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Leica Q2 Review

The Rolls Royce of photography wears a cape of shattered identity

By Aurimas Adomavicius

November 8^th, 2019

This is a difficult review to write. I craved the Q2 unlike any other piece of kit in the history of photography, to the point that I went out of my way to find and purchase the camera while it was largely unavailable through official sources. At great financial disadvantage, I might add. I took it on multiple trips, used it on the street, took pictures of the family at home. It performed admirably in all scenarios. And yet... it wasn't exactly what I expected.

The discovery is curious, because I genuinely believe the Q2 to be a very competent piece of equipment and am a huge fan of fixed-lens compacts. I'll share my findings below, but I'll start by saying that a Leica is just like any other digital camera from the perspective of the sensor and the lens - there is no such thing as the "Leica pop" or "Leica depth". That's all bullshit propagated by choice-supportive bias after an expensive purchase has been made. Great pictures are made by great light and composition, not equipment. Raw files are generally the same across all brands, and baked in JPG processing or "look" can be achieved with your choice of poorly-optimized desktop software (you know what I'm talking about, you monolithic Adobe Lightroom shit pile). And before you prickle up and jump to defend the 15-stop dynamic range of your favorite manufacturers sensor - sit down and let me finish. Dynamic range is a wonderful tool, but as long as you expose properly you will still compress down the range so that it can be displayed by your run of the mill LG monitor or, gasp, printed on paper. Okay, rant over, let's get back to all the great things about the Q2.

Where Leica does push the boundaries is the quality of everything they build by hand in their elf village - the sensor, the body, the lens.

This unprofessional review focuses on two primary categories of "feedback" to Leica as they ponder their future product roadmap for the lucky few of us oligarchs able to afford this piece of photographic jewelry. First - the lens and sensor. Second - the ergonomics of the body. Neither of these will be scientific, but my overinflated ego tells me there are millions of readers shaking in anticipatory anxiety to hear my opinion. Right, on to the meat.

Sensor & lens

The 47MP beast-of-a-sensor is not something I thought I needed until I saw the files. They're ludicrous in their resolution, medium-format like. Throw your images on a 4K display and marvel away. Your friendly neighborhood point and shoot can now print medium-format images on a banner by the highway. You never will, but it can.

The idea behind the sensor is that the camera has baked in "crop" modes to simulate additional focal lengths. With a push of a button you're able to see an outline around a, for example, 35mm or 50mm equivalent field of view. The feature works largely as promised, albeit you do lose that beefy resolution as you continue to crop down. Leica says you can take this one camera on your holiday trip and it will cover all the focal lengths you may need. While the crops are usable, you don't actually have a 50mm F1.4 lens on a full frame sensor at your disposal (🥰). Shooting wide open, the 28mm F1.4 renders a 15 megapixel 50mm @ F3 equivalent image... so not much of a portrait shooter for you bokeh fetishists, but it gets the job done. Hold that thought.

The sensor, however, has a Mr. Hyde side to it. At 47MP the raw files weigh as much as a bar of depleted uranium - up to 90MB per shot😳! Yes, you can shoot jpegs, but personally I was underwhelmed by the color rendition of the Maestro processing engine. The camera has very minor adjustments available through software and made me seriously long for some Fuji colors out of the box. My six core Macbook starts levitating on ventilation fan exhaust the moment I import fifty of the Leica Q2 DNGs into Lightroom. Not only are the files heavy storage-wise, Lightroom gets totally crippled (🔥) having to process that much data during import. Working with the files is manageable one at a time, but they're no joke.

Oh, camera manufacturers - here's an idea.

Please throw in a basic curve adjustment tool into the camera software in addition to the shadow, contrast, and saturation settings.

The whole industry is going through a retro-hipster cycle now and allowing these stylistic preferences to be saved in-camera would save so much time. Yours truly hasn't succumbed to playing vinyls yet, but I do like the crunched look of film on my digital files. Yes, I'm a simple man🧐.

The 28mm F1.7 Summilux lens quality is out of this world. Some people are rightfully saying that buying this type of Leica glass alone would run you close to $5K and the Q2 body is thrown in for free when you buy this package. The statement is probably a stretch, but this glass showed no aberrations wide open in a variety of shooting scenarios.

Personally, I find 28mm slightly too wide for subjects I shoot and I'll talk about why "cropping in" is not really the best solution in the ergonomics section of the review. I really think Leica could build a killer product with a baked in 35mm F1.4 lens - wide enough for contextual street shots, shallow when needed for portraits, small enough to be a compact.

Ergonomics

The two key benefits of a compact are that a) you are more likely to bring a small, light camera along, and b) people pay less attention to you, even when being photographed. Because Leica wants you to feel less guilt about sacrificing your children's private education to purchase a toy they have used metals extracted from a collapsed star to design the case of the Q2. The sensation of holding the Q2 is both tactile heaven as well as existential dread - that's one tiny, heavy, slippery $5,000 box.

A notch built into the camera does provide a lackluster assist in the ergonomics department, but I've ordered a thumb grip to mimic my setup from the Fuji cameras. The weight and size of the Q2 also makes me slightly uneasy to throw the camera to the bottom of the backpack for a daily cary... after four months of semi-active use I can already see paint chipping away on the corners of the base. The lens cap has a tendency to slip off the camera, as well, but the hood provides adequate protection. To summarize, the Leica Q2 accomplishes to be both compact as well as too large and too heavy to be treated as a typical compact. See what I mean with shattered identity?

Leica decided to hide most of the camera's setting in the LCD menu's, leaving you with fundamentals such as shutter speed, f-stop, and exposure compensation as mechanical dials on the body. I was initially irritated by this decision - who has ever complained about too many dials on the surface of a retro-styled compact anyway? Two of the buttons on the camera, however, can be used to cycle through your preferred settings (e.g. changing ISO) so it's a manageable offense. Holding either of the buttons also allows you to cycle through a list of your favorite settings prior to changing the values - a nice little trick.

From what I've read about a variety of manufacturers, the body size of the camera is the primary constraint that influences how large of an EVF a camera can fit in its guts. Larger is obviously better. Compare a Fuji X-T3 and a Canon EOS R - both sporting similar EVF resolution, but the Canon managing to cram a much bigger screen inside the camera. The shooting experience is night and day, especially for a visually challenged operator such as yours truly. Luckily, the Q2 has a brilliant, large, bright, high refresh rate EVF in its little body.

I mentioned the lens simulation crop modes in the previous section and those are by all means useful. The issue that could be easily fixed through a menu option is how the crop framing is handled in camera, on the EVF. Instead of zooming into the frame, the camera throws an outline on the screen to show you what your selected focal distance will capture. While this may be my own limitation, I see two issues with this:

I like composing in a box. It helps me eliminate noise and I see the composition better when there's a "frame" of nothing around my subject. The Leica introduces information that is outside of my frame and it confuses the crap out of me (because it's always a 28mm view).
Simulating a 50mm lens essentially forces you to use 50% of the EVF to compose your shot... why not just add an option where I could zoom in and have the 50mm point of view fill my whole frame in the EVF?

To conclude our ergonomics discussion I will say that the compact size and utterly silent shutter means that the Q2 can be equally effectively used at parties, street, and places of worship for your preferred deity.

Conclusion

So the Leica Q2 is a far from a perfect compact camera, but then what did you expect from a full-frame compact with a fixed lens? Only madmen and the emerging Chinese bourgeoisie are attracted to these 🦄 (for very different reasons, BTW), like moths to an all-purging Leica flame. I find myself in a peculiar position reflecting back on this camera as well as Leica's design philosophy - it's absolutely incredible by many accounts and one of two full-frame compact cameras available on the market today. The other one being the Sony RX2, which I haven't had the pleasure of testing.

It's also frustrating, because I suspect some decisions, or even compromises, have been made based on a product design philosophy that is trying to cater to an audience that seeks Leica for its renown, for the "Red Dot". And that's too bad. It reminds me of the unfortunate BMW grill design debacle, where the growing popularity of the BMW 7 series in China led to BMW abandoning the original, somber German design aesthetic for their vehicles. Money rules the world, but doesn't buy you taste.

Looking to the future of Leica and flexible compacts I would love to see a mirrorless, full-frame offering with a built in EVF, and interchangeable lenses. A cross-breed between the M and the Q - something not as pedestrian as the Q2, but also full of modern comforts such as exposure simulation through the EVF. Now wouldn't that be something to desire?