Leica Q2 Monochrome - 50 shades of grey - unrated edition
When you take away all color, your mind relaxes, following just forms, lights and shadows.
Stories of light told in shades of grey, if you want.
For those who know me, you know that I’m a big fan of the Leica Q line. Today, I want to tell you this story about the Q2 Monochrome and my little experiment to see how it handles itself in rough conditions.
I would like to bring out the fact that this is a very good looking camera, and because it is stripped of the red Leica logo, and missing any sort of color on its body, this camera is recognizable mostly by people that know what is what, or connoisseurs.
If you are unfamiliar with the Q line, the Leica Q is a compact camera with a full frame sensor. Being a compact camera means you cannot change the lens. The good news is that this camera is packing the amazing Summilux 28mm 1.7 ASPH. This is a very sharp, low-distortions and very beautiful depth-of-field lens!
Talking about the lens, I just remembered that some of my Instagram friends asked me about the AF when I published the Leica Q3 43 review (you can read it here), so for this one, I thought about a small game to put the AF to the test. So, I asked Gabi to pose for a few photos. It was a combination of camera-shy and hard-to-get attitude:
Next time, I will try to film the whole interaction so you can see the back-and-forth :)).
The idea is that I was shooting wide open (check that beautiful bokeh) and with AF-S (which means that once the focus is set, it stays in that position) so that means that I did need to focus for every single shot. Oh, and I only use the central point of focus.
And to get to a conclusion: I can work very well with the AF from the Q2, even in very low light, as you will be able to see in the case study further down in this post.
Can this be an all day camera? Well, let me show you some examples:
I was trying to put this camera through some situations, and my conclusion is that it’s a great camera to carry with you every day if you fancy your world in black and white.
As you may have read in previous articles, I only shoot RAW and edit after. The Q2 Monochrome put that theory of mine to te test. For the first time in a very looooooong period, I was shooting RAW+JPG. All the files above are actually JPGs straight out of the camera, with some small adjustments, such as a bit of brightness added.
I will show you the difference between JPG and edited RAW
I promise that I will not hold that against you if you prefer the JPG better.
Another great thing, since we’re here, is the sensor: the 47MP full-frame sensor brings a lot of detail to the image. As you can see above, you are able to crop your image without losing detail (grain is a personal option). And for someone who likes to post-process, the flat RAW gives you a lot of information to work with - It’s worth mentioning that a RAW file is around 80MB.
We talked about the body, sensor and lens, but let’s see how it performs in a real situation, and for this I picked our Spontan BlackParty. For this party everyone was supposed to come dressed in black, so black-and-white photography was a format we had used before.
Most of the photos are JPGs straight out of the camera with minor adjustments. Only one crop has been post-processed a bit :
My first thoughts were as follows:
The autofocus performed very well in tough conditions, including moving lights, dim light, and moving subjects.
The image quality at very high ISO was excellent, with a lot of information retained—I had my camera set to go up to 25,000 ISO.
Because of the high megapixel count, you can crop, reframe, or adjust the image significantly.
Great JPGs with presets that help achieve the look you imagine (flat, high contrast, etc.).
The amazing Summilux 28mm f/1.7 lens with Macro mode.
You want one…
I feel you, so I would follow the Leica store Berlin instagram page, or even better, drop by (google maps location), and ask for Nico.
Good to know:
all the files here were resized significantly - imagine a jpg being reduced from 20-40mb to approximately 100-400 kb
I can provide most of the sample files through a WeTransfer link so you can check them out in full size. Just send me a DM on Instagram - link at the bottom of this page
if you have any questions, let’s have a chat
Until next time.
