So, is the Sony A7r a Leica killer? Or does the Leica M still have some advantages over the Sony?
Obviously we are comparing apple and oranges. Shooting with a rangefinder camera is quite a different thing! That said on the pure Image Quality front we can report a small surprise. While the A7r beats the Leica M in many aspects (overall resolution, dynamic range, color rendition) the Leica M still shows a clear advantage over the A7r: The corner performance of the Leica is considerably better!
In the center, the A7R has much higher resolution than the Leica 240; it’s 36 megapixels versus 24, after all. But the corner numbers are more interesting. Here the Leica camera has resolution slightly higher than the A7R.
And if you want to “see” the difference watch this test made by Stilgar:
Center crop and corner crop too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stilgarnaib/sets/72157638447272734/
This means that the Leica M still shows a much better performance particularly with wide angle lenses. Something you have to take into consideration if you shoot mostly with that kind of lenses!
5 Responses
This means that the Leica M still shows a much better performance particularly with wide angle lenses? … complete useless test … only interesting for people with adapter. Comparing native mounted lens with adapted lens? Untrustworthy!
be a bit less of a fanboy in your defensive take.
in a system that does not have native wide angle lens, I think that a test like this is very welcomed and hardly “useless”.
how can one use wide angles in their A7/A7R if not with adapters? so when you say it’s “only interesting for people with adapter”, you are basically saying that it’s interesting for everyone wanting to use a wide angle on their cameras, how can that be useless then?
Very worrisome. Only two things could cause that big difference between center and corner resolution: Field curvature issues in the lenses or a problem with Sony´s sensor design. I think the second more probable.
Well, we’ll have to wait until Sony launches native FF wide angles to see how it really affects corners, which can be I don’t know how many years from now…
Did you actually read the article? Roger made it quite clear that we can’t judge corner performance of a lens with an adaptor against a native lens, and that real world results would probably be much better than shooting a chart. What this says is that a Leica lens shows better performance on a Leica than on a Sony using an adaptor. Look at the figures for the Sony/Zeiss 35mm native mount. They beat the Leica 35 on a Leica hands down.