Preview based on a pre-production Leica M9 with firmware 1.002
9/10/2009 – Updated with tests of the M9 sensor’s infrared response compared to the M8.
Three years ago Leica revealed the M8, its first digital rangefinder. The M8 looked similar to the film M7 but was a completely new body, with a 27 x 18 mm (1.3x FOV crop) 10 megapixel Kodak CCD sensor and no resolution-sapping anti-alias filter. However it wasn’t all plain sailing, all modern digital cameras feature a glass UV/IR filter in front of the sensor, and in the case of the M8 the design was particularly thin (just 0.5 mm) which turned out, in production, not to be strong enough. We along with several other testers noted this issue, and soon Leica were producing screw-on UV/IR filters for their lenses in order to eliminate the effects of such spectral pollution.
In September 2008 came a subtle update; the M8.2 was identical from a sensor and imaging sub-system point of view but added a few new features; a quiet metal shutter, discrete shutter re-cock, snapshot mode, sapphire crystal cover glass for the LCD and most importantly the ‘stealthy’ black Leica dot.
And now comes the M9, ‘the world’s smallest full frame camera’, which on paper at least looks to be the ultimate digital M; an 18 megapixel full-frame (36 x 24 mm) sensor, still with no low-pass filter but now with a new UV/IR cover-glass filter which means no need for lens filters. Here are some salient image quality related points which came out of an interview we conducted with Leica in Solms:
A stop improvement in noise (ISO 1250 M9
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