Our own review of the M9 pales in comparison to thislabor of love by Thorsten Overgaard who has been shooting with the storied digital since 2009 and continuously updates his post with commentary, pictures, and advice. Not only is he a great, quirky photographer he writes passionately about the places he visits and, most important, the camera itself.

He notes that many people approach him about the camera:

But also from airline captains stopping me in the airport, people approaching you in a restaurant. Some are on the waiting list, some are just interested, others again want to hear if they are missing out because they don’t believe they will ever be able to afford one. It always strike me as odd that people with a Canon or Nikon and ten or more lenses for that think of the Leica M9 as the dream camera they will never get. At least till I realized that quite many Leica shooters mostly use one lens, whereas it’s implied that you as a dSLR user buy all the lenses.

Which is pretty impressive, especially in a world full of point and shoots and throwaway DSLRs. Just goes to show you that someone is still in it for the joy.

via DaringFireball

It’s not every day you see how the sausage is made. This is how Leica puts together their famous M9 camera – by hand, all done by men in white lab coats. It’s an impressive bit of engineering to be sure and pricing aside, this is an incredible camera.

Click through for one more walk-through video.

via ACL

Here at MobileCrunch, we like to keep a watchful eye over what’s going on with the Meizu M9. Not because we’re actually interested in owning the phone, mind you (the onslaught of Android phones is already overwhelming without having to turn to the stuff coming out of China), but because these are the guys that got sued by Apple for building an iPhone clone, and now are trying to turn their act around and go legit with an Android handset. Plus, promises out of the company such as that the M9 will tote a screen on par with Apple’s Retina Display don’t hurt.

For a few months now, Meizu’s CEO Jack Wong has been saying that the M9 was pretty much ready to go — they just needed the Chinese government to approve their network permit. Permit granted!

According to company rep Zhuo Yue, the M9′s permit papers finally came through this morning. Meizu’s goal was to get this thing out by the end of 2010. With 13 days left, do you think they’ll make it? Will Meizu actually manage to prove all the vaporware-naysaying wrong?

[Source: MeizuBBS]

We didn’t get a chance to go out to Photokina this year so Photokina – or at least Leica’s portion of it – came to us. I got a closer look at four of Leica’s new cameras, the all-black X1, the DLUX 5, and the V-LUX 2 along with the new Titanium M9, one of the most outlandish cameras I’ve seen in a while.

The V-LUX 2 is Leica’s ultrazoom priced at $849 and available this month. It has a 4.4-108mm lens and takes full 1080i-AVCHD video. It is quite light and feels on par with similar point and shoots except for the fast lens and focus features.

http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=hjMGdyMTrhoy_LXF-Kc_PetZX–DUUHg&version=2

The X1 is the same except for the color but it has a handsome, compact design with a 2.7-inch display and a huge 12.9 megapixel sensor. It costs $1,999.

Finally there’s the D-LUX 5, a version of the Panasonic LX5 with some improved features. It costs $799 and has a 10.1MP sensor.

The real belle of the ball, however, was the Titanium M9. Walter de’Silva of the Volkswagen Group designed this monster with the clean lines of Audi in mind. It’s made of a solid block of titanium and is limited to 500 pieces this year. De’Silva didn’t quite know what to do with the hot-shoe port on the top so Leica had to hide it under another piece of metal to satisfy his design aesthetic.

It comes with a 35mm lens and light shield along with a huge instruction book and design document. It is, in short, one of the most striking pieces of photographic equipment I’ve seen in a while. It has no strap loops but instead has a little removable nubbin that reveals a port for connecting a strap or a thumb loop. It also has a “holster” for those times when you want it out of the way.

People are usually on the fence about Leica especially considering the price and perceived value. These things are works of art and works of technological prowess, however, and I came away impressed if not very enthused by the price tags. We’ll have reviews of the new point and shoots this month.

You can find the rest of our posts here.

[image: David Farkas; via Leica Rumors]

This review is by photographer Rich Svinkin.

“Nice Equipment.”

It took a second to process that the wedding photographer was talking about my camera. It was the shock of phrasing, not the awe displayed, that startled me. When I’m carrying this beauty around I get stopped by strangers all the time. Camera junkies are boundary blind like dog lovers. And like a champion breed, the M9 takes some effort to tame and train if you aren’t a professional. But if you go into it eyes open and put the effort in, get ready for blue ribbon results.

Features:

• high-resolution CCD sensor
• full 35 mm format
• compatible with any M-System Lens
• self-timer, single and continuous (up to 8 pictures in succession) exposure controls
• 2.5 inch LCD screen
• MSRP: $8000
• Product Page

Pros:

• image quality, up to 18mp
• no UV/IR filters required
• original classic design
• amazing for portraits and scenes
• lightest full-frame digital camera on the market
• Battery & SD card capacity monitoring

Cons:

• no digital preview
• manual focus using the rangefinder patch
• image quality of the auto-review
• UI controls take some getting used to
• hold and spin ISO sensitivity control
• price
• no video.

At a glance the Leica M9 resembles a camera from the 50’s and 60’s. Like most mechanical machines made back then, this newest addition to the M-System feels like it was built to last. The auditory experience makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something; it starts with a snap and ends with something akin to the raising of turrets on a battleship. But that’s just the soundtrack to an experience that may start an outright addiction to doing nothing else but taking shots with this thing. The first in-focus picture I saw on my computer made me wonder – did I really take that? Nice equipment indeed.

The M9, for all its technical achievements, like the high resolution CCD sensor which is a first for this camera size, affords a powerful but also warm, nostalgic experience, especially for those of us who took up photography before the Bush administration. But you don’t need decades of experience and schooling to use the M9 to shoot great pictures, so long as your subjects are objects at rest, not bodies in motion – the continuous shooting feature is not photojournalist strength. You do need about 7 grand, a little patience and strange as it may sound a little faith in the equipment, and yourself.

Let’s start with faith.

There’s no preview. You have to use a view finder, which relies upon a high contrast range finder patch which Leica and its retailers tout but really it’s small, for me it makes manual focusing even harder than in old film cameras where at least you had a reference line to work with. It’s like having double vision after a few drinks and trying to force yourself to sober up. So far I shoot a lot of things at a distance of infinity.

The LCD does provide auto-review after you shoot, for which you can set the duration, but it doesn’t add any confidence now matter how long you look at it because the resolution leaves a lot to be desired. Only if the picture is an outright blurry disaster will you know to delete it right away. For those that make your initial on-camera cut you simply have to wait till you get them on a computer to really see what happened. But once you do the results are impressive. If you’ve ever looked with admiration at one of your own snaps, get ready for a self-love fest. One week with this puppy and you’ll think you’re Robert Frank or Walker Evans.

Patience

If you’ve been pointing and shooting for a few years you need a week to learn or remember the classic manual controls. You not only focus manually but you adjust the f-stop the way you were meant to, by turning a ring. If you look into the lens while doing so you can see the shutter actually opening and closing, just like the old days! You can easily experiment with the shutter speed dial which ranges from 8s to 1/4000 of a second. But you’ll need to experiment because the automatic shutter speed setting often leaves you wanting more, especially when you just want the end result to look like what your eye can see.

To us amateurs the M9 affords a re-education in photography. I say embrace it rather than look for the easy ways out we’ve gotten used to with advances in point-and-shoots like the Leica D-LUX 4 which for my money is the best wide angle on the market for under a grand. Unlike the D-LUX 4 which offers a fairly intuitive user interface for a camera with sophisticated functionality the M9 UI seems like it was designed by a great music star of a genre passed by just now trying to adapt. But make no mistake the underlying design logic is cut from a timeless stone. They know what they’re doing and are willing to make difficult tradeoffs. After getting used to the interface you’ll find it easier and easier to adjust to your liking. As soon as I found the vintage black and white setting I had a vision of meeting St. Peter.

You can also read our review of the V-LUX 20 here.

The Leica M9 is deserving of its accolades and undoubtedly will earn its place in history. But be careful, if you’ve got seven or so thousand dollars to spend understand that you are getting a great camera for shooting portraits and scenes, a unique aesthetic quality in the visual imagery that only comes with a Leica lens, and a great conversation starter. If you are more interested in clearly capturing fast moving objects, having video (buy a SONY for goodness sake), or paparazzi snappiness then move along.

Also Matt said to say the V-LUX 20 is available on Amazon. He also got a new bike seat.

Finally. It seems like there have been a dozen leaks about the Leica M9 and X1 the last couple of weeks, but they are finally announced. It’s too bad that the leaks killed all the fun and announced everything already though.

The new M9, which should be available this week, features a very similar body as the M8, but now rocks a 18MP full frame CCD sensor along new button placement for quick access to important settings. Plus, it has new micro lens that should help with performance at the edges of the frame and further justify the £4,850 inc VAT ($8,000 USD) price.

The new X1 is like the M9′s little brother. It’s still very capable, but not nearly as experienced as the M9. It’s a pocket camera for professionals or trust fund babies with a 12MP CMOS sensor, a fixed F2.8 24 mm lens and a DNG RAW shooting mode. The top panel sports three analog dials for power/zoom, shutter speed, and aperture control while the back has a large 2.7-inch screen. In all, it looks to be a quality shooter when it launches in January 2010 at an unannounced price.

DPReview has extensive hands-ons posted for both of these cameras with tons of pictures, along with a tour of the factory. Spend a few minutes and geek out over there. You’ll be thankful you did once the Applepalooza starts.

• 18.5 MP CCD
• DNG RAW file format
• SDHC card slot
• 80 – 2500 ISO
• 32 s to 1/4000 s shutter speed
• 2.5-inch rear LCD

Be sure to check out the full rundown over at Photography Bay. We’re just glad that at least one of the mystery cameras leaked out early. Now, how about that big X1 that was spied a few days ago?