The Canon 5D Leica M8 Minitest

This is not a big scientific test. I don’t plan on expanding on it. It reflects my experience with the Canon 5D (over the past year) and Leica M8 (over the past few weeks). I do shoot in poor light, and value that capability in better digital cameras.

This test was prompted by Tina Manley’s Canon 5D/Leica M8 test. Tina’s test shows a big edge for the 5D in low light. I don’t dispute Tina’s results in her situation, and agree that the 5D is amazing in low light, but her really poor results with the M8 don’t match my experience. So I did my own quick-and-dirty version of her test. It’s interesting how people can do similar things and get such different results.

So I grabbed my 5D and M8 off the shelf. They had my most used lenses mounted already---50 f1.4 Canon, and 35 f1.4 Summilux ASPH (not coded). I set the Canon on 1600, and shot one photo of a wall, then upped the ISO to 3200 and shot another. I shot a photo of the same wall with the Leica. I set both lenses to f 1.4, as I nearly always do when shooting at ISO that high (why bother with a fast lens if you don’t use it fast when you need to?).

Here are my results. I shot RAW on both cameras, and converted using Raw Developer. I had to set white balance for all the photos, they all were way off (in retrospect, it looks like I clicked a slightly different spot for white, but perfection doesn’t matter for a noise test anyway). I had to add just a smidgen of exposure to the Canon shots; it appears the matrix meter missed ideal exposure by a little, but not by enough to matter.

When I push the ISO with either camera, I generally convert to black and white (I prefer black and white in general, and when things get a little noisy, I prefer it very much). So I’ve included some Raw Developer black and white conversions. I capture sharpened all the Canon shots, because it is clearly needed, and that’s my normal Canon workflow. I provide both sharpened and unsharpened versions of the Leica shots because I find that I often like its look better with minimal (or no) sharpening.

I included some Canon edge crops with the vignetting (very roughly) compensated near the end.

Anyhow, this is the way I really use these cameras and lenses, and these results are representative of what I typically see. And after this test I still think a reasonable person could prefer either camera.