Leica attempts to “redefine” DSLR’s with the Leica S2
At Photokina this year Leica released their new Leica S2 digital SLR. The camera takes a traditional DSLR body and adds a 37.5 megapixel, 30 x 45 mm sensor, which is 56% larger than the full frame, in a packages smaller than your standard SLR.
From their press release, “In designing this brilliant new camera, Leica’s engineers took a close look at the best existing DSLR designs and then synergized them into a radical but practical new camera that combines the performance parameters of a medium-format digital camera with the ergonomics, form factor, and handling ease of a 35mm SLR. The result is the new Leica S2, an entirely new, finely crafted, professional tool developed in-house by Leica with hands-on input from some of the most renowned professional photographers in the world.”
The camera uses a new dual shutter system with in-body focal-plane shutter for fast lenses, and in-lens leaf shutters for high flash sync speeds. The Leicia S2 has an ultra-high-precision auto focusing system, and a Maestro image processing system that provides twice the speed of comparable medium-format backs and also reduces power consumption. The camera also has in-camera JPEG capability.
In addition to the new camera, Leicia also released nine new lenses: a 24mm ultrawide, 30mm tilt-and shift, 35mm wide, 70mm standard, 30-90mm standard zoom, 100mm short tele, 120mm macro, 180mm telephoto, and a 350mm telephoto optical. All for the lenses will incorporate leaf shutters.
Leicia sees the announcement of this camera as one that would redefine photography as we know it. In their press release they say “It is a statement of Leica’s continuing pre-eminence in the world of imaging that goes back nearly 100 years. Perhaps that is why our top executives in Germany have compared the announcement of the Leica S2 to the debut of the first Leica, the legendary model A in 1925. That seminal camera did nothing less than redefine 35mm photography in the 20th century and we believe that the Leica S2 may well do the same for DSLR photography in the 21st.”
I don’t know about all that. Do you think the Leica S2 really “redefines” photography as we know it?
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