The GF1 has been extensively reviewed elsewhere, technically by DPReview and hands-on by Craig Mod, and if you are interested in this camera I encourage you to read those very thorough reviews. I will not attempt to duplicate them here. Here are just salient observations from using this camera that I have not seen elsewhere:

• The image preview mode is deceptive. At the maximum 16x magnification, pictures appear far worse on screen than they really are. I can only assume the interpolation algorithms used are terrible. The camera’s review mode is useless for editing images or rejecting poor ones in the field, you have to return to your computer to get an assessment on critical focus.
• The orientation sensor is inexplicably part of the lens, not the body. The 20mm pancake does not include one. Even Canon’s cheapest digital Elphs or Rebels include an orientation sensor, its absence in a $900 camera kit is inexcusable.
• In program mode, the camera seems to always select f/1.7, even when lower apertures with more reasonable depth of field are available.

The Monovid is supplied with an accessory screw-on close-up lens that reduces the minimum focus distance. This is useful for butterfly or hummingbird watchers, but the arrangement is clumsier than the Minox Makroskop.

The Monovid is essentially half of a pair of Ultravid 8×20 BL binoculars. The barrel is 3-4mm longer to accommodate the threads for the close-up lens, and it has a goiter-like knurled protrusion towards the end for focusing. The eyecup is the same, and can be either pulled out for normal viewing, or left in for eyeglass wearers. This is a far better arrangement than fold-up rubber eyecups. The leather case for the Monovid is quite bulky, and features a screw thread to hold the close-up lens as well as an ingenious ribbon that pulls the monocular out of the case when you flip the lid open. It also has a magnetic catch unlike the Ultravids’ snap button.

Unsurprisingly, the performance is nearly identical, that is to say, stellar. The image is bright (most monoculars are in the 12-15mm aperture range). There is no hint of distortion or chromatic aberration across the field. It is quite sensitive to perfectly centered eye placement, specially when you are wearing eyeglasses, otherwise you will black out.

Sadly, the price is not half that of the binoculars, closer to two thirds. Considering that it is not all that much more compact and you lose stereo vision, if you are considering one, I would recommend the more versatile Ultravid 8×20 BL (or the cheaper BR) instead. Another option to consider is the respected line of Zeiss monoculars (most are more compact than the Monovid, but the 8×20 is nearly the same size and not as well built) or the slower but smaller Nikon “high grade” monocular series (unfortunately the 7×15 has been discontinued, but old new stock is still readily available).

The Sigma DP1 and DP2 were actually the first cameras with large sensors and reasonable pixel counts, bucking the marketing-driven trend towards too many pixels squeezed onto too small a sensor chip, with horrible noise as the result. I own both, and their image quality is indeed stunning, but they have one Achilles’ heel — speed, or the lack thereof.

The E-P1 is very compact, almost the same size with the 17mm as the Sigma DP2 (some photos released suggested it was closer to the Leica M8). The build quality is fine, and it is nowhere near as heavy as some early users suggested it was. They probably compared it to a plastic fantastic compact rather than a more substantial camera like a Leica or a DSLR.

I was surprised to find the 17mm AF hunted quite a bit, overshooting and then backtracking. Oddly, it did this even on the next shot when the lens was already in focus. I don’t know if this is specific to the 17mm lens, but it is certainly not encouraging.

From my test shots, I was also distinctly unimpressed by the optical quality of the lens, or the noise performance at ISO 1600. The Four-Thirds and Micro Four Thirds formats are hobbled by sensors one half the size of the APS-C used in most entry-level DSLRs, with predictably higher levels of noise and limited dynamic range. I had to go back to 2003 and my then Canon EOS 10D to find similar levels of noise. The Canon Rebel XT was definitely superior in high-ISO performance, let alone current SLRs. Olympus fanboys seem to be in denial about the limitations of Four-Thirds sensors, but you cannot fight against physics and expect to win.

The other disappointing thing about the 17mm lens is that it is not particularly sharp, specially for a prime lens of relatively modest maximum aperture. The pictures were nowhere near as crisp as the lovely Sigma lenses on the DP1 and DP2. This is all the more a let-down as Olympus was renowned for the quality of its miniaturized prime lenses in the days of the ground-breaking OM system. I wasn’t expecting Pentax SMC Limited pancake lens levels of performance (we are talking of a lens one third the price, after all), but there is no point in having 12 megapixels (at least 6 too far in my book) if the lens can’t actually exploit them.

I had preordered an E-P1 with the 17mm kit lens and viewfinder from Amazon. After handling the E-P1 and taking a few test shots, I canceled my order.

• The unfolding mechanism is a bit finnicky. You have to be careful to get the front standard aligned with the film plane. Once deployed it seems fairly stable. Folding it back is also quite tricky.
• The meter indicator LEDs and controls are very reminiscent of the Epson R-D1, not surprising since both are actually made by Cosina.
• The leaf shutter is amazingly quiet. It makes a Leica sound like a clunker in comparison.
• The camera is quite light for MF, it feels lighter than a R-D1 (even though it weighs nearly twice as much) and is not that much larger.
• It does not exude quality like the Fuji-manufactured TX-2 (Hasselblad XPan II).
• The rangefinder patch is bright and clear. The RF base length is very short as in a VC Bessa, and will probably not be as precise as a Leica, XPan or Zeiss Ikon.
• The film loading mechanism is very easy to use, and built as well as other Fuji MF cameras such as the G617.
• You have to remember to reset the lens to infinity focus in order to fold it.
• You get a choice of 6×6 and 6×7, 120 and 220.
• The optional case is a snug fit. I wish it included a belt loop.

In grand old techno-fetishistic tradition, I put up an unboxing gallery.

Update (2009-08-27):

I have finally uploaded a gallery of my first test roll from the camera. The lens’ optical quality is outstanding, unlike most older folders (well, apart from the Plaubel Makina, of course).

A few weeks ago, Olympus and Panasonic announced the Micro Four Thirds specification, which would allow for interchangeable-lens compact cameras with a larger sensor than the nasty tiny and noisy ones used on most compacts. Unfortunately it seems the whole misguided Four Thirds effort is destined to flounder, just as APS did compared to 35mm, despite the undeniable convenience. The 18×13.5mm sensor size has almost half the area of an APS-C sensor and all Four Thirds camera made so far have predictably poor low-light performance.

In a much more promising development, Samsung announced today that since it is finding it very hard to dislodge Canon and Nikon from their top position in DSLRs or even make a dent, they are going to create an entire new segment of professional quality compact cameras using the same APS-C sensors as their DSLRs, and due for 2010. Samsung uses the Pentax lens mount for its DSLRs, and has a long established relationship with Schneider Kreuznach. Pentax makes some very nice pancake lenses that combine high optical quality with small size. The only other company is Olympus, but the 25mm f/2 is saddled with the aforementioned Four Thirds sensor with all the limitations that entails.

At the same time, Thom Hogan has echoed rumors of an APS-C size Coolpix compact from Nikon. It looks like the big camera manufacturers can no longer afford to ignore the pent-up demand for this category, as demonstrated by the brisk sales of the DP1 (No. 49 on Amazon’s Digital SLR chart).

I returned it and sprung for an Epson R-D1 instead, saving almost 50% in the process. I had already previewed one at MacWorld SF two years ago.

Most people interested in a M8 know by now about its problems with sensitivity to near infrared, which manifests itself as a magenta cast in certain situations. There is a work-around (buy costly Heliopan or B+W IR filters for your lenses, although there are rumors Leica will provide two free filters), but many are legitimately angry at Leica for having rushed the M8 launch despite such a fairly obvious flaw. It’s not an ideal situation but I could deal with it, as long as Leica stood behind its product and committed to a free upgrade to the corrected model once a definitive fix becomes available.

The straw that broke this particular camel’s back was quality control, however, or the lack thereof. My M8 exhibited almost an entire column of dead pixels (the bottom 3/4 at x=2888). If you must, see this jpeg or the original DNG. This kind of flaw would be unacceptable in a sub-$1000 Canon or Nikon, it is simply outrageous in a camera as expensive as the M8.

The magenta cast is not an edge condition visible in limited conditions, by the way (Leica claims it only affects black synthetics under tungsten light), the photos I took last Sunday indoors in available light are completely unsalvageable, with a strong magenta cast everywhere that cannot be corrected by any amount of custom white balancing. Here is an example: JPEG, DNG.

Last, but not least, noise levels are excessive at ISO 1250, let alone 2500, with smearing in rows where bright highlights are present. Essentially, this camera as it stands today is utterly useless outside broad daylight conditions (I don’t have an IR filter, so I can’t comment on how effective they are). Of course, pretty much all cameras do reasonably well in daylight, even cheap and nasty point-and-shoots with too many megapixels crammed in a sensor too small. Rangefinders give you a two stop advantage due to the absence of mirror slap, but even with a Noctilux, the M8 has no edge over a Canon DSLR because of the noisy sensor. Then again, it is one of my rules of photographic thumb that Kodak stands for poor quality, and since they make the sensor in the M8, I should have expected the worst.

It’s interesting to note how the reviews published so far managed not to mention any of these problems, which are completely obvious, even with the most cursory of inspections. In at least one case (Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape), the reviewer found out about the IR issue, informed Leica about it but neglected to mention it in the review. This confirms me in my belief Phil Askey’s reviews at DPReview are the only reliable online reviews of digital cameras.

Leicaphiles seem to be mostly in denial, or minimize the extent of the problem. I am as big a fan as any of Leica’s optics and their rangefinder cameras, but the flaws in my M8 were so glaring I can’t even begin to fathom the levels of cognitive dissonance required to sustain a positive opinion of this train wreck in the making.

All the reviews I have read so far have been raising hallelujahs and claiming the M8 feels like a real Leica M. It most certainly does not:

• The body feels much thicker than the MP, and is just as thick as the R-D1, in fact, despite not having a flippable LCD like the R-D1.
• The lightweight magnesium body does not have the same level of robustness as the R-D1, let alone a MP, and feels more like a CM. It’s not even to the same grade as the original Digilux.
• The lens mount lock does not snap positively and reassuringly as it should, and the release button feels cheap compared to my MP or M6TTL.
• The shutter release is mushy and unpleasant. The shutter sound itself is a loud thunk followed by a noisy motorized re-cocking.
• Setting ISO is buried in a menu and you need even more keystrokes to change it than on a Rebel XT (the R-D1, in comparison, has a genuine knob to set it quickly with direct feedback).
• The rangefinder on mine was slightly misaligned vertically, something one can tolerate in a $300 Bessa, but certainly not in a M (to be fair, rangefinder patch vertical alignment is an endemic problem with the R-D1 as well).
• In another sign of sloppiness and poor quality control, the copy of Capture One LE included in the box was missing the serial number required to activate the program.

After using the R-D1 for a few hours, the superiority of the design over the M8 is readily apparent (with the sole exception of the taller body and short rangefinder base length):

• The R-D1 has perfectly acceptable ISO 800 and 1600, unlike the M8, making it suitable for available light shooting.
• The LCD screen pivots and can be turned around to protect it from scratches (or resist the temptation of chimping).
• The viewfinder has an honest to goodness magnification of 1.0x like the original M3, not one that panders to jaded wide-angle junkies (I never shoot wider than 50mm and my MP is a 0.85x mag, so yes, I am biased)
• The power supply is a manageable size and even has a cord, unlike the bloated wall-wart type Leica supplies with the M8.
• The shutter speed dial goes in the traditional direction, not the M6TTL/M7 direction…

One bright light in this fiasco: Doug Thacker at Calumet Photo San Francisco (above) went well above the call of duty to help me with my purchases, all with unfailing good humor (he once sent me an email at 11PM to let me know of the IR sensitivity problem before they started receiving theirs). He even set one M8 aside for me even though I had cancelled my initial pre-order (they are in short supply and are reportedly going for over $6000 on eBay right now, so the opportunity costs are considerable). I think I will switch from B&H to Calumet for the bulk of my photo purchases in the future.

Update (2007-08-25):

I must be a glutton for punishment, as after reading Phil Askey’s M8 review, remarkably thorough as usual, I decided to give it another chance and get one for my birthday. The first one I ordered (from Amazon) had a severely misaligned rangefinder – points at infinity would not coincide at all when the lens was at infinity focus. It had a low serial number, suggesting an early model with teething problems. Presumably Amazon does not sell that many, so I returned it and ordered another one from a place with much higher turnover, B&H. That one was a recent vintage (they have an orange sticker on the body cap), but its rangefinder was also misaligned, if not as severely.

In frustration, I went to my local Calumet and finally found one that focuses correctly. Wonder of wonders, it even seems like there are no dead pixels or highlight streaks. Conclusion: Leica’s M8 quality control is still spotty, your best bet is to buy locally and test the rangefinder in the store itself.

I usually carry my camera discreetly inside a shoulder bag. A regular bag, mind you, not one of those obesely over-padded camera bags that are so bulky as to preclude walking around with them. You still need something to secure the camera, prevent it from slipping from your grasp and falling onto the hard pavement.

For pocket cameras, the wrist strap usually supplied will do just fine. You can get a tighter fit by attaching a cord lock (Google comes up with a bewildering variety of them) and reduce the risk of the lanyard slipping off your wrist. For some reason, only Contax had the sense to supply lanyards with a built-in cord lock.

For larger cameras, you need a hand strap. They are very common with camcorders, but unfortunately, very few camera manufacturers think of offering them as an option, or even provide bottom eyelets to make attaching them convenient. You have to hunt for third-party accessories and attach them using the tripod screw mount at the bottom of the camera.

For some time, I have mounted a cheap Sunpak hand strap on my Rebel XT. It does the job, but the plastic tripod mount is flimsy and unscrews all to easily, and the vinyl is not very pleasant to the touch. Another issue is that it precludes the use of an Arca-Swiss type quick-release plate. About a year ago, I wrote to Acratech, the people who make my ballhead and the QR plate on my Rebel XT, to suggest they drill an eyelet in the plate to allow mounting a strap, but never got a reply back.

I recently found out that Markins, a Korean maker of fine photographic ballheads, apparently took a patent on the idea and sells leather hand straps to go with some of their QR plates. Despite the princely price, I immediately ordered a set.

You have to unwind the strap to thread it through the eyelets on the camera and the QR plate, and back through the leather knuckle guard. This is fiendishly difficult to do if you don’t know the trick to it: wrap the tip of the strap in packing tape to produce a leader, and cut to a taper with scissors to ease insertion.

This strap works because the Rebel XT has a protruding hand grip. For a camera like the Leica MP, which does not have an ample grip (unless you attach an accessory grip), I use a sturdy strap liberated from my father’s old 8mm movie camera.

If you don’t have one of these lying around, you can always try one of Gordy Coale’s wrist straps, or if they lack snob appeal, Artisan & Artist makes ridiculously fancy (and expensive) ones for Japanese Leica fetishists.

This nonchalance is not a very smart move on Adobe’s part, as it will certainly drive many to explore Apple’s Aperture as an alternative, or be more receptive to newcomers like LightZone. I know Aperture and Photoshop are not fully equivalent, but Aperture does take care of a significant proportion of a digital photographer’s needs, and combined with Apple’s recent $200 price reduction for release 1.1, and their liberal license terms (you can install it on multiple machines as long as you are the only user of those copies, so you only need to buy a single license even if like me you have both a desktop and a laptop).

There is a disaffection for Adobe among artists of late. Their anti-competitive merger with Macromedia is leading to complacency. Adobe’s CEO, Bruce Chizen, is also emphasizing corporate customers for the bloatware that is Acrobat as the focus for Adobe, and the demotion of graphics apps shows. Recent releases of Photoshop have been rather ho-hum, and it is starting to accrete the same kind of cruft as Acrobat (to paraphrase Borges, each release of it makes you regret the previous one). Hopefully Thomas Knoll can staunch this worrisome trend.

Adobe is touting its XMP metadata platform. XMP is derived from the obnoxious RDF format, a solution in search of a problem if there ever was one. RDF files are as far from human-readable as a XML-based format can get, and introduce considerable bloat. If Atom people had not taken the RDF cruft out of their syndication format, I would refuse to use it.

I always scan slides and negatives at maximal bit depth and resolution, back up the raw scans to a 1TB external disk array, then apply tonal corrections and spot dust. One bizarre side-effect of XMP is that if I take a 16-bit TIFF straight from the slide scanner, then apply curves and reduce it to 8 bits, somewhere in the XMP metadata that Photoshop “helpfully” embedded in the TIFF the bit depth is not updated and Bridge incorrectly shows the file as being 16-bit. The only way to find out is to open it (Photoshop will show the correct bit depth in the title bar) or look at the file size.

This bug is incredibly annoying, and the only work-around I have found so far is to run ImageMagick’s convert utility with the -strip option to remove the offending XMP metadata. I did not pay the princely price for the full version of Photoshop to be required to use open-source software as a stop-gap in my workflow.

Photoshop will embed XMP metadata and other cruft in JPEG files if you use the “Save As…” command. In Photoshop 7, all that extra baggage actually triggered a bug in IE that would break its ability to display images. You have to use the “Save for Web…” command (actually a part of ImageReady) to save files in a usable form. Another example of poor fit-and-finish in Adobe’s software: “Save for Web” will not automatically convert images in AdobeRGB or other color profiles to the Web’s implied sRGB, so if you forget to do that as a previous step, the colors in the resulting image will be off.

“Save for Web” will also strip EXIF tags that are unnecessary baggage for web graphics (and can actually be a privacy threat). While researching the Fotonotes image annotation scheme, I opened one of my “Save for Web” JPEGs under a hex editor, and I was surprised to see literal strings like “Ducky” and “Adobe” (apparently the ImageReady developers have an obsession with rubber duckies). Photoshop is clearly still embedding some useless metadata in these files, even though it is not supposed to. The overhead corresponds to about 1-2%, which in most cases doesn’t require more disk space because files use entire disk blocks, whether they are fully filled or not, but this will lead to increased network bandwidth utilization because packets (which do not have the block size constraints of disks) will have to be bigger than necessary.

I wrote jpegstrip.c, a short C program to strip out Photoshop’s unnecessary tags, and other optional JPEG “markers” from JPEG files, like the optional “restart” markers that allow a JPEG decoder to recover if the data was corrupted — it’s not really a file format’s job to mitigate corruption, more TCP’s or the filesystem’s. The Independent JPEG Group’s jpegtran -copy none actually increased the size of the test file I gave it, so it wasn’t going to cut it. jpegstrip is crude and probably breaks in a number of situations (it is the result of a couple of hours’ hacking and reading the bare minimum of the JPEG specification required to get it working). The user interface is also pretty crude: it takes an input file over standard input, spits out the stripped JPEG over standard output and diagnostics on standard error (configurable at compile time).

ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test.jpg > test_strip.jpg
in=2822 bytes, skipped=35 bytes, out=2787 bytes, saved 1.24%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -copy none test.jpg > test_jpegtran.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -restart 1 test.jpg > test_restart.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -DDEBUG=2 -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test_restart.jpg > test_restrip.jpg
skipped marker 0xffdd (4 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd1 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd2 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd3 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd4 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd5 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd6 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd7 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
in=3168 bytes, skipped=24 bytes, out=3144 bytes, saved 0.76%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>ls -l *.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2822 Apr 22 23:17 test.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3131 Apr 22 23:26 test_jpegtran.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3168 Apr 22 23:26 test_restart.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3144 Apr 22 23:27 test_restrip.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2787 Apr 22 23:26 test_strip.jpg

Update (2006-04-24):

Reader “Kam” reports jhead offers JPEG stripping with the -purejpg option, and much much more. Jhead offers an option to strip mostly useless preview thumbnails, but it does not strip out restart markers.

Color is much harder than B&W, and requires toxic chemicals. I shoot slides, which use the E-6 process, not the C-41 process for more common color negative film. For the last five years, I have been going to ChromeWorks, a Mom-and-Pop lab on Bryant Street, San Francisco’s closest equivalent to New York’s photo district. The only thing they did was E-6 film processing, and they did it exceedingly well, with superlative customer service and quite reasonable rates. When I went there today to hand them a roll for processing, I discovered they closed down two months ago, apparently a mere week after I last went there.

I ended up giving my roll to the NewLab, another pro lab a few blocks away, which is apparently the last E-6 lab in San Francisco (I had used their services before for color negative film, which I almost never use apart from the excellent Fuji Natura 1600).

Needless to say, these developments are not encouraging for a film enthusiast.

Update (2007-12-14):

There is at least one other E-6 lab in San Francisco, Fotodepo (1063 Market @ 7th). They cater mostly to Academy of Arts students and are not a pro lab by any means (I have never seen a more cluttered and untidy lab). In and in any case they are more expensive than the New Lab, if more conveniently located.

Update (2009-08-27):

The Newlab itself closed as wella few months ago. I now use Light Waves instead.