I am interrupting my photos from my Vietnam trip to share some thoughts on the new Panasonic S1R camera that will start shipping in about a week.
Caution: this is primarily for people interested in shooting with manual focus M mount lenses (made by Leica, Zeiss, Voigtlander, et al), and within that group, especially people like me who think the rangefinder is a brain dead relic of the past, and have been looking for years for a modern camera to use with their M lenses.
For everyone else interested in these new cameras, I would recommend seeing the dozens of reviews that will be popping up all over the place very soon.
Background
At Photokina at Cologne, Germany, in 2018, Leica, Panasonic and Sigma announced an L-mount alliance that sounded more fluff than reality, but I thought there was a real chance something big could come out of it.
Fast forward to a couple of months ago, and Panasonic announced two new full-frame cameras in the L mount, a 24MP S1 entry-level body and a high-end 47MP S1R. This is consistent with the trend that Sony set, with the A7 and A7R, followed by Nikon with its Z7 and Z7R, then Canon with its R and RP, etc., and now we have the S1 and S1R.
I am pretty much committed to Sony and I have no intention of abandoning it any time soon. But since I dumped my Leica M9 in 2011 and dumped my Leica M240 in 2013, I have been waiting for a competent, high-res camera that was good enough for use with my M lenses.
Although the Sony cameras have been reasonable proxies, unfortunately Sony put a 2.3mm thick glass plate over the sensor in its camera. The Leica M lenses, which were all designed originally for film, required a glass plate that was as close to zero thickness as possible. This made Sony cameras sub-optimal for M lenses, especially wide angle lenses. Even 50mm lenses barely work with Sony cameras, showing heavy vignetting and loss of edge and corner sharpness at max aperture.
The Leica M cameras use a glass plate that is 0.85mm thick, and the Leica SL camera also used a thin glass plate. The new Panasonic cameras (designed in close collaboration with Leica) have both a thin glass plate as well as an entirely new micro lens array that make it possible for M lenses to be used effectively.
So to make a long story short, within a couple of days after the L mount alliance was announced, I started looking for a used M lens to L mount adapter on eBay, and found one virtually new for a throwaway price. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the first L mount camera to be announced.
Finally, a competent camera for M mount lenses!
When I saw the specs of the Panasonic S1R, I was very pleased with what I saw, and since then, I’ve been pretty happy with the handful of spotty reviews of the S1R, which has mostly focused on autofocusing, the new 24-105mm f/4 and 70-200mm f/4 lenses, etc., none of which I care about. My interest has been and at least for the time being, remains its usability with M mount lenses.
So finally, I got a chance to see and play with the Panasonic S1R today at a local dealer in the San Francisco Bay Area. There were two Panasonic reps on hand, with a couple of S1 and S1R bodies and some lenses, including the Panasonic 24-105/4 and 70-200/4, and I think they also had an Leica 50/1.4.
I went over to the store with my hitherto untested M to L adapter and four M lenses: Leica 21mm f/1.4 Summilux, Leica 28mm f/1.4 Summillux, Leica 50mm f/1.4 Summilux, and Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 Distagon ZM. I figured if these lenses worked reasonably well, pretty much all M mount lenses would likely work well, too.
Bottom line: the S1R impresses. I can’t recall seeing this level of performance from my M mount lenses from any Leica M camera, let alone Sony bodies. One of the reps told me they (Panasonic working with Leica) built a completely new micro lens array for the S1R that delivers a far superior IQ than the M or SL cameras. They even had big posters illustrating this new design – it shows a thinner glass plate and also taller micro lenses that look more like LEDs than lenses.
Whatever, the darned thing seems to work very well for my use case, which is to use this as a camera for my M lenses. The live view and loupe zoom works exactly as I was hoping, and focus peaking works very well, too. In fact, the focus peaking is so good that live view is almost (but not entirely) unnecessary.
The S1R is physically quite big (5.9 x 4.3 x 3.8" / 148.9 x 110.0 x 96.7 mm), which is 75% bigger in volume than a Sony A7R III (5.0 x 3.8 x 2.9" / 126.9 x 95.6 x 73.7 mm). But it is quite comfortable to hold and handle.
The S1R is also 55% heavier (1020 g vs. 657 g), which is a pain, for sure. And as of March 30, 2019, the S1R is also 32% more expensive in the U.S. ($3700 vs. $2800).
The price is a little misleading – Sony is likely getting ready an A7R IV with a 72 MP sensor and a bunch of new features that leapfrogs the S1R, and its price will likely be in the $3500 range at introduction, and the S1R will likely come down a little over the next few months. The price always equalizes – it is impossible to maintain a big discrepancy (unless you are Leica, but then you don’t sell much).
For now, the Panasonic S1R appears to have jumped ahead of the Sony A7R III in a lot of areas, including resolution, a superb EVF, a high res LCD back that seems to articulate in more ways than in the Sony, pixel shifting, focus stacking, XQD memory support, etc.
The pixel shifting sounds very innovative, going well beyond what Pentax did in the K-1. It is done with a capture of eight shots, four to essentially offset the Bayer filtering and the other four to boost resolution. The claim is, they can crank out 180+ MP images that are near-medium-format.
They also have an automated focus stacking that can start from a specified location in the frame and take a specified number of steps in a specified step size. So you could combine pixel shifting + focus stacking to get very high res and very sharp images. The firmware has some motion sensing algorithm that is supposed to compensate for detected movements.
In theory, you could combine both pixel shifting and focus stacking to produce very sharp and very high res images.
The Panasonic rep also bragged that their AF lenses have almost no focus breathing, which makes the focus stacking even more effective.
It looks like there are a lot of other feature / function innovations. E.g., image review steps through some 4-5 different views that includes RGB and overall histograms.
I have no idea how autofocusing, focus tracking, eye AF, face recognition, video, etc, work. I was not testing the camera for any of those things.
But as a replacement for the brain-dead rangefinder, finally here is a camera that can really work well with M mount lenses to deliver an image quality that no Leica rangefinder or any other camera could ever deliver.
Test shots
In my brief handful of test shots, given the limitations of a busy store, sub-optimal lighting, limited availability of the S1R, etc. I came away very pleased with my test shots. I have enough confidence that with a little more breathing room, I can crank out images that I will be pleased with, and really enjoy shooting with my M lenses that I kept, after dumping my Leia M9 and M240 in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
The camera store had a female model, so that helped a bit. I took a few test shots of her, as well as a few other things in the store, mostly focusing on placing my subject in a corner of the frame.
I have uploaded a few of these shots to Flickr, as 100% magnification views in Capture One, saved as screen captures. This makes it easy to see exactly where they came from in the frame. These are hardly exhaustive, but I hope these provide a feel for what the S1R can do. In time, I expect to be uploading a lot more images from the S1R / M-lens combination.
As of right now, there are now RAW converters for the S1R in either LightRoom or Capture One. I do have the RAW files, but I also saved JPEGs, so what I have uploaded are SOOC JPEGs with no post processing. The in-camera JPEGs are not great – there is too much posterization. But they are looking good enough that I think the S1R will work very well with M lenses. I have no doubt that the raw files will be far better.
I did not get to test the sensor for high ISO and dynamic range. It is what it is, and it can’t be too bad. I avoid shooting at very high ISOs, anyway. The colors look accurate.
So net-net, I’m pretty excited that I now have a camera that I can really use with my M lenses, and I’m planning to get the S1R. I just haven’t decided if I’m going to buy it right away, or wait for the initial excitement to die down a little, then get one after the inevitable first price drop in a few months.
The new leadership in photography
More profoundly, after a decade of sleep walking by Canon and Nikon, the leadership in photography is now firmly in the grip of Sony and Panasonic, I think. From the D100/D1X through the D850/D5, (and similar progression of model numbers from Canon), apart from resolution and faster processing (both of which came from Moore’s Law), there has been very little innovation in cameras in the past nearly 20 years. In the past ten years, we have seen one dramatic new paradigm after another from the mirrorless guys that the DSLR users had no idea about.
I look at what Sony has done with its A7R III and A9, and now Panasonic with the S1R, and inevitably, what Sony will have to and will likely do in the A7R IV and A9 II, and with Sigma likely jumping in with a FF Foveon L-mount camera, there’s going to be a lot of excitement. Maybe this will be the golden age of photography…
Nikon and Canon are simply not culturally set up to innovate like this, and I wonder how they’re going to play this. The DSLR parade they were leading is rolling over a cliff, and the new parade is led by Sony, Panasonic, Fuji, Olympus, and even Leica and Sigma after the L mount alliance, not to forget the medium format guys.
Posted by Roy Prasad on 2019-03-31 01:33:15
Tagged: , Leica , Panasonic , Sony , Sigma , Rangefinder , S1R , Mmount , A7R , A7RM3 , Mirrorless , Nikon , Canon , Prasad , royprasad , M9 , M240 , M10 , SL , Lmount
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