxes I’ve been lugging around for ages, I found a nice little surprise. Now I have some real decisions to make, do I keep the manual film M7 or sale it and go after the M9 that I’ve always had my eye on. 😕
Do you have a lab easily accessible that can process it/scan it for you?
Do you enjoy the process of analog versus the rapid product of digital.
If you answered yes to 1or 2 and 3, then keep the M7. If you say no, get the digital. But as a regular user of an M9, i can tell you it is very much like a film camera with a native ISO of 160 and same handling as a film Leica- I love it but I also loved shooting chromes in my M6- which is exactly what this feels like. The M9 isn’t doing hand held church interiors.
Also, the M10 is a lovely camera with the same handling but is a CMOS vs a CCD. You lose the “filmy” quality of the CCD going up to the M10 but you gain low light sensitivity and ultimately better perceived sharpness.
We had the first gen CCD monochrome at work and when the CMOS came out we were offered an upgrade, so we traded the CCD in. After getting the new one we realized how different it looked, not necessarily better or worse, just different. Plus the CCD did scale focusing like a film Leica whereas the CMOs you really has to use the rangefinder. We called the shop to which we traded and bought the CCD back, so we have both now. The M9 and M10 are very much the same situation- different, not better.
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