Børge Indergaard's honest, studied review of the Leica M Typ 240 is well worth a read. His main concerns are: white balance and skin tones.
“The auto-white balance isn’t good on the M240. In normal daylight it is fairly accurate, but the camera really struggles in mixed lighting, dusk and dark lighting, and especially indoors with mixed artificial lighting. A grey card is a must for most scenarios, unless you prefer tinkering with the dropper tool in your raw converter of choice. Comparing the M240 to a Fujifilm X100S/T in this regard just shows how much the M240 is lacking in comparison. The Fuji’s I’ve used for comparison almost always nails the white balance, in nearly every scenario, and rarely require any white balance correction in post production. This saves a lot of time and headaches.
The skin tones. This is quite an important part of a digital camera. Pleasing rendition of skin tones is a must for any modern camera. The skin tones doesn’t need to be dead on accurate, at least not for me, but they should be pleasing. Sadly the skin tones on the M240 tend to have a very red or pink cast with Adobe Lightroom. If you use Capture One Pro as a raw converter, this shifts to a more yellow/orange hue, and in some instances it almost becomes too green looking for my liking. I specifically purchased a SpyderCheckr Pro color reference card and made profiles for each of my lenses to fix the colors, and still skin tones tend to have much red in them for my liking. I’ve learned to work my ways around it, but it has been frustrating at times. The funny thing is that this red cast is not a problem in JPEG’s generated by the camera. The JPEG’s have more natural colors out of the box than the raw files. This doesn’t really make sense to me, and I wish the situation was the opposite.”
In general, my experiences mirror Børge's, though when natural sunlight hits the sensor, I find the M240 nails both skin tone and white balance. For reference, read the following article: Nagano, Japan: through the Summicron 50.
When cloudy light, or mixed light gets in, problems can arise. I carry a WhiBal card in my wallet for use with all my cameras, especially when shooting indoor events. (Interestingly, the M240 shows less green cast than the Fujifilm X-T1 under fluorescent lights, which is why I prefer to carry it to headphone and camera shows.)
As to the eternal rangefinder conundrum, accurate focusing requires a perfectly calibrated rangefinder. Børge's M240 had to go back and forth to Leica's factory for adjustment. That's typical and has been typical of all rangefinder cameras.
Unique to Leica in the digital world are basic electronic lockups. Despite their long history as a camera maker, they are a German manufacturer of analogue cameras. True to most consumer goods, Japanese electronics are more reliable.
Anyway, good read. Thanks, Børge.
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Twitter: @borgeindergaard
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