Good summation Adam (
@Adzman808).
Having not shot another Leica digital before buying mine (other than a single image on a M9 once upon a time), it was difficult to benchmark against anything else. I found through extensive research a good selection of reviews from good independent sources who could see further than the name and this helped make my mind up on going for one. I was teetering on buying an M240, but know I would have had that nagging thought constantly if I hadn't gone for the M10-P, simply as it was the latest model!
I find the M10-P very similar in use to my M6, which is just about perfect IMHO (if only I could afford an M10-P & an MP film camera!). Of course, heavier, but you can feel the history and family line switching between the two. The only real world difference I find is for some reason I find the viewfinder in the M6 much nicer on the eye.... I have no reference for validation on that, both are 0.72 magnification and optical so should have pretty much identical rendering... but they don't!
All in all, I've been super pleased with my M10-P purchase (like you Adam, the most obscene amount of money I've ever spent on a single item, excluding houses, cars and holidays
) . It's taken me a long time to get used to manual focussing, which is probably due more to my eyesight than anything else and I find the metering pretty archaic in comparison to the Z6 I have for instance, but no way will it be going anywhere for an awful long time.
Thank you very much Dave.
I have the M9 and 240 and now M10 (one needs to go, and it won't be the newboy or the the M9!!)
The M9 is in many ways the most simple camera, it lacks live view and has but one metering mode.
Despite them all being within a few mm and <100 grams of each other I find they feel surprisingly different in the hand.
I think much of this semi-psychological!
I think It's like a motorbike with a fairing, if you take the fairing off and ride it, it some how feels smaller and more nimble and lighter (it's not the first two and only the weight of the fairing for the third) - it's because when you ride it you're used to seeing the fairing around the cockpit, then when you take the fairing off the bike feels small.
The 240 (that's the thickest one, by about 0.9mm over the M9) has a big, flat and largely featureless top plate. I think this makes it look bigger and heavier than it is
The M9 (and M10) have a kinda stepped top plate that I think makes them look smaller, and when something looks small it can
feel lighter.
There's also the very real truth of mass centralisation - of which the M10 is better than the 240 (the 240 is more front heavy)
The 240 gets a bad rep IMHO. It's a good camera, who's only crime was to have the
clucking audacity to arrive straight after the M9 with no CCD sensor
Anecdotal forum evidence suggests the 240 is the most robust M as well in terms of problems...
The thing I love most about the M9 is the simple workflow, by and large the files either look nearly finished upon import or they're not really worth pursuing IMO
The thing I found with the M240 is the amount of work... it's harder work in the hand (thicker and heavier), it's harder work on the camera/menu (more buttons and menu features), it's harder work in post (crucial to get WB correct -yeah I know that's true with any camera- various little foibles around banding, noise, green shadows, clipping the red channel). So all in all the 240 is a great camera, makes nice images (I've compared some M10 and 240 shots and <1600iso there's very little in it), but you need to work the 240 hard... IMO none of the RAW apps (for me that's LR, C1, DxO, SilkyPix) make particularly special 'magical' colours with 240 files straight out of the box, so having a robust workflow is crucial.
The M10 sits somewhere between the M9 and 240 - the images are more 240 than M9, but the work flow is more M9 than 240.
I can live with that.
I don't cry myself to sleep at night because no other camera has a FF CCD sensor other than the M9 (unlike it seems some folks over on LCF
) - when I want the M9 look, I just shoot my M9 !!
But what I can live without is spending ages in front of a screen pi$$ing about with image editing, and with this the M10 really delivers, for me anyway - as ever OMMV
It seems to me (....) that sensor improvements within the industry have been steady for the last few years, with new models offering IBIS, more megapix etc rather than colossal leaps in DR and max ISO.
That Leica has kinda caught up with current-ish tech, in a package that's been refined over decades is great.
Or put another way - finally the M is modern enough for most tasks (in a 2016 sort of way, which was after all when it was designed), but still with all the joy that shooting a rangefinder brings (erm sometimes brings!)
Providing I haven't bought a lemon (and it came with a 1yr warranty), I can't see me being particularly disappointed with my purchase
Maybe the eye relief is different between the M10 and the M6?
(that's colour matrices + Hue Sat Deltas and a LUT oh and a tone curve !!)
