The Panasonic S1 2023 Review: When More is More

For at least a decade I’ve been a card-carrying weight weenie, obsessing over grams I thought I didn’t want to carry. But a while back I came into a battered old Canon 5D, the OG enthusiast full frame camera. The controls felt like a soggy diaper, but the heft of the body, the solidity of the grip, were strangely satisfying. It made me wonder: what new camera vistas would be open to me if I didn’t care so much about weight? And so today we’ll consider the Panasonic S1, a full-frame mirrorless L-Mount camera introduced in 2019. It weighs over a kilogram without a lens. It is, in at least some ways, a strange and marvelous beast.

I’ll refer you to contemporary reviews from the usual suspects for objective performance data, mostly restricting myself here to the hors piste details and digressions for which I am justly famous. I will say that the sensor was capable in 2019 and remains so today. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but it could be made by a company then unfortunately called TowerJazz, now known as Tower Semiconductor (much better, guys). Or it might just be a Sony. Like nearly all big sensors of the last few years, it’s wildly overqualified for taking pictures of your cats and kids, unless you keep them in a candlelit cave. And even then, it would do ok. By most metrics it holds its own against other sensors of its size and resolution in current models.

The S1 was generally well received by the photo press. The 2019 reviews boil down to: “Pretty great if you don’t mind the weight; too bad about the autofocus.” It cost $2,500, which seemed like a lot back then because we couldn’t see the future. Cost is part of what makes this camera particularly interesting now. If it came out today, MSRP might be a kilo-buck higher and its specs would hardly be different. Second hand, you can buy it all day on MPB for less than 1,200 EUR, and if you’re ready to poke around inefficient local marketplaces and do some unbundling, you can have it for under a grand. Meanwhile, contemporary competitors like the Sony A7 III go for hundreds more and lack a lot of the special sauce that makes the S1 interesting.

Plus, a side effect of the S1’s odd market position is that it’s easy to find one that hasn’t been abused. Most of these have not been smashed around in conflict zones or indy movie productions; they’ve been on a cruise or two, covered a few little league games, and spent the majority of their lives in a well-padded case. Avoid the few wedding veterans and you’ll be fine. Mine had just a thousand shutter cycles on the odometer.

Some Background

Leica introduced the L-Mount (originally called the T-Mount) on some quirky APS-C mirrorless cameras that the company released in 2014. Just a year later a full frame mirrorless model with the same mount appeared, suggesting that Leica had planned to accommodate the larger sensor all along (the old APS-C lenses work in a crop mode). The SL cameras are hideously expensive for what they offer, but the Leica fairy dust ensures that at least some people swear by them. I’m sure the lenses are optically outstanding, but they’re inevitably heavy and the premium pricing feels wrong on something with an RoHS label on it; the M rangefinder lenses that are just brass and glass seem more deserving. The SL line mystifies me, and it feels even more dentisty than the Panasonic S cameras.

I don’t know who asked who to dance, but at some point Leica teamed up with Panasonic and Sigma to form the L-Mount Alliance. Panasonic and Leica have a long and tangled history in the digital age: at one point Leica was selling red-dotted cameras that were essentially rebadged Panasonic models, so you paid the Leica premium for a camera that could also be had for much less in the same store, which seemed weird. Panasonic also licenses the Leica name to decorate some of its lenses, presumably an effort by a Japanese electronics maker to confer some cachet on its products. (Panasonic, a company so unsexy that it decided to write “Lumix” on its fake prism humps. Not “Nikon,” like Nikon does, or “Canon” like Canon, or “Sony” like Sony. ) I don’t know if that fooled anyone, but Panasonic’s camera division feels like it’s on stronger footing than some of the competition. In mid-2020, Panasonic and Leica made a vague announcement that they were collaborating on technology and branded the effort “L2.” The first fruit of that is apparently the processor in the new Panasonic S5 II, which I’m sure is fine but doesn’t exactly get the heart racing.

On the consumer side, Panasonic is best known as a maker of Micro Four Thirds hybrid stills/video cameras that lean into the video side, but it also makes broadcast video equipment, and TVs, stereos, shavers, air conditioners, in-car electronics, industrial HVAC systems, supply chain solutions, factory robots. Panasonic will be around long after the last camera aimed at enthusiast photographers ships. And I think Leica will, too. Leica will exist, selling rangefinders that need film that’s no longer made, a hundred years after people have stopped taking photos and have uploaded their minds to the cloud.

The third amigo in the L-Mount Alliance is Sigma, a company that I can’t help but love. They so crazy! Their lenses have kept the mainstream camera makers, who would otherwise gouge you mercilessly, a little bit honest, and they’re still made in Japan. Their own cameras, which normal people have never heard of, are certifiably bonkers. They used to have a proprietary mount, but now, thanks to the Alliance, you can put insanely expensive Leica lenses or rationally reasonable Panasonic lenses on your nutball Sigma camera, or mix and match as you see fit.

Recently, DJI joined the Alliance, but I don’t care about drones.

So, a Veblen-powered camera maker that popularized 35mm photography, an international electronics megacorp, and a substantial but quirky family business walk into a bar. Over sake and schnapps they hammer out the L-Mount Alliance, and we have a new (kind of) mirrorless full frame mount option. It joins Sony’s E-mount, the early mover that basically created the market, and Canon’s RF and Nikon’s Z mounts, woefully late to the party but already dancing sweatily. Is there room for one more on the dance floor?

To switch metaphors, I think the slowest wildebeest in this herd is pretty obvious. Camera buyers can smell fear. My guess is that the S1’s depressed resale value represents some justified dubiousness that the mount will remain supported for the long term.

Lucky for me, I’m not a long-term thinker. Since I started buying used, I try on systems like clothes off the clearance rack. I went all into Nikon’s full frame DSLRs a while back, viciously depreciated by the deathwatch tick of mirrorless encroachment, had a blast, then sold out. The whole experiment ended up costing about 100 EUR after transaction friction. Miraculous.

And sometimes, the lagging wildebeest has some surprises left in it. Let’s not forget that while Sony ushered in the full-frame mirrorless revolution with the A7 in 2013, it was actually Panasonic and Olympus that got the mirrorless ball rolling back in 2008 with the first Micro Fourth Thirds cameras. Olympus sold its camera division in 2020, but Panasonic soldiers on. Sigma cameras are acts of irrational devotion, and maybe loss leaders that are imagined to drive lens sales. Leica exists beyond the constraints of conventional economics. So who’s to say what the future of the L-Mount will be?

Matter Matters… Or Does It?

Even mainstream camera reviews, so often oddly aphasic on the issue of weight, reliably comment on the mass of the S1. It is the only single grip mirrorless body in production to top a kilo with battery and card. Yes, that’s over 10 newtons of force pulling you relentlessly towards the center of the Earth. The Canon R3, a double grip camera aimed squarely at professionals that costs over 5,000 dollars, is a shade lighter. Most cameras in the S1’s class weigh hundreds of grams less.

The lightest Panasonic lens adds another 300 grams. That’s a lot less than any Leica L-Mount lens, but it’s something. For perspective, camera and lens add up to a full bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and a small bag of crackers. Many are the times I’ve left home so laden, but coming back, my load would be considerably lightened. Not so with the S1.

The Panasonic S1 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens next to the Olympus OMD EM-5 III with a 25mm f/1.8. Nearly the same field of view. Both lenses are of modern design and moderate budget, far better corrected than the nifty fifties of yesteryear. Shot wide-open, the Oly will have a broader depth of field (historically a strength, in the current fashion a weakness), but will only grab a quarter of the photons for the same exposure. You probably shouldn’t care. Weights as shown: S1, 1,320 grams. EM5, 555 grams.

But is it really so much? Yes and no. I can wear my EM-5 III and the Oly 25mm 1.8 lens all day in my Osprey Daylite Sling and basically forget I’m carrying it. The S1 needs a little more room, but it does fit into my small Tenba shoulder bag. But for me, it turns out that one shoulder is not enough to comfortably carry the S1, even with a reasonable lens like the Panasonic 50mm 1.8. I was a little surprised — after all, that’s not even two and half times heavier than my Oly kit, and that seems to weigh nothing at all. Primary school math tells me double zero should still be zero, but no.

My first solution was to put the S1 in a backpack, which spreads the weight across two shoulders. This make a huge difference for transporting, if not shooting, and transporting is really the thing. I must also admit that my photography curriculum is less physically demanding now than it once was. In the old days I used to tramp around dusk til dawn with a camera, but now, with a brood of three in tow, there are lots of breaks built into even an ambitious outing.

My second solution was to reconsider the value of comfort and convenience. Maximizing these two factors is so deeply engrained in a culture broadly defined by consumer capitalism that, I realized, I have never even considered if they really mattered. Upon reflection, I think their importance has been overstated, perhaps even entirely misunderstood. Pretty much everything was less convenient and comfortable in pretty much every time before our own, but we do not seem to be massively happier for it. Carrying this banal assertion forward leads to an obvious deduction that seems largely ignored: further enhancements to comfort and convenience are not likely to make us happier.

Now, my mercifully brief exposures to actual pain, mostly bouts of tendonitis and back aches, leave no room for philosophizing; real pain makes life less good. It sucks the light right out of the afternoon. If you have to live with it you certainly can, but it’s better not to. Yet it seems to me that the worthy goal of minimizing pain has been conflated with the avoidance of slight discomfort; the later has been elevated to the position of the former in a way that’s a disservice to everyone.

Inconvenience has also been reframed as a dire symptom of inefficiency, that unquestioned root of all evil in an Amazon-ideal society. The notion that Amazon might not actually be ideal has been percolating for some time, but the discourse usually seems to stop at questions of homogenisation, monopoly, worker exploitation and the like, without drilling deeper into the assumptions that late stage capitalism works so hard to inculcate in us.

I write this, fully aware that I get enraged when someone pays with a check in front of me at the grocery store. I remain coated in the tar of our assumptions, even if I can see and smell the black sticky stuff. But I will now make what would have seemed a radical assertion to me just a few months ago: that an extra few hundred grams of camera and the attendant minor shoulder soreness it might occasion will not negatively impact my photography, the enjoyments of being out in the world with people I care about, or my memories of the moments I try to pin down in images. So far, my experience with the S1 bears this out, but I’ll check back with you when it gets hot again and sweat comes into the equation.

Room With a View

The fate of mirrorless hinged on whether electronic viewfinders and screens could replace the optical viewfinders of DSLRs. For most of photography’s history, viewfinding involved increasingly baroque ways of channeling the actual photons flying off the subject into your eye, and the screens on digicams were not a satisfactory replacement for that. The early EVFs, which started showing up in “bridge” cameras (digicams with DSLR aspirations) were a joke: low resolution, slow refresh rates, wonky colors, extreme contrast. I had one, a Konica Minolta A200, and only resorted to the EVF when ambient light made the rear screen unviewable. In those cases it was better than nothing, but it was more a rough composition guide than a way to see what an actual photo might look like.

The first impressive electronic viewfinder I experienced was the accessory EVF for the Sony NEX 5n, introduced in 2011. It initially retailed for half as much as the camera itself, but I bought a used one later on for a hunge and was impressed. It used an XGA OLED panel, which in EVF speak is 2.4 million dot resolution. I guess because early digicam screen resolutions were so low, marketers took to quoting the resolution in “dots” rather than “pixels,” with dots being the display’s subpixels, so you generally get three dots for every pixel.

My next mirrorless camera, the original Olympus E-M10, had a built-in EVF, but it was only a 1.44 million dot (SVGA) panel. Years later, during the pandemic, I bought an old Sony A7, which took me back up to 2.4 million dots, and then a much newer Oly E-M5 III, also 2.4 mil dots, but with an OLED panel for deeper blacks. A few months before Olympus unveiled the super-light, reasonably-priced E-M5 III, Panasonic dropped the S1, with a 5.76 million dot EVF, the highest resolution then available. At the time, I was not at all interested in an expensive, mammoth-sized full frame camera. But time has a way of changing hearts and whittling down the price of electronics, and so here I am, a proud owner of the best EVF money could buy in 2019. How good is it?

Pretty goddamn good. In normal indoor light, when the dynamic range of the scene is narrow and light levels are moderate, I dare say the EVF looks eerily like an optical viewfinder, except that corner-to-corner sharpness is better than what you’d find in an SLR because the viewfinder optics are dealing with a tiny display rather than a big slab of ground glass. In bright light, the EVF is dimmer than an OVF would be, but the substantial round eye cup does a good job of keeping extraneous light out of your eye so the EVF looks bright enough. In dim light, the EVF looks much better than an OVF because you can actually see what’s going on thanks to the efficient light sponge of a big modern sensor.

Of course when the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the sensor’s capability you’ll see areas blow out or go black in the EVF, but that’s arguably more useful, if less beautiful, than the cheerfully optimistic view of the world an OVF gives you.

The improvement from the 1.44 megadot E-M10 to the 2.4 megadot E-M5 III was very noticeable, but even the newer Oly leaves something to be desired. There is still obviously much less detail than you’d see in a good optical viewfinder. I can’t confidently say that of the S1’s EVF. Even more dots might look better, but I’m not sure, and it seems it will be quite a while before I find out. The S1 broke ground with its EVF, but the industry has not rushed to beat it; several years after its introduction the standard highish-end EVF resolution has settled around 3.6 megadots. Only the top-end cameras, generally costing a lot more than the S1, get the 5.76 megadot treatment. There are also a few models that leap up to 9.44 megadots, but these are outliers. My guess is that the upward trend in EVF resolutions is plateauing in the face of power consumption issues and diminishing returns. I don’t think most buyers are clamoring for more anyway — as usual, my obsession with this seems rather niche. It’s interesting that the best-EVF-specs record holder before the S1 was another L-Mount camera, Leica’s SL, introduced in 2015 with a 4.4 megadot panel (and a $6k price tag in pre-pandemic dollars). High res EVFs seem to be taking a while to trickle down, which is why it’s exciting that the S1 can be had relatively cheap used.

Knob Feel

I have mixed feelings on the knob feel front.

My first impression of the two main control wheels was pretty good: not too clicky, fairly well damped. Not super luxy, but satisfying enough. Over a few months of shooting, though, I’m having second thoughts about the rear (thumb) wheel. Each click feels like it subtends a pretty broad arc, and there’s something about the way the wheel starts and stops that bothers me. Stiction. As you apply force, the wheel doesn’t move at all, until it suddenly does. There’s almost no roll to the movement: it’s a bit herky-jerky. This reduces the confidence that I can move the wheel through a given number of clicks with a given input; I feel like I have to give it discreet pulses of force for precision. I don’t have the same beef with the front wheel, which has a more bell-shaped resistance curve to its clicks.

The third wheel, around the d-pad, feels a little dull. Acceptable but uninspired. The mode dial feels very nice: precise, with satisfying, broad-shouldered resistance and a hefty thunk as you change settings. I’m not a big fan of the center button that you have press down before turning the dial (why not make it a toggle so I can decide if I need it, like on my EM5 III?) but it’s not a dealbreaker.

The power switch flips with a nicely positive click. Solid, short throw. Ergonomics are good enough, but not as good as a well-implemented shutter button collar, which remains my ideal. The small size of the switch flirts with being fiddly, though probably just escapes it; it could be a little bigger. Turning the camera on is easy enough, but turning it off requires you to shift your grip in a way that you wouldn’t with a shutter button collar.

Speaking of that shutter button. Unlike every other autofocus camera I’ve used, the S1’s shutter release doesn’t have a detectable first stage. It takes a very light touch to press it down, and at some point the camera will take a picture: there’s no tactile feedback when you pass through the AF-on region to the shutter release point. I only use back-button focus so once I got used to the light touch (which resulted in quite a few accidental photos of the ground) I was fine, but this design decision is mystifying.

The other buttons are mostly unremarkable. They feel weather-sealed, which they are. They don’t offend me, but they aren’t exciting.

There’s a collar on the mode dial that clicks nicely between drive modes, and I also like the feel of the tiny S/C/M focus mode collar around the AF mode button, which is hard enough to turn but then locks neatly into the next position.

The battery and memory card doors spring open confidently, and the battery itself literally leaps out of the camera when you depress the retaining tab: be ready to catch it. I’d rather have it like this than an anemic spring that barely pushes the battery out enough to grab, but it really is like a projectile weapon.

The screen feels reassuringly solid when you lift it. And none of this flippy bullshit that reviewers and videographers seem to want; this is a proper tilting screen that you can pop up for quick look-down shooting. It also tilts out along the other axis, but you need to fiddle with a lock switch to do that.

Overall, I was expecting a bit more in terms of knob feel because of the S1’s weight and positioning, but the camera generally feels excellent in the hands, presumably due to its solid construction and good materials choices. I have to believe that the weight Panasonic put into the S1 plays a role here, because it’s really not clear what else it’s for. The S1 is large, but it’s not huge. It has a magnesium chassis under all that black plastic, but so does pretty much every other camera in its class. Is that magnesium just thicker? Do the optics in the EVF weigh a lot? Is it the muscular sensor stabiliser? All of the above? I don’t know.

Oh, I also like to touch on sonics in the knob feel section. The S1 has the quietest shutter I’ve heard in a full frame camera. Much, much quieter than the mirror slap of an SLR like the Nikon D750, but also far more discrete than the early Sony A7 series cameras I’ve heard. It’s amazing close to my Oly E-M5 III in terms of both quantity and quality of sound. Indoors even in a fairly intimate ambiance, it won’t distract people. On the street, no one will hear it over the typical city background rumble unless you’re so close that they’re definitely already aware of you. This is all a big plus in my book.

AF AF

Most contemporary reviewers seized on the S1’s autofocus performance as its most glaring weakness. They would have been primed to do so because while everyone else in the world had gone to on-sensor phase detect AF technologies, Panasonic in 2019 still clung stubbornly to contrast detect AF. Reading out a phase detection sensor tells the camera how far out of focus (and in which direction) the lens is. Contrast detection is relative: the camera looks for contrast in the image, and if it doesn’t find it, it refocuses and tries again. By trial and error, it hopefully finds a contrast maximum. In practice, this can happen extremely quickly for single AF modes, but things tend to fall apart when continuous AF is used on moving subjects.

Panasonic bet on a homemade flavor of contrast detection that it dubs “Depth from Defocus,” which involves jiggling focus quickly and analysing the out-of-focus areas to suss out more information about where the lens should be driven. In the S1, this jiggle happens at an impressively fast 480 Hz. You can actually see it in the viewfinder, especially in out-of-focus areas of the image. It seems to really bother some people, but me, not so much. I think it’s more of a problem if you’re shooting video since the effect would be recorded in the final output, but I haven’t messed with that.

As I was writing this, Panasonic announced the S5 II, its first camera with phase detect autofocus. I don’t know if this represents capitulation to reviewer pressure or an acknowledgement that DFD’s strengths don’t balance its weaknesses, but it’s safe to assume that the successor to the S1 will have on-sensor phase detect AF as well.

But back to this S1. Single AF is fast AF. And accurate. That’s not hugely impressive, though, since most cameras I’ve used in the last five years could claim the same.

Continuous AF, which I was prepared to be disappointed by, is fairly capable. It’s certainly much better than my phase detect-equipped Olympus E-M5 III, which can’t keep a kid running towards the camera in focus for love nor money. It might be as good as the Nikon D750 (with tried-and-true off-sensor phase detect AF) I had earlier this year, but I sold that on so I can’t do a head-to-head comparison. The S1 is most likely to drop the ball when the kid is closer, which makes sense since the depth of field drops with magnification.

Besides the basics of focusing on what’s under an AF point, we also now expect cameras to decide where that AF point should be. This is the first camera I’ve used that doesn’t just grab the closest big object and find faces, but also claims to detect whole people and animals, wherever they are in the frame. I was dubious that this would work usefully, but it’s impressively effective.

For example (depending on which focus mode is active), if the camera doesn’t find an obvious face, you might see an orange box around a whole person the camera has decided to focus on, with other people boxed in white. You can in theory redirect focus to other people with the joystick, but in practice this is fiddly even if you’ve left the joystick enabled, which guarantees other problems (see Dumb Stuff, below). But often it grabs the right person anyway, even when their back is turned. Sometimes it will also lock specifically onto a head, again, even if the head’s face is not visible. I don’t keep company with many non-human animals, but I tested the animal finding on some birds at the park and it seemed to work well enough.

Panasonic says all this happens thanks to “deep learning,” which, sure. I don’t know enough about what’s going on at the compute level in modern cameras to assess how powerful they really are, but the S1 seems ready to flex. I was initially dismissive of the fancy AF functionality claimed by OMD Solutions (nee Olympus) for its latest flagship camera, which involves similar advanced subject detection, but now that I see it can actually work pretty well, I’d like to see what tricks the OM-1 can manage. One day, when it’s cheaper.

So, look, I’m not versed in the very latest AF feats from Sony and Canon, but the AF on the S1 seems just fine to me. Maybe it’s because I’m using the camera with firmware version 2.1, while most reviewers would have tested the camera closer to launch. Maybe my standards are just low.

If you really care about AF performance, you should be prepared to do some reading before getting the most out of the S1. Panasonic published a 48-page PDF “guidebook” on the S-series AF system. Maybe because the distinction between menu options like “1-Area (Human Detection)” and “1-Area+(Human Detection)” is not crystal clear. This in addition to the 527-page printed (!) manual included with the camera. There are three independently adjustable AF parameters, and then four presets of those parameters that Panasonic offers for given situations, outlined in the guidebook. The examples can be surprisingly specific: “Hawk / Eagle” or “Dog / Cheetah” when “Enlarged in center. From the front” calls for preset 2, while someone swimming a breaststroke or butterfly warrants preset 3. I’ve mostly left it on preset 1, which covers not just children, but also bicycles, ballet, and horseback riding. But not equestrian jumping (preset 3) or “Horse racing: cornering” (preset 4). So, RTFM, or maybe just don’t.

Dumb Stuff

Every digital camera I’ve ever used has some dumb stuff: the kind of things that make you wonder if the designers actually use cameras to take pictures on a regular basis. These things are often totally ignored in normal reviews, so let me bitch about some here.

Deleting photos is dumb. By default, deleting a single photo take four presses on two different buttons. You can eliminate one press by setting the default choice for “Do you want to delete?” to “Yes,” but c’mon. I’m all for the nanny state, but nanny cameras should be hidden in teddy bears. Let me just press the delete button to delete something. I’m a big boy.

Compression for raw files is also dumb, at least compared to Olympus. The Panasonic files are too big, but not for a good reason. I found some people who seem to understand why, and you know what? I’m not going to even try to get my head around it. You’ll just need more hard drive space sooner than otherwise.

I initially thought the customization of the control wheels was totally dumb, but it turns out that it’s only a little dumb. I thought that you couldn’t assign exposure comp to the two main dials because the menu section for assigning functions to those dials does not allow it by default. I looked in the manual, and googled, to no avail. But finally with some more menu browsing I figured out that there’s another menu item called “Exposure Comp” which does let you assign it to one of the wheels. But you still can’t assign it to either wheel, i.e., so that whichever wheel is doing the A or S changing, the other wheel will be exposure compensation.

Another minor dumbosity regarding control configuration: the joystick. By default, its main job is to move the AF point around. And by default it will do so as you continually bump it while carrying the camera, so that when you pull up to take a shot you’ll find the AF point in some random place. You can turn this off, but then you can’t press the joystick to cycle through detected subjects. You can assigned about 800 functions to most of the buttons on the camera, but not that subject cycle command. To be fair, I find that all cameras now have programable function buttons that seem to offer limitless flexibility, but inevitably the one thing I want to do isn’t on the menu.

Anyway, I’m sure I could go on but you’ve probably already skipped ahead. I should have just written: Like every other digital camera I’ve ever used, the Panasonic S1 offers vastly more configurability than I need while not offering a few options I want, and is plagued by some annoying design decisions that I can easily live with if I don’t think about them.

Trappings of Luxury

There are subtle signs, beyond the apparently superlative build quality, that Panasonic pulled out the stops for the S1 in an effort to make a good first impression for its new line. There’s not just one printed manual in the box, but six, a veritable rosetta stone of camera guidance. Plenty of cameras today come with a quick-start sheet that points you to a pdf for the details. I don’t much care in practice, but the show of dead trees is weirdly reassuring.

Panasonic also includes a battery charger, which in the good old days would not have been worthy of comment, but you can’t assume these things any more. Not only that, it has a progress indicator that shows whether the battery is below 50%, between 50 and 80%, between 80 and 100% or full. Be still my beating heart. (It also charges via its USB-C port. With a Power Delivery-compatible charger, it’ll suck down 24 watts when the battery’s low, so you can get back in action pretty quickly. If you use some random old AC USB adapter, the trickle charge of 2.5 watts will take forever to juice up the battery.)

Adaptation

This isn’t unique to the S1, but one of the fun things about full frame mirrorless cameras is that essentially any lens made to cover 35mm film can be used with an adapter. There must be some obscure mount nobody makes an adapter for, but I haven’t found it. So you have a century of glass to choose from. This is partly how I justified buying an S1 (my day job sometimes involves verifying the functionality of old lenses). But I also think it’s fun, particularly with an EVF as good as the S1’s. When you’re manually focusing, a good EVF is key. It’s also just more fun.

Fun, but not all the time. Some people only use adapted lenses, but while I did that for a time back when I had my Sony 5n, ultimately I’ve become a nativist when it comes to glass. But I do get a big kick out of doing it occasionally, which is why I’ve illustrated this post with pics of the S1 wearing lenses of varying outrageousness.

In Conclusion

The Panasonic S1 presents an unusual value at the beginning of 2023. Despite being a current model as of this writing, it is deeply discounted on the secondary market because of its age and stiff competition from brands with more traction in the full-frame mirrorless segment.

A used S1 is the cheapest route to a transcendent electronic viewfinder and it may remain so for some time to come. The last few years indicate that camera makers won’t prioritize EVF performance in any but the highest-end models anytime soon, and the cost of “high end” is climbing faster than the specs that define it.

If an S1 II should emerge, it could push S1 prices even lower, especially if the phase detect implementation is competitive. On the other hand, Panasonic might also introduce the S1 II at a higher price than the original, given the way of things, which would offset that effect.

But the future is the future, while we live forever in the now and the past that informs it. I think the S1 is something special because it was Panasonic’s first play for a piece of the full frame market. It had to be really good to have any hope of luring customers from more established systems, but the same pressure also compelled Panasonic to hold the price down. Given the S1’s qualities, this aggressive pricing must have eaten into the margins, but Panasonic presumably took the long view that you can soak customers later, once they’re committed. This is just my theory, but it feels right.

All of this being said, I still believe Micro Four Thirds is the most practical format for most people who care about photography, including me. The fetishization of “full frame,” a term I use in protest, is a sign of the the decadent end-times of amateur photography. But right now, I’d have to pay something like 100% more for an OMD OM-1 to get a viewfinder as good as the S1’s, which seems silly. And I wouldn’t be able to play with ancient lenses at their natural fields of view. Plus, I already have a nice Micro Four Thirds system, and what’s the fun in that?

For now, the rough trade of the S1 is too seductive to ignore. If its heft builds my core strength, so much the better. It’s a fun camera to use apart from the usual raft of niggles. It feels like quality. It smells of long-chain monomers. Its output looks good if you point it at interesting things. It’s quiet as an owl skimming over moonlit snow. When I lift it to my eye, I am simultaneously there and not-there, and isn’t that the point?

Samsung NX3000 with Samsung 30mm f/2 Review: A Grave Robber’s Regrets

Oh dear, my quixotic hunt for a lightweight and compact large-sensored camera with a fastish normal lens has once again aroused my necrophilic tendencies. The Nikon J5 did not sate me. Why this perverse hunger? I blame the demand that drives the camera makers to ever-beefier products. The demand, but not you. I know you are not part of the undifferentiated mass. How much does a megapixel weigh? 

The NX3000 prised from the earth, still looking remarkably fresh for a dead camera.

Prologue

My quest obviously points towards Micro Four Thirds, but that reasonably sized sensor turns out to be a red herring. In 2013, Panasonic explored extreme compactness with the 204 gram Lumix GM1, followed by the 211 gram Lumix GM5 in 2014, followed by… nothing. The GM5 remains a cult camera today despite some fairly serious issues (that could be addressed now) because Panasonic abandoned the line. 

This is the GM5, the last (and one of the only) enthusiast cameras that really pushed the envelope of how small Micro Four Thirds could go. It was introduced in 2014, apparently a market dead end.

之乎, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Olympus (hollowed be thy name) did something wonderful by making its EM-5 III lighter than the EM-5 II, which is why I own it, but it’s still a bit chunky for a coat pocket at 414 grams. The Olympus Pen-series cameras started out impressively small and light, but they have bulked out over the years, to the point where they hardly make sense given the sacrifice of the viewfinder. 

And then there’s the M43 lens issue: this is where the real opportunity for compactness lies, since the immutable physics of casting an image circle of a given size cannot be magicked away by Moore’s law and better battery chemistry. But Olympus only makes one pancake lens, which is wide and slow. Panasonic’s 20 mm f/1.7 (87 grams) is more interesting to me but it’s kind of wide and has famously sluggish autofocus. 

What about Sony, the destroyer of worlds? Its mirrorless E mount APS-C cameras started by mapping out promising sub-300 gram territory in 2010: hail the NEX C3 (225 grams), 5N (269 grams), 5T (276 grams), and non-NEX A5000 (267 g). The last Sony to hold the line was 2014’s A5100, at 267 grams.  Now consider the current line-up of Sony’s most compact mirrorless bodies: A6000 (344 g), A6100 (396 g), A6400 (403 g) and A6600 (503 g). The lightest of those, the A6000, is “current” in name only, as it was actually introduced a few months before the A5100 in 2014. 

But even if you feel like buying a seven year old camera, there are no pancake normal lenses for the Sony E mount. You have slowish wide options, the f/2.8 16mm and 20mm, and then there’s the 35mm 1.8, which is fairly light (150 grams) but a stack of pancakes long. And strangely, no third parties have filled the gap. I would almost believe there’s some optical roadblock — I don’t understand lens design well enough to know one way or the other — except that someone has built a reasonably fast pancake 30mm lens for a mirrorless APS-C system. You just have to do a little grave robbing if you want to use it.

Alas, Poor Samsung, We Hardly Knew Ye

Samsung entered the DSLR market in 2005 through a “partnership” with Pentax. I use quotes because it seems like said partnership consisted of Pentax using Samsung sensors, and Samsung rebranding Pentax cameras as Samsungs, and changing the color accents from green to blue. I was aware of this at the time because my first DSLR was a Pentax K10D, and the Samsung version looked like the evil twin version of the same camera. The Samsung lenses were also identical, but were branded “Schneider Kreuznach,” which was probably the first time I realized brands could be pimped out with impunity. Anyway, it was beyond me who would rather buy a DSLR from Samsung (better known as a maker of televisions, phones, refrigerators, air conditioners, memory chips, medical equipment, office buildings, and container ships) than a camera from the storied Pentax. Apparently I was not alone in this because the partnership fizzled out a few years later and Samsung struck out on its own. 

Here are a Samsung and a Pentax SLR from the partnership period. I’d forgotten that at least they reworked the button shapes.

The company launched the NX mount in 2010, a mirrorless APS-C design that confusingly began with a camera that looked like a fully-mirrored DSLR, the NX10. Later that year Samsung introduced the much smaller NX100, which still weighed over 300 grams with a battery (its loaded weight is misstated as 282 grams in some sources: that’s actually without a battery). The NXx00 line gradually got heavier, but Samsung then introduced the NXx000 series, which kept things under 300 grams. With these innovative, slim cameras, Samsung soon displaced the hidebound legacy camera makers who clung to their DSLRs, eventually becoming the leading producer of ILCs.

Just kidding! I remember being puzzled by the NX cameras. Not that they were terrible, or even bad. But there was someone else making innovative, slim APS-C cameras at the same time, and they seemed just a little better in pretty much every way: Sony’s first NEX cameras came to market in 2010, and very quickly got an edge over their Samsung counterparts. I bought a NEX 5n, and I don’t even remember considering an NX alternative. (Let’s just take a moment to reflect on the fact that the two competing mirrorless systems were branded NX and NEX. OK, let’s move on.)

The E-mount lens lineup was also more complete. I was more of a zoom guy back then, and I was impressed with the metal bodied NEX kit zoom (it was all plastic inside, but whatevs). Sony made quite a few lenses, and third parties were quickly on board. And the Sonys had Sony sensors, which were already starting to kick ass.

The last two NX bodies, the DSLR-shaped NX1 and the smaller (but still over 300 gram) NX500, built around a new Samsung 28 megapixel BSI sensor, seem to have been genuinely compelling. But by then the stink of death was on the system. Samsung exited the market, I guess to focus on cell phones, as if anyone would want to take pictures with those. 

It was, by Samsung’s standards, an impressively long commitment to a camera system. Five years and over a dozen cameras was better than the four cameras that emerged from the Pentax partnership, though at least those owners could easily cross back to Pentax when Samsung moved on: they weren’t stuck with lenses for an orphan mount. Those who jumped on Samsung’s first 35mm SLR bandwagon weren’t so lucky. The Samsung SR 4000 was introduced in 1997 with a proprietary mount. It was the first and last of its name. One and done. I didn’t know about the SR 4000 when I ignored the NX cameras, but it seems that as usual a student of history would have had some clues about the future.   

The Samsung Summicron

So why am I nattering on about the NX cameras now, all these years after the last one was shipped? Because my thirsty wandering through the desert of bloated cameras and optically-perfect, boat-anchor lenses led to me an oasis that I had hitherto missed: Samsung’s 30mm f/2 lens. This works out to a just-slightly-wide normal, with a field of view around 45mm-equivalent. And the kicker: it weighs just 68 grams, and protrudes a tad more than 20 millimeters past the mount. On paper, this is the lens I’ve been looking for.

How small is the Samsung 30mm f/2 lens? Here it next to Nikon’s f/1.8 normal prime for its 1 system, which had a 1-inch sensor, roughly a third the area of the NX system’s APS-C sensor. Weird, right?

Tracking one down would have been tricky (eBay was showing silly prices, and mostly out of Russia) but I got lucky on the French version of Craig’s List, called leboncoin. Someone was selling one just outside of Paris for a hunge, if I was willing to take the train out to Neuilly, which apparently I was. The lens appears to be unused. The guy who sold it to me had, I believe, a Russian accent. I had my Samsung Summicron (no lightning from Wetzlar has struck me yet).

The NX3000 

Unlike a real Summicron, the 30mm was made for a dead mount. Catnip to me, of course. The upside is that you can get a camera for it pretty cheap. I settled on the NX3000 because it was the last of Samsung’s lighter-weight semi-entry level cameras. It uses the second-to-last sensor for the system, a 20.3 megapixel CMOS. On paper, it looks basic but not too basic. It has a PASM dial, which I took as a good sign. A tilt-up screen, a design I love. A single control wheel around the D-pad, which, OK. I found one on leboncoin for 200 EUR, including the two kit stabilized zooms, which I sold off (yes, amazingly, you can still sell them), effectively making the camera cheaper than free. The body showed no signs of being used, but I did have to spring for a generic battery because the original no longer held a charge.

When I had my lens, my camera, and a working battery, I took a few new-toy-around-the-house shots to get a feel for this corpse I’d dug up. This is not the lightest camera I’ve ever held, but I’ll wager it is the lowest density: in the hand it feels like a hollow mock-up. I’m not complaining, mind you, since the whole point of this exercise is lowering weight, but it bears mentioning. I wish Samsung had taken some of the air out of the camera, but then people would have complained that it was too small to hold. 

Here you see the NX3000’s top plate, with precious little to offer. Also pictured is the kit 50-200mm zoom, which shows you why putting a big sensor in a small camera doesn’t necessarily result in a small package. Compactness is largely about lenses.

I’m not going to give the NX3000 an exhaustive knob-feel treatment. Let’s just say it’s mostly par for the course. The PASM dial actually has nicely damped detents. The single control wheel has reasonable clicks, though the link between turning it and changes to settings is tenuous. It’s not nice, but this is the world we live in, even today. The screen has a smooth feel when you flip it up. It will actually go all the way up so you can use it for selfies, if you’re one of those people. The shutter sounds like a dropped milk carton (empty), but at least it’s not too loud. Power is a button, not a switch, which belies the promise of that PASM dial.

But poking around the apartment, I was cautiously optimistic. Focus seemed reasonably quick and confident in good light. I did, however, notice that it slowed down and became less reliable in low light. Now, contemporary reviews of the camera also noted this, but I forgot that the definition of “low light” has changed in the intervening years. Now, “low light” is something like, “a starlit night with a very thin crescent moon.” But in 2014, low light was something much brighter. Back then, you might not want to perform surgery in low light, but you could definitely read in it. Then, unlike today, low light was something that people lived in.

Here’s one of the kids that lives in my apartment. At ISO 1600, he looks pretty clean, not counting the bolognese sauce. What first looks like noise-reduction softening is actually missed focus — the camera focused back around his ears, so his face is a little blurry.

This would be a problem if this was supposed to be my real camera, but I already have one of those. This was supposed to be my lazy-carry, out-and-about camera, and since I have young kids, I’m usually not out after dark. For the same reason, high ISO performance was not a big concern. 

Soon enough, I went out with the family to the Jardin de Plantes in Paris, which had an outdoor exposition of gaudy models of prehistoric creatures made of brightly-color fabric stretched on wire frames. At night they light up, but of course I was there during the day. Pretty quickly, I realized that the NX3000 and I were not going to get along.

There are a few problems problems. First off, I can’t see the screen in daylight. In sunlight it becomes a black mirror with just a suggestion of a scene on it. Plus, I guess I’ve gotten used to cameras with eye level finders, and forgot that a 3-inch screen, when held at a distance that I can easily focus my eyes on, looks like a wading pool seen from a high dive. 

That kid again. This is with cloudy white balance, but the jpeg is cool and green. At least you see that the 30mm f/2 allows for some real subject separation.

And then there’s that single control wheel, which I would use to select aperture, being a very type A person. As I alluded to before, you would have to turn it very…slowly…and…very…carefully to get a one-to-one relationship between setting and motion. What did I expect from an entry-level camera from 2014? We forget things, I guess. 

Finally, there’s focusing. I tried a mix of point focus and face/zone focus, because you can’t have face and point active at the same time, which bugs me. I guess Panasonic does this too, but the Panasonics I’ve used are a lot better at finding faces than the NX3000 is. Moving faces, for example, fahgettaboudit. Moving targets in general, for that matter. I tried to document my kids on a carrousel because I don’t have any pictures of them doing that, and it was a frustrating struggle. Might as well pre-focus like you’re using a rangefinder. None of this was helped by the poor screen visibility, which meant that even when the camera had locked focus on something, I wasn’t sure what it was.  

Here’s one of those times the camera wanted to get the background in focus instead of my beautiful children.

When I got home and pulled the files off the thumbnail-sized micro-SD card, I discovered that my RAW processor, DxO PhotoLab, does not support the camera. I thought I’d checked this, but realized that I’d been fooled because the earlier NX2000 and the later NX500 and NX1 were supported, so I’d assumed the intervening NX3000 would be as well. But no. So, to the jpegs.

Most of my life I’ve been a jpeg shooter, but since I went RAW, I guess I’ve become a snob. The NX3000’s jpegs look really jpegy. Even though I’d set noise reduction to “low,” things looked weirdly smoothed out. Color can be nice, or it can be off, usually in a green direction (as usual, I used cloudy white balance outside to keep the images warm). But probably the biggest problem was that a lot of images were out of focus, something that had escaped me when I was shooting without being able to see the preview. 

What About the Lens?

So, for me, the NX3000 is kind of a nonstarter. It’s just not fun to shoot. But what about that little Korean Summicron? Does it cut the kimchi? 

I believe it does. My days of photographing brick walls are long behind me, but there’s nothing I saw in my short experience with the lens that suggests it’s crippled by its small size. Wide-open, you definitely get some subject separation and the lens isn’t committing any crimes in the corners. Yes, things get a tiny bit smudgy in the extreme corners if you’re pixel peeping. But if you truly need corner-to-corner perfection, there are Zeiss Otus lenses for you.  

Here’s a wide-open shot, focused on the scarecrow (and underexposed, but I think I did that on purpose to keep the sky in there — I didn’t yet realize I wouldn’t be developing the RAWs). If you look down in the bottom left corner, you’ll see plenty of detail. If this was a real photography review site there would be a snappy way to see a 100% view of the corner. Oh well!

I also didn’t notice any chromatic aberration to speak of, though it’s possible the NX3000 is zapping it in post. Bokeh’s mostly acceptable, though as always it depends on a bunch factors.

It’s not a real Summicron, but I would happily put up with more weaknesses than this little lens has in exchange for its tiny, weightless form factor. This is the lens I’ve been looking for. Why, why does it have to be for this mount?

Conclusion

The NX3000 is not a good bet for weight-averse photographers today, even if they’re willing to put up with some faff to get a cheap, lightweight body. Probably because of its everyman-consumer focus (and price point), the NX3000 has not aged well; it just isn’t much fun to use. I think the sensor quality is fine (but I can’t be sure because my raw processor doesn’t support it and I sure as hell ain’t going to start messing around with a new one for the NX3000’s sake),  but the screen and autofocus aren’t quite at the sufficiency point that most of the market was achieving around that time.

The Samsung 30mm f/2 lens, on the other hand, is a tiny gem that would be an asset to any APS-C mirrorless system. Tragically, it’s trapped in NX purgatory. It might be worth exploring it with the NX500, likely a more capable camera in every respect, albeit a slightly heavier one. However, the NX500, even all these years after Samsung took the NX system out behind the barn, commands real money (and the NX1 even more so): too much to justify, at least for me.

I’m selling on the NX3000 and its zooms, but I’m not sure I can part with the 30mm. Maybe one day a cheap NX500 will fall into my lap and I’ll give it another airing. 

The Leica M10 Haptic (Fondler’s) Review: Does it Feel Like a Real Leica?

When the alien archeologists come, they will know the name Leica. As they root through our landfills, they will tut at our Evian bottles and K-Cups, but they will be taken aback by the Leica rangefinder cameras. Not the real Leica Ms, chambered for 35 mm film, which stayed safely on shelves and in closets until whatever apocalypse of our own design finally overtook us. No, the trash diggers will find the digital Leicas, their disposable silicon guts wrapped in perfectly machined metal, capped with the opto-mechanical miracle of the rangefinder focusing apparatus. One of the archeologists will chronicle this badly arranged marriage in a paper positing it as a microcosm of the habits that doomed our species. Another will argue that it's an example of the only impulse that could have saved us. 

The Leica M10. Beautiful landfill.

The Leica M10. What, a consideration of an almost-current camera? Yes, my friends, strange times demand strange blog posts. Plenty of reviews of the M10 were penned (or videoed, god help us) in 2017, but they focus mostly on irrelevant details like image quality. In this review, I will consider elements more central to the Leica experience.

It has been my privilege to handle a great many classic cameras and quite a few digital cameras as well, but I’ve only come across digital Leica Ms once or twice. This was a long time ago, before I was born again as a film shooter, before I’d been infected with leicaphilia, and I was honestly flummoxed by those absurdly expensive, hard-to-use cameras. But even then, knob feel was important to me so I gave them a fondle all the same. I remember that I was unconvinced.

A decade or so later, I am different, we are all different, never the same river etc. I acquired an M10 recently from a young man in a banker’s suit who counted my gangster-sized sheaf of 50 euro notes with the mechanical efficiency of a blackjack dealer who’s seen a million sad, smoky busts. This is not the kind of camera I generally buy, and I don’t intend to keep it, but before I send it on to someone who really wants it, I will answer a question that has intrigued me ever since I began shooting film in Leica M cameras: was my earlier disappointment with Leica’s digital rangefinders justified, or was I just a philistine? How does a digital M like the M10 feel compared to the classic film Leicas? How does it fondle?

Before we get into controls, let’s take the body itself. This is the low-hanging fruit for Leica: how hard is it to make a robust metal body when price is no object and keeping weight up (aspiring to original Ms, the classiest brick shithouses ever constructed) is the goal? Well, they nail it. The M10 feels delicious in the hand. Rock-solid, dense, with lustrous finishes. I know the body coverings aren’t vulcanite, but they feel fine to me. People give the digital Ms a hard time for the impracticality of removing the baseplate to access the battery and card slot, but Jesus H, you’re not buying a digital rangefinder because you prioritize practicality. The micro-tolerances with which the base kisses onto the body is glorious in a Leica M made in 1957, and that remains true sixty years later. Swapping batteries should not be this fun. Seriously, it should’t.

The M10 back to back with a real M.

So, feels in the abstract are good. But in use, in the hand? When introduced, Leica crowed proudly that the M10 was the same exact thickness and width as a classic M: the earlier iterations were a little chunkier. And indeed, when you hold the camera up to your face to take a picture, it does feel like the real deal. However, the M10 is a bit taller than my M2. I would not think it enough to make much of a handling difference, but when I’m not shooting I like to carry a camera with my hand wrapped around it top and bottom, with the top plate snugged into my palm, lens in towards my thigh. This keeps the camera unobtrusive but ready to shoot. And it turns out that those few extra millimeters do change the way the M10 feels here — it’s much less comfortable. But this might just be me. Putting myself in your shoes, which is hard because I’m really very self-centered, I would rate the M10 as a success overall when it comes to replicating the general feel of a real Leica.

The M10 is just a little taller than it should be. You wouldn’t think you’d notice it, but you do, if you are me.

Now, let’s get to the controls, and cattily, I’ll start with what’s obviously not there at all: the arming lever. This is neither a double-stroke nor a single-stroke Leica M: no strokes, folks. It feels pretty weird to just press the shutter button repeatedly and have the camera keep taking pictures. In my darker moments I’ve dreamed of a digital camera with a manually armed shutter, but that way madness lies (there was that one Epson…). You just don’t get to wind on and that’s that, so we’re starting with quite a handicap in the haptic experience category. Can the M10 catch up?

Well, it does does have some control points that a mechanical Leica does not. The shutter button is surrounded by a power switch, for example. An M3 does not need a power switch because it is powered by photons and stored kinetic energy and the pure love of photography. The M10 is a computer strapped to some fancy optics, so it needs a Li-ion battery, which means it needs a power switch (does it, really? Could you have it just sleep all the time and wake with a half-press of the shutter? Maybe, but people would complain. People always complain.) Anyway, the power switch feels fine. It’s nicer than the slightly clacky switch on my Olympus EM-5 III, but doesn’t stand out from any number of similarly implemented power switches from Nikon or Pentax. 

The power switch, which we just addressed. The shutter speed dial, about which more later. The multifunction wheel, a necessary evil that Leica does not manage to elevate. Here’s something a UX engineer might ask a focus group: “When the red dot is visible, is the camera on or off?”

Then there’s the much-maligned ISO control. This is really a strange misstep. You have to lift it to change the ISO, a design common in film cameras, where it makes perfect sense because you might (or might not) change it when you load a new roll. For a setting that might be changed shot to shot, it’s bonkers. Lifting it is difficult to do with confidence because it does not want to pop up and there’s not much for your fingers to grip. The whole thing feels fiddly and uncertain. Once it’s up, the dial turns without distinction. Adding insult to injury, the ISO dial occupies the place where the rewind knob would be on an M2 or M3, and lifting those knobs into the turning position is… well, sublime.

The ISO dial. Haters gonna hate. But sometimes the haters are right. No coincidence this is set to 'A.’

I almost forgot to mention it, but there’s a small mode-dependant wheel on the right corner of the M10 that you use for digital BS like zooming in on playback or menu scrolling. It feels OK. Not too clicky, not too mushy, but it is what it is. It does not feel luxurious.

The final entry in the digital-only category, the buttons. Amazingly, the M10 only has three of them. Astoundingly (and I’m veering into traditional review territory, but I can’t help myself), the M10 feels by and large like a fully functional, intuitive digital camera with just those three buttons (no touchscreen yet). This is exactly what I’d expect a company like Leica to get wrong, and it’s a grand slam. End digression: for our purposes here we only care about what the buttons feel like. Unlike knob (or wheel or dial or ring) feel, I find button feel hard to qualify. At best, buttons are not a disaster. The bottom of the scale is pretty easy to establish — something like a late 90s entry-level Canon SLR has buttons that are clearly about as far as you can fall. Mushy, soggy, etc. But what does a great button feel like? I have to believe that I’ll know it when I feel it. Perhaps it is waiting for me on a 50-pound piece of test equipment manufactured in 1962. The M10’s buttons do feel good: short-travel but with crisp actuation, broad and flat across the finger tip. I don’t think they’re truly great, but neither do they let the camera down.

The buttons. Broad and bold, satisfying but not inspiring intimate caress.

Oh, I said there are only three buttons, but there’s also a d-pad. It feels clicky and precise like the other buttons, but it’s sized for a race of tiny primate photographers. They love Leicas, and their basketball players are four feet tall.

Circling back to the shutter button: it also feels good enough. This is actually something I’m not terribly precious about, though — most cameras manage a satisfying shutter release, and I tend to only notice when something really balls it up, like the Yashica Electro 35. 

When you press that button, you hear a click. I consider shutter sonics as a separate but related aspect of camera fondling, so within the scope of this review. Compared to the cloth shutter I’m familiar with from the M2 and M3, the M10 is louder but the energy sounds like it’s concentrated at higher frequencies, so it might not carry far. It’s much quieter than the only full frame mirrorless focal plane shutters I’m personally familiar with, in the first and second gen Sony A7, which have all the subtlety of a ballista hurling a bolt downrange into mounted armor. It’s much louder than the shutter in my Olympus EM-5 III, which has a beautifully damped *whuff* sound, almost like a sharp exhalation. 

But now, let’s consider the shutter speed dial. This part of a classic Leica is, for me, the standard against which a knob with detent positions is judged and generally found wanting. I was ready to be disappointed by an ersatz effort to mimic this feel in what is really just a jumped-up electronic switch, but the M10 holds its own here. It feels legitimately mechanical. Not exactly like my M2, but the difference is subtle and honestly I’m not sure which I’d prefer in a double-blind test. This is what I remember being disappointed by in the earlier digital Ms I tried, so either Leica has upped its game or my tastes have evolved. 

The shutter button and speed dial again, with more context. Photography is really about controlling context.

And that’s how an M10 feels. Most of this review sounds like griping, but that’s because I’m considering all the bits that don’t really belong on a Leica M. If you look at what really counts, the shutter speed selector, the shutter button, and the overall feel of the body, the M10 does it right. The rest is just what the M10 has to do to be a digital camera, and it does it at least as well as anything else. It’s not transcendent. Maybe that was what left me with a sour feeling the first time I handled a digital M: the whole thing is not magic, and I thought it had to be to justify itself. Now that I know and love the M, I see more clearly what matters. All of that, feels-wise, the M10 gets remarkably right.

If you don’t want me to harsh your vibe, stop here. I won’t judge.

I’ve answered the title question of the post: in the hand, the M10 does a pretty solid impression of a film M with an endless 35mm roll. But answering it, I realize a larger question remains open: what defines “success” for a digital simulacrum of an analog camera? Leica’s digital Ms are indisputably the best digital rangefinders: they’re also the only ones. Perhaps because the market is small and there’s no reason for other players to pursue it. Or/and, perhaps because without Leica’s history, the products don’t make sense. Can an M10 exist if HCB never used an M3? Whatever the reason, there’s nothing to compare them to.

If rangefinder focusing and framing give you the jollies, the M10 will do the trick. If we locate feeling in nerves under the skin, the M10 feels like a Leica. But if psychedelics have taught us anything, it’s that sense lives in the brain, not nerve endings. What does the M10 feel like in the mind? I can only speak for myself, because we are each irredeemably alone in our skulls. To me, an early M feels, in the mind, like the pinnacle of something. It’s a high water mark of human achievement, albeit very narrowly defined. We needed a lot more “progress” to get to the M10, but our times strongly suggest that progress sometimes isn’t. Part of me loves the feel of the M10. Part of me is dismayed by beautifully machined e-waste. No human thing is forever, but classic Ms let me pretend. A digital M reminds me that I’m pretending. 

The Nomos Tangente Power Reserve Reference 172 Review: Pandemic Time, In Colour with an Impressive Map Section

As the world burns, let us fiddle a bit. Today we will consider the Nomos Tangente ref 172, a mechanical watch made by a German company familiar only to people who care about watches.

My Tangente on the nifty box it came in. I have a new respect for people who photograph small objects. What a nightmare of filth coats every surface of every thing, and praise be that we at our lofty heights are usually spared it.

My Tangente on the nifty box it came in. I have a new respect for people who photograph small objects. What a nightmare of filth coats every surface of every thing, and praise be that we at our lofty heights are usually spared it.

Every Nomos introduction must mention that the company was born from the ashes of a divided Germany, blooming in the sudden sun that warmed the East just after the Wall fell. That wall stood for a bit less than thirty years, and Nomos has now beat its record: at just over thirty years old, the company has built far more watches than the Wall ever did, and crushed far fewer dreams doing it.

I was going to write, “the sudden sun of capitalism,” but decided it was needlessly cynical. The strange and immensely appealing trick that Nomos pulls off is appearing to truly be the thing that nearly all companies wish to be perceived as – a commercial entity driven by aesthetic and moral imperatives as much as the accumulation of crass lucre. Nearly all of the world’s corporations front like they love us and only want to add rainbows to our daydreams, but statistically… OK, I was going to make up a statistic, but let’s just call it obvious bullshit. Nomos, though… if they’re bullshitting, they’re supreme bullshitters. I’m sure it helps that they’re a relatively small company in a high-margin industry, but still.

The special thing about Nomos watches is that Nomos makes them. Right there in the tiny village of Glashütte, down the road from its extremely illustrious neighbor, A. Lange & Söhne, the OG Glashütte watchmaker. This is remarkable because almost nobody really makes mechanical watches. Even in olden tymes, when watches were an enormous industry, sourcing movements (the ticking guts of the watch) from someone else was common. Now, only a handful of companies in the world make mechanical movements. ETA (of Swatch Group), Sellita, Miyota (of Citizen), Seiko, and then you get into the really fancy stuff, in-house manufactures with production numbers lower than my bowling score. Rolex makes its own watches and makes them very well, and even though Rolex prices start surprisingly low compared to the lofty peaks of haute horologie, Rolex is still synonymous in the public mind with “a stupid amount of money to drop on a watch.”

On watch forums, this is called a “wrist shot.” It’s like a selfie, but for your watch. Wrist shots make me uncomfortable in a number of ways, but they are also fascinating to look at. I have never adapted to the performative aspect of social media,…

On watch forums, this is called a “wrist shot.” It’s like a selfie, but for your watch. Wrist shots make me uncomfortable in a number of ways, but they are also fascinating to look at. I have never adapted to the performative aspect of social media, and the idea of pointing a camera at any part of myself still feels vaguely transgressive.

And then you have Nomos, which builds mechanical watches to an extraordinarily high standard, almost entirely from scratch, for money that, while seemingly extravagant to sane, non-watch people, is an excellent value for what the company delivers. (Incidentally, Rolex turns out something like a million watches per year. Nomos makes around 20,000.)

This is the story of Nomos, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned while loving watches, it’s that stories are what people are actually buying. The stories of the watches and their makers, and the stories that those watches let us tell ourselves and other people. At its basest extreme, that story might simply be: “LOOK AT ME! I HAVE MORE MONEY THAN GOD!” But let’s give ourselves some credit. The world of watches is almost as varied and variegated as the real world. Tell me you like watches, and apart from knowing that your basic needs have already been met, there’s not much I can say for certain about you.

Nomos supports its story with the facts of its existence and products, but also of course with a certain amount of marketing. That certain amount is very little. I have never seen an ad from Nomos for Nomos on the internet, despite having shopped for a Nomos watch for months, which tells you something (I have of course gotten ads for stores that sell Nomos watches). I haven’t seen one in a magazine, and even though I rarely read magazines, I have seen a few watch ads in them. I don’t remember how I first encountered the brand.

The small seconds subdial, actually a bit smaller than on a vanilla Tangente. The concentric design reminds me of a zen garden.

The small seconds subdial, actually a bit smaller than on a vanilla Tangente. The concentric design reminds me of a zen garden.

I do have a print catalog of the product line, which Nomos sent me (for free) because I asked for it. They included a little moleskine-style notebook with the first few pages pre-filled with a description of the company’s in-house escapement, the beating heart of the movement and a part that many companies that claim to make an “in-house movement” are likely to source from somewhere else. That is brilliant marketing, but I had to ask them to send it to me.

I also have a book, given to me by a friend who acquired it when going through his own period of infatuation with Nomos some years ago, called “Nomos Glashütte – The Great Universal Encyclopaedia.” It is a thick, hardbound book with cloth covers, and is, as a subtitle suggests, “in Colour with an Impressive Map Section” (as well as an insert of stickers). It is the strangest amalgam of art and advertising that I have encountered. My friend ordered it directly from Nomos along with his product catalog (he had to pay for the book). A couple of hundred pages long, extensive photographs and diagrams. Some of it is about Nomos watches — specific models and movements — and some is more generally about mechanical watches and watchmaking, but most of it is something else. There is natural history, philosophy, politics, facts and figures related to the company and not. It could be a hero prop for a Wes Anderson movie set in a watch manufactory. If I had to assign it a single adjective, it would be “playful.”

tangente encyclo.jpg

An entry titled “Everything Arabic in and from Glashütte” discusses how “Arabic” numerals are considered to be “western” by Arabic peoples, as opposed to the truly Arabic system, which Arabs call “Indian.” The opposite page is a redacted copy of an e-mail order Nomos received in 2006 from a Polish company for 20,000 half-liter glass bottles, which they obviously could not fulfill. There is an entry about a tremendous flood that inundated Glashütte in 2002, the toll in damage and life and the subsequent baby boom nine months later. There is a star chart. There is an entry about the frustration of teaching a child to read a watch.

Animals that lived in Glashütte long before the watchmakers arrived.

Animals that lived in Glashütte long before the watchmakers arrived.

The entry for “Money” includes the following: “In general, money does not make people happy, but can help make unfortunate situations easier to bear in a relatively pleasant way. NOMOS watches also cost money. A lot at first sight: as much as a short vacation, a really good winter coat. Comparatively little, however, if one considers how much work goes into these watches.”

There is no entry for “Pandemic,” but otherwise, the Encylcopaedia seems quite comprehensive.

An impressive map section.

An impressive map section.

The Great Encyclopaedia creates a story about Nomos: what the company is about, who the people are that make it up. It succeeds in doing this with a perfectly balanced deployment of the direct and the oblique, pride and humility, humor and dry fact. The Nomos of the Encyclopaedia is plainly what I hope it to be: authentic, charming, refined, self-aware, morally balanced, capable. It's a story I might wish to believe about myself. The trick the Encyclopaedia pulls off is telling this story convincingly to an audience so jaded by a thousand other unsuccessful efforts to spin the same yarn. Please pay attention, says the Encyclopaeida, and you will see that we mean it.

Perhaps the Encyclopaedia’s most convincing argument is the simple fact of its irrational existence. It defies transactional calculus. No cost-benefit analysis, no strategy to maximize gain while minimizing expenditure, could possibly result in something like this. Hardly anyone will ever see it. Sure, a decade down the line you might impress some guy enough that he writes a blog post about it, and seven or even eight people might read that post, but that’s not going to recoup the effort and expense that must have gone into producing this artifact. Yet paradoxically, it’s this failure that transmutes the Encyclopaedia into the magical thing it seeks to be, the proof of its genuine nature that also makes it lethally effective branding.

One last thing that puts Nomos on the good guys’ team: they’ve publicly called out the rise of far-right hate in Germany, and have an internal program in place to combat it. This watch kills fascists! It probably works better in conjunction with a tire iron, but still.

Ah yes, we are here to review a watch. What shall I note that is not evident from the nicely done Nomos website? Well, the dial does not look white, despite what the official Nomos photos indicate. It is technically silver, made with a galvanizing process, and is almost impossible to photograph in a way that communicates its character, which changes dramatically with the light — it can look gray, or iridescent, or cream colored. It rewards careful study.

The knob-feel of the crown is excellent: firm, with satisfying resistance. The sound is pleasantly clicky, very different from the ETA 2824-2 in my last watch, which made a raspy hiss when hand-wound, albeit appealing in its own way.

My wrist is not large, and the standard strap is almost too long — I use the very first hole, which leaves quite a tail to tuck into the keeper. Nomos makes much of the strap being Horween Shell Cordovan leather, a horse product imported from Chicago, although it begins it existence on the hindquarters of charismatic quadrupeds in Texas. I am immediately suspicious when a material that I’ve never heard of is cited in marketing — for example, the Tangente case is made of 316L surgical steel, which sounds impressive unless you know that most decent watches are made of the same thing. Some research, though, indicates that this leather is indeed special — I just didn’t know enough about fancy shoes to be aware of it. It does seem like it will wear well. One thing to note — its color is not entirely resistant to the stomach acids of small children, which I discovered in the course of wearing it while being a father. Still, it’s nice, and Nomos sells replacements in different sizes and colors.

Is 35 mm too small a case for a real man? To answer that, I suppose you will need to judge if I am a real man. I believe I am at least fairly real — the imaginary part of me is not tremendously pronounced, and many people miss it entirely. And I am definitely a man, utterly boring in my cisgendering, and far too old, even by today’s standards, to be called a boy. I have never fought in a war or climbed a mountain, but there is time yet. The watch does not look small on me. If anything, I look small on the watch, despite standing over six feet tall when paying attention to my posture.

The main external difference between the 172 and the far more popular and widely documented 101/139 Tangente is the presence of a power reserve indicator giving you an idea of how much kick is left in the mainspring. It’s a patented Nomos design, and I really like it. Some people think that a power reserve on a handwound watch with a typical 40-ish hour mainspring makes no sense because you need to wind it every morning anyway. But some people think that Donald Trump is doing a great job of leading the United States through the pandemic, so some people can certainly be very wrong.

Power up.

Power up.

I have not yet read a review that clearly describes what this indicator does as it progresses through its stations, so let’s try here. It consists of two independently rotating disks. The top one has a cutout that reveals the disk below, which is painted partly red. As the mainspring winds down, both disks turn, rotating maybe half-a-dozen times over two days. But they turn at different rates, so the red slowly emerges from its hiding place. For a few hours in the morning, it remains entirely hidden from view, and I know the day has just begun, and anything is possible, I can do anything, as long as I do it inside my apartment because outside is virus hellscape zombieland. When you wind the watch, you can see the whole process happen like a time-lapse video in reverse.

This is actually my favorite part of the reserve indicator: I can see it turn while I wind the watch, and stop just short of fully tensioning the spring, when the red part of the indicator has just vanished. I never have to hit the spring’s hard stop. To be clear, this is for psychological reasons that may or may not suggest pathology. There’s nothing practically wrong with fully winding your watch.

I will take this moment to admit that while I appreciate watches and put a lot of thought into the search that led me to this one, I am not a true Watch Person. I seem prone to the occasional fit of watch frenzy — this is the second one I have suffered, or the third, depending on how you count — but in the years between them, I don’t read Hodinkee on the reg or go to Baselworld. But I did look at a lot of power reserve watches before selecting this one, and it has among the most elegant indicator designs I have seen. Many, most, look awkward and weird. There is one that is cooler, in which the “12” changes color, but the watch costs more than a nice car, and is made in such small volumes that I can’t even google my way back to what it was now; I will never forget her face, but her name eludes me.

On the inside, the 172 is based on the totally in-house DUW 4301 movement. The 101/139 contains Nomo’s Alpha movement, also made largely in-house but with a Swiss escapement. Those dirty, dirty Swiss. There is no difference in accuracy or anything like that. It’s a story element, but as I said, it’s all a story. I wonder if the DUW movements are in practice just Alphas that incorporate the in-house escapement – the layout appears identical. Do note if you’re shopping for used watches that the Tangente Gangreserve was also produced before Nomos graduated to its DUW movements — you can easily see the caliber labeling through the sapphire back, but if you’re just going by the dial view, I don’t think it’s possible to tell the difference.

It’s not easy to make this movement looks this bad, what with the Glashütte ribbing and the sunburst polishes, the rhodium plating, the neat perlage tucked behind the balance wheel, the blue tempered screws and balance spring. But I have done it, wi…

It’s not easy to make this movement looks this bad, what with the Glashütte ribbing and the sunburst polishes, the rhodium plating, the neat perlage tucked behind the balance wheel, the blue tempered screws and balance spring. But I have done it, with my own flakes of skin, smears of oil, and some sloppy lighting, produced entirely in-house with no help from the Swiss.

“But does it tell time?” you want to know. It does. Although wildly inaccurate by quartz standards, my watch only drops about two seconds a day, which is quite good for a mechanical caliber. Under normal circumstances, I would rather it gained two seconds a day, but I’d also rather the world had shifted a bit of resources from stockpiling weapons to stockpiling N95 masks at some point in the last hundred years, yet here we are. You play the hand you’re dealt. And in these troubled times, my watch’s habit of slipping seconds is actually welcome. Although, in normal circumstances, I might check my watch to stay on schedule for the many time-sensitive obligations that an important person like myself must honor, in pandemic confinement as I am now, I mainly look at my watch to know: a) how long until I can begin to drink, and b) how long until I can put my children to bed. If these two pillars of my day gradually creep forward, so much the better.

Pandemic time is, generally speaking, best read from a wristwatch, because a watch is not a phone. There is nothing more feculent than the pocket Petri dish that masquerades as a cell phone — just looking at mine makes the skin on my fingers want to leap from my hands and flop around in some rubbing alcohol. In the best of times, these sordid slabs are teeming hot zones of E. coli, staph, Clostridium difficile and thousands of other nasties. But in pandemic times, the phone starts to feel even more menacing. Reading a wristwatch transfers zero pathogens to your precious bodily surfaces.

Also generically, a mechanical watch is a pleasant object to contemplate during a pandemic. It is by definition orderly, predictable, and clean. Its roots in history are reassuringly long and comforting to consider. It has a purity of purpose that flashes bright in the cold darkness of an indifferent universe. In the face of death, it says: “I will persist.” In every way it stands in opposition to a pandemic, which is by definition a total shitshow, a disordering of life from the micro to the macro level, a disaster compounded by human shortsightedness and buffoonery at every turn. Yes, there is heroism, and a nice dip in air pollution. But a pandemic is fundamentally the shrieking mouth of chaos, while a mechanical watch is a totem of order, its ticking a quiet song of promised continuance. You should also feel free to be a compassionate and useful member of your community, but let’s not overlook moments of watch-fancy as a tool for self development. The Dalai Lama has a Patek Phillipe. And you might argue that that is completely beside the point, and even though I might agree with you, I will not be listening.

The Tangente, unlike most cell phones, can tell you the time without being touched. Eventually you will have to touch it to wind it, but you can do this on your own terms, near a bathroom sink and a bottle of good Marseille hand soap. The crown and …

The Tangente, unlike most cell phones, can tell you the time without being touched. Eventually you will have to touch it to wind it, but you can do this on your own terms, near a bathroom sink and a bottle of good Marseille hand soap. The crown and lugs are quite elegant.

The Tangente 172 is also specifically good for telling pandemic time. I find it soothing to look at, and right now soothing is something I can really use. The simple, no-nonsense design (Bauhaus! Deutscher Werkbund!), quite liberally inspired by a beautiful Lange watch from 1940. The pearlescent dial, which flashes almost rainbow in direct sunlight, which I try to experience as much as possible, albeit usually through windows. The needle-straight heat-blued hands (they look black in some lighting conditions, but their blue is really remarkable), so precise in their indication of the moment that you could almost read off the seconds without checking the small subdial. Looking at the watch gives me hope for humanity, for the simple beauty we can achieve and the complexity we can command to achieve it. If we made this thing just because it works so well and looks so nice doing it, surely we can solve more pressing problems, like getting masks and gloves to people who work in hospitals.

Of course, if in three months time I’m dragging my family through the twisted ruins of a civilization gone to seed, I’ll probably wish I’d opted for a Casio G-Shock. From that vantage point, would the Tangente be a bitter-sweet reminder of what was lost? A gleam of hope for what might be recovered? A mocking jab at misplaced faith in a world order that seemed so firm but proved so fleeting? I don’t know. But if I can make it across the border into Germany, I know where there’s a quiet village that might be a nice place to settle down. It’s supposed to be friendly, and it has weathered privations before. I already have a map.

Nikon J5 and Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8 : The Last Review

When the Nikon 1 line was launched in 2011, I scorned it. I paid attention to digital cameras then. A mirrorless system with a one-inch sensor? Nothing wrong with that in principle, but the 10-megapixel Aptina sensor that Nikon used in the J1 and V1 launch cameras was underwhelming to a measurebator like myself. Poor low-light performance, unimpressive resolution considering 16-megapixel sensors were already standard. I never even looked at the J1, since it seemed aimed at the “girl photographer” that Nikon has been fantasizing about since the EM launched in 1979. The enthusiast-focused V1 (and I definitely considered myself an enthusiast) was bigger, blacker, and more button-and-wheely—but did I mention it was bigger? It weighed more than the lighter members of Sony’s APS-C NEX line, which had more capable sensors (at least in terms of image quality). It wasn’t much smaller than many Micro Four Thirds cameras, which had a far better selection of small lenses (including primes — imagine that!).

The Nikon J5 alongside the Nikon F2. The F2 will stop a bullet but only fires at 5 frames per second with the pictured MD-2 motor drive. The J5 should survive an impact from an errant ping-pong ball and can shoot at 60 frames per second. The F2 make…

The Nikon J5 alongside the Nikon F2. The F2 will stop a bullet but only fires at 5 frames per second with the pictured MD-2 motor drive. The J5 should survive an impact from an errant ping-pong ball and can shoot at 60 frames per second. The F2 makes you feel like a conflict photographer until your shoulder starts to hurt and you realize you wouldn’t last five minutes in the shit. The J5 is so light you forget you’re carrying it.

A cynical enthusiast likely wondered if the 1 system wasn’t hobbled by design to protect Nikon’s DSLR sales. Remember DSLRs? Those big things that ordinary people who wanted a “real camera” to take to Rome or Paris were tricked into buying for years and years? There was a time, hard to countenance now, when the DSLR money train looked like it was it going to clack along forever, assuming you were too myopic to see the one-two punch of mirrorless and cell phones looming down the line. Sure, phones were already lopping the head off the consumer compact digicam market and lapping up the arterial spray . But people who wanted a real camera would always want a flipping mirror. Sony? Don’t they make TVs? If Nikon and Canon could agree on anything, it was that, and fuck the haters.

But maybe, as our confused world plowed into the second decade of the millennium, Nikon was having doubts. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall but misread it. And so, the 1 system. 

The Loneliest Number

I was far from the only person scratching their head. My feeling is that the commentariat was unimpressed, but that makes sense since the system wasn’t really aimed at people who talk about cameras. The J1 and V1 were considered together on DPreview and scored in the 60s, which is not great. The reviews got better as the system matured, but first impressions are hard to break. 

Fast focus is something any girl photographer can appreciate, since they need to take pictures of their fast moving children, which as we know is all females care about (incidently, DPreview said the V1 was good for “soccer moms,” their quotes. I guess the quotes made it OK?).

DPreview thought that moms would like the 1 system.

DPreview thought that moms would like the 1 system.

But what enthusiast will buy into a camera system with a handful of slow zooms and not much else? The lens I bought, the normal-equivalent 18.5mm f 1.8, wasn’t even available at launch. Nikon had the temerity to offer an expensive AF-enabled adapter to cobble its DSLR lenses to the 1 cameras, which all of seven people must have bought. It’s hard to imagine anyone but bird photographers thinking that a 2.7 crop factor would make adapted lenses useful.

So I pretty much forgot about the 1 system. It sputtered along for four years, culminating in the J5 in 2015. Contemporary reviews of the J5 were fairly positive, noting that the new BSI 20.1 megapixel sensor was actually up to scratch image quality-wise while still packing the blistering read-out speeds and whip-snap phase detect AF that first set the 1 system apart. Some reviewers wrote hopefully about an anticipated enthusiast-oriented V4, the presumed successor to 2014’s V3. Their hopes would have withered. As months and then years passed with no new announcements, it became obvious that Nikon had disowned its mini mirrorless offspring. “All dwarfs are bastards in their fathers’ eyes.” The company finally confirmed it in 2018. Not long after, it released a full frame mirrorless line, just like everyone else. Woohoo.

J is for Justifications

So why buy a J5 in 2019? I’ve been mainly shooting film for my “personal work” and using my phone (a Pixel, sometimes with a lens add-on that doubles the focal length to provide a normalish field of view) for the snaps that I take as the family chronicler. Thing is, lately I’ve been enjoying that chronicaling a bit too much to fit it into a phone. I wanted a real digital camera with a normal field of view and a sensor big enough to deliver good quality and a bit of subject separation for my kid pics. But it had to be small and light enough to fit in my man-purse along with a 35mm film camera, and ideally in a jacket pocket by itself, and it had to be relatively cheap. 

The list of contenders was surprisingly small. The Sony R100s are super-portable, but not cheap. Worse, their zooms slow down quickly as you leave the wide end, and in any case using a zoom to do a prime’s job is inelegant, not to mention that zooms lead to impure thoughts and moral decay. Ricoh’s GRs are interesting but too wide (and expensive). The Panasonic GM5 with the 20mm 1.7 or Olympus 25mm 1.8 mostly fits the bill, but it’s becoming expensive if you’re not an extremely patient auction watcher, and it has an assortment of other quirks mostly linked to its innovative stepper-motor micro-shutter (it DOES have a viewfinder, which is nice, but that makes its screen very small). And then my mind and my googling drifted to the 1 series. 

ISO 800, f/1.8, 1/80 sec. My first APS-C DSLR looked pretty crap at ISO 800, and it only offered half the resolution.

ISO 800, f/1.8, 1/80 sec. My first APS-C DSLR looked pretty crap at ISO 800, and it only offered half the resolution.

The J line might have started out as a point-and-shoot with interchangeable lenses, but by the J5’s time, things had changed. Nikon had introduced the entry-level S line, pushing the J up. So the J5 has a PASM dial (along with a bunch of inscrutable little pictures), two control wheels, a nub of a finger grip, and a flip-out screen (a big bonus for me, since I love TLR-style shooting as long as the image isn’t reversed). In other words, the J5 looks a lot like an enthusiast’s camera — it’s at least semi-enthusiastic. Maybe Nikon already knew that there’d be no V4 and positioned the J5 to have something for everyone. I was intrigued.

They must be dirt cheap, I figured, being unloved from birth and orphaned now. Not so much, I discovered — the J5, being last of the line, has held its value surprisingly well, and even the older models are still worth some scratch. I got a black J5 body in nice shape from a Japanese seller for $240. If you wait for an auction, you can do better. The 18.5mm 1.8 ran me $130 from a US seller. It rarely seems to come up for auction, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get one for much under a hunge. So, $370 all in. Not nothing, but I justified it because the value has presumably flattened out for a while — if we don’t get along, I can send it off without much of a loss.

Something Like a Review, Finally

That Aptina sensor that left me so nonplused in 2011 was actually a bit of a wonder. The first on-sensor phase detect autofocus at this scale, and they nailed it — focus was blazingly fast. Continuous shooting at 20 FPS with AF enabled, and an astounding 60 FPS with focus locked. I don’t recall it ever being mentioned in the marketing and I didn’t even realize it until I got my J5, but the J cameras have no mechanical shutter, so they’re perfectly silent (once you disable the fake shutter noise). It’s that electronic shutter that gets you up to 1/16,000 of a second (and limits you to a flash sync speed of 1/60 sec, but never mind — it was good enough for Leica).

That sensor/shutter actually has a big impact on how I shoot the J5: I use it like a phone. Cell phones are basically aperture priority cameras with a fixed aperture — the phone picks a shutter speed and ISO to get the job done. The J5’s lightning shutter lets it be used the same way, just without the suck of handling a slippery glass slab. I can shoot my 18.5mm lens wide open in full sun and not worry about overexposure, even with the J5’s base ISO of 160. That wouldn’t make sense for general photography, but for the kid pics that I’m doing, it’s almost always nice to have a little subject separation. Stopping action is good, too. 

ISO 1600, f/1.8, 1/40 sec. Even at this relatively high sensitivity, there’s plenty of detail in this dark scene. The J5’s silent operation allowed me to get right next to the water buffalo.

ISO 1600, f/1.8, 1/40 sec. Even at this relatively high sensitivity, there’s plenty of detail in this dark scene. The J5’s silent operation allowed me to get right next to the water buffalo.

Since I’ve turned off all the beeps and blurps, the J5 is effectively silent (the aperture and focus motor must make little clicks but they’re normally inaudible). This has obvious advantages in terms of not bothering my subjects, but it also gives me the feeling that I’m not really taking pictures as I repeatedly mash the shutter button. This sounds like a complaint, but it’s more liberating than anything else. Rationally, the J5 is not more frictionless than a digital camera with a conventional mechanical shutter, but it feels that way. When your “other camera” is loaded with film, the total separation of the act of photographing from the physical world can actually be relaxing. People often run this argument in reverse to justify the appeal of shooting film, but it works in both directions.

Insert Need For Speed Joke Here

You know the J5 is supposed to be fast. But is it really? Does it slam you into your seat? Does it make your cheeks ripple? Is it the blue meth, the mantis shrimp, the Amazon Prime of cameras? 

Well, the autofocus is pretty goddamn fast with the 18.5mm lens. It feels as close to instantaneous as any camera I’ve used. If you’re expecting it to be fast, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Unless you’re the kind of person who’s inevitably disappointed, in which case you should work on that. AF is also accurate, which is nice. It’s so fast that the J5 thinks it can get away with not taking a photo if it hasn’t locked focus in AF-S mode. I disagree, but apparently adding menu options is expensive in the imaginary world where the 1 system was a roaring success.

What exactly are your supposed to look at with these things?

What exactly are your supposed to look at with these things?

And the burstastic burst mode? It bursts, no doubt about it. You know that movie trope where a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing fires a machine gun and it jerks wildly in his hands and ends up stitching the ceiling with a dozen holes before he can get his finger off the trigger? That’s what the J5’s continuous drive feels like. You really can’t squeeze off less than three or four frames, and if you lean on it you’ll fill the buffer with nearly-identical shots in no time. I think it’s a neat thing to have and there are probably some use cases where it’s invaluable, but for me personally, the work involved in whittling down the extravaganza of files it kicks out is rarely worth the upside.

I guess I should also mention the J5’s best shot feature now, which purports to continually buffer 20 images and then picks the best recent one when you press the shutter. I’m sure you can think of a thousand reasons why this shouldn’t work, and in my limited messing around with it I haven’t found much that would refute you. My guess is that if you’re shooting a group it will try to pick a shot where everyone’s eyes are open, but I haven’t put that to the test. 

The rest of the camera is mostly normal, speed-wise. Average start-up, normally responsive. There is one strangely sluggish behavior: if you have image review on (that is, the screen automatically shows the photo you just took), there’s a lag between shooting and when the image flashes onto the screen. It’s way too long, but since I leave image review off anyway, this doesn’t bother me. (I’ve seen complaints about slow shot-to-shot times in reviews, but I think it’s really this pinch point that’s bothering people — the camera can take pictures about as fast as you can mash the button).   

Image Quantity

Let me address the fear many potential J5 buyers will have: is a 1-inch sensor big enough to capture the vast scope of my creative vision? Will this relatively paltry slab of silicon be able to grab enough photons to transmute my artistic will into eye-slashing files? Is it large enough to assuage long-standing doubts of self-worth? Everyone must answer that last one on their own, but on the first two counts you needn’t worry. 

The 20.1 BSI sensor in the J5 can slice bread and fart rainbows. Or not, but it certainly gets the job done.

The 20.1 megapixel BSI sensor in the J5 can slice bread and fart rainbows. Or not, but it certainly gets the job done.

The 20.1 megapixel backside-illuminated sensor is not appreciably noisier than a good Micro Four Thirds sensor of similar vintage. Its dynamic range has tested at over 12 stops, and I see nothing in practice to make me doubt it. It’s a fine little sensor.  If you want exhaustive image quality details, go back to some of the contemporary reviews (but don’t start at DPreview, which passed on the camera — maybe they smelled the stink of death on it). It’s my humble opinion that from around 2014 on, most sensors were pretty damn good. Sufficient, let’s say. Within any given format, “sensor quality” starts to take a backseat to other considerations for all but the most basement-bound measurebator. The J5’s sensor supports that world view. I have no problem with it at normal ISOs, and while detail suffers as you climb through four-digit ISO territory, I find that with the 18.5mm 1.8, you can take a technically satisfying picture under most any lighting condition in which you’re likely to find humans living their lives. I just leave ISO set to automatic and capped at 6400, and don’t much think about it. Noise is nicely fine-grained and even.

The more ineffable qualities of the image are fine for me too. Color is good. The automatic white balance is too cool in the shade for my taste, but this is the case with every digital camera I’ve ever used. I typically leave WB set to cloudy or shade when outside, and use auto when I’m under artificial lighting (it does a good enough job with that). 

There’s apparently no antialiasing filter, but I don’t notice a big difference, either on the upside (sharpness) or the down (moire). I’m a bit suspicious of the practice of nixing AA filters because it feels like gaming a benchmark, but whatevs.

Gripes

One gripe I have is that the J5 tends to underexpose when there are bright parts in a scene. Yes, this is better than overexposing, but it seems like a silly problem to have in this day and age. If there’s a bright window in the background, get ready to spin up the exposure compensation. I notice this tendency in both matrix and center-weighted modes. The spot meter is kind of useless outside of manual mode since you can’t lock exposure and focus separately. 

On a related note, the Face Priority feature does a good job of finding peoples’ mugs and locking focus (without too many false alarms), but strangely, the camera doesn’t seem to bias exposure towards the faces. Got two faces smiling right into the lens with a bright window between them? Get ready for a nicely exposed picture of what’s outside, with some shadows flanking it.

Another thing. On paper the J5 has dual control wheels. Yay! But in practice it has one (1) very nice control wheel on the top plate, with a broad ridged surface and satisfying knob feel, and one (1) kind-of-crappy little dink-ass wheel on the back surrounding the OK button. One controls shutter speed, one controls aperture. Which one is assigned to aperture, making it one of the most important controls for an aperture priority shooter like myself? The wrong one. Can you swap them? No.

This problem is emblematic of the J5’s UI as whole, which feels a lot less flexible than I’m used to on an enthusiast-targeted camera. You have minimal control of what’s displayed on the screen in shooting mode, for example. There are two settings: the “high” setting buries the preview image in mostly irrelevant icons, while the “low” setting still eats up a lot of edge.

Let me digress for a second and get something off my chest. I think ALL digital cameras should offer the option of seeing a preview image with no information overlays. I find that I really have to think about including what’s under that transparency in the composition, especially when using a poorly visible screen in bright light. 

Other stuff you can’t do that I wish you could: go between zoomed-in images in review mode without zooming out. Toggle info levels without deep diving into the menu system. Repurpose the useless wireless button. Lock exposure without locking focus.

What About That Lens?

I like the Nikkor 18.5mm 1.8. It’s your basic moderately fast normal, kind of hard to screw up I suppose. It’s sharp from wide open. It only flares if you savagely provoke it, and even then veiling glare is pretty minimal. I haven’t noticed any vignetting. Focus is silent. As far as optics goes, you can basically ignore it.

You can get the Nikkor 18.5mm to flare if you’re a dick about it.

You can get the Nikkor 18.5mm to flare if you’re a dick about it.

But nothing cheap is perfect except for french fries. The lens has a marked potential for purple fringing, which can be pretty intense on high-contrast edges when wide open. I think the J5 tries to hide this in post, but occasionally some slips by. There’s presumably not a ton of ED glass in this low-cost, lightweight lens, which probably explains the less-than-total longitudinal chromatic aberration correction. And if I could shoot fancier lenses wide-open in full sun at 1/16,000 sec, they might get fringe-y too.

The other thing is bokeh. I’ve tried pretty hard not to become a connoisseur of bokeh because I mostly believe that any photograph that depends on the quality of out of focus areas for impact is probably artistically bankrupt. But I do use shallow depth of field in my family “documentary” photos to keep attention on the main subject, and then I find myself looking at the blurry bits, and it’s nice if they don’t stand out or look funky. Unfortunately, this lens’ bokeh tends to be pretty busy and jittery. It’s not hideous, but it’s far from great. Anyway, I can live with it.

Should I Buy a J5?

If you’ve wandered in here by mistake looking for a generally good compact system camera, then the answer is “NO.” If you aim to invest in a variety of lenses, nope. If you’re a normal person, basically, no.

But if you found this review at all it probably means you’re a bit of a weirdo, and if you’re weird in a very specific way, then you should seriously consider the J5 and its 18.5mm normal lens.

If you want just about the smallest, lightest camera with a larger-than-campact sensor and a fast normal lens that won’t break the bank, then the J5, a four-year-old camera from a failed system, merits a serious look. If you take a perverse pleasure in making contrarian consumer choices, all the better. Also consider the Panasonic GM5 and Olympus EP-M2, especially if you might want to expand your lens collection beyond that fast normal.

Besides the above-mentioned qualities these cameras all share one other thing: they’re positively geriatric in digital terms. At some point camera makers decided that people wanted bigger, not smaller. If you want something that’s both small and capable, you are part of an underserved minority. The market has cut you off. The market is roiling with full-frame cameras, with 50mm f 1.4 lenses that weigh more than your head. Even Micro Four Thirds bodies have been bloating. They’re still the best option for most people who want an ILC system, but they’re bigger than they need to be. 

The camera market is no longer interested in most people, because most people aren’t interested in cameras. They have a phone that does that. (If you want a long-form mulling-over of where the camera market is going make sure to check out this post. And congratulations, you’re part of an even smaller underserved minority). The not-most people who have convinced themselves they need a real camera have shown a strange willingness to pay enormous premiums for enormous hardware. And camera makers don’t do what makes sense, photography-wise — they do what pumps up the margins in a shrinking market. 

So here we are, you and I. Small camera weirdos. Good luck. Let me know if you dig up something interesting that fits the bill.

The Olympus OM40 / OM-PC Casual Review: Tall, Dark and Ugly

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It was 1985, 13 years since the OM line of cameras sprung from the fertile soil of Yoshihisa Maitani’s mind. The serious, single-digit OMs (the OM1, 2, 3, 4 and their variants) had been joined by lighter-duty double-digit models (the OM10, 20, and 30). The doubles were lighter, cheaper and less robust than the singles, but they were generally fine. And they looked fine: just slightly parred down, more approachable versions of the singles, which derived in orderly fashion from the attractive OM-1.

Then the OM40 happened (AKA the OM-PC in the States, and for whatever reason, the OM-40 all over the Internet). Presumably someone at Olympus looked at the Canon T70 or some other plastic-age wonder, threw up in their mouth a little, and then muttered to themselves, “Well, I guess this is what we’re doing now.” So they took the sleek metal beauty of an OM camera and wrapped it in a thick coat of rubber that wordlessly shrieks “THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES ARE HERE TO RUIN THINGS.”

Behold the Neanderthal mien of the OM40: heavy shoulders, protuberant brow. I know it’s not fashionable to bash Neaderthals now that we know about the prehistoric hanky-panky we got up to, but on the other hand, I’m probably 2% Neanderthal so I thin…

Behold the Neanderthal mien of the OM40: heavy shoulders, protuberant brow. I know it’s not fashionable to bash Neaderthals now that we know about the prehistoric hanky-panky we got up to, but on the other hand, I’m probably 2% Neanderthal so I think I have the right.

On the front right of the camera, the rubber rises up to form a fingergrip, admitted useful but lumpen and mostly smooth so as to best show off your skin oils. It probably looked better in a line drawing. On the left of the camera, the rubber is smooth as the wax cheek of a figure in one of those medieval torture museums, the better to attract all manner of smear and scratch. Around the back on the film door, there’s a gentle rise of thumb-rest on the right patterned with small squares and more of that same, corpse-like slick of black rubber.

It’s not just the rubber. The OM40 hunches its shoulders as if ashamed. Nearly all SLRs have a shape dictated by the path of the film and the presence of the prism used to bounce light into the photographer’s eye: a “prism hump” flanked by two roughly symmetrical planes bearing the most important controls. But the OM40 permanently cowers after its beating with the ugly stick, the prism hump sunk down between its uneven shoulders – the right-most control dial, which sets ISO and exposure compensation, sits nearly level with the top of the prism hump. On the left side of the mount, just below the hump, a small knob protrudes like a bolt from the neck of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s offset on the other side of the mount by a large red self-timer light.

The rubber does not generally age well, developing a white exudate as it slowly reverts to its component petroleum parts. You can kind of clean it off with some patience, and at least it doesn’t feel too sticky, but yuck.

From above, the OM40 is less objectionable. The same is true of many things, which probably underlies the human urge to fly. Yes, these are my eBay pics. Don’t worry, I’m being honest in the description.

From above, the OM40 is less objectionable. The same is true of many things, which probably underlies the human urge to fly. Yes, these are my eBay pics. Don’t worry, I’m being honest in the description.

Beauty is strange. Science says that all things being equal, we perceive beautiful people as smarter, nicer, and generally superior to less-beautiful people. This feels in line with the way the world seems to work, but at odds with the way I experience other people. I tend to be suspicious of exceedingly beautiful people, dubious that their accomplishments are truly their own. I struggle to grant them full human agency (with the exception of my exceeding beautiful wife and children, who confront me with the violent fact of their agency every day).

Beauty in objects, particularly functional objects, is simpler and harder to fault. Why a beautiful camera? Well, why the hell not?

Anyway, my OM40 turned out to have a fault beyond its appearance: a slippery film transport that resulted in overlapping frames. So, no samples with this review except this one:

Ru-roh, Raggy. After the first frame, things went bad quickly.

Ru-roh, Raggy. After the first frame, things went bad quickly.

But it seems that mine is a one-off, and apart from internet mutterings about the electronics failing, which honestly could come down to one guy on a forum with a chip on his shoulder ten years ago, people don’t complain much about the OM40, or indeed, talk about it much at all (these guys excepted). My one practical gripe about it is that its height makes it hard to palm. I like to carry a small SLR or rangefinder in one hand (with a wrist strap for backup), with the top snugged into my palm and fingers curling around underneath, the lens facing in towards my leg. Although it’s generally small, the OM40’s strange tallness makes this grip uncomfortable.

Apart from that, in use, it’s usually fine and occasionally better. The viewfinder is larger, with more coverage, than many cameras in its class. The tactility of its electronic controls is acceptable. Wind-on is a little janky, with a distinctly two-stage feel as the stroke advances the film and then cocks the shutter, but maybe that’s partly down to my syphilitic sample. I like the shutter speed ring around the lens mount, an OM hallmark that seems like it should have been widely copied but wasn’t. There’s a rudimentary form of evaluative metering that’s supposed to be quite good, but with negative film, who really cares? Maybe this is one to try your fresh Ektachrome with – you can buy an OM40 body for less than a roll of that sweet transparency stuff.

Hey Google! The Lightest Metal Mechanical SLR

Quite a while ago I was wondering which metal mechanical SLR was the lightest, the most compact, aka lightweight, also aka light-weight, and generally small and cute. This turned out to be harder than you'd think to figure out, but with my master Google-fu I discovered the truth. For the record, with a weight of 495 grams, the Pentax MX is the lightest metal mechanical  35mm SLR ever made. It also seems to be the most compact. Since I embarked on that particular quest, an answer of sorts has arisen in the hive mind: the top Google result I see for "lightest mechanical SLR" is a blog post from 2017 that correctly identifies the MX. But it reads like something generated by a camera-savvy bot: "Then, the MX is one of the terminus ad quem of its lineup." So I decided to write this anyway. 

It bears repeating, for search optimization: the Pentax MX is the lightest metal mechanical 35mm SLR.

It bears repeating, for search optimization: the Pentax MX is the lightest metal mechanical 35mm SLR.

The MX, introduced in 1976, appears to be a direct answer to Olympus's OM-1 of 1972, which set a high (or low) bar for compact SLRs. Until Olympus shook things up, Pentax's Spotmatics were considered small and light, but still tipped the scales at over 600 grams, with heavy lenses to boot. The MX undercuts the OM-1 by 15 grams, which gives it bragging rights but not much practical advantage. I went with it more because I like the lenses, which seem to be more robustly made than their Olympus OM equivalents, though they don't feel as nice as Pentax's ridiculously luxy screwmount optics.  

There are many 35mm SLRs that are smaller and lighter than the Pentax MX, but they came later, as electronics replaced mechanics and plastic displaced metal. Many of those cameras are probably better, objectively speaking: electronically controlled shutters are more accurate than their clockwork predecessors, and well-made plastic bodies can resist impact better than metal ones. For example, the MX's prism hump is an alloy eggshell that crumples at the slightest provocation: peruse listings on eBay if you don't believe me (happily, this doesn't usually seem to affect the camera's function). 

But if you've found this post, you probably understand that metal is better than plastic, even when it isn't. And mechanical cameras can be fixed forever, while dead integrated circuits are forever dead. (The MX does have an electronic light meter, but if it fails it just makes the camera more like an old Leica). So if you're a romantic with a bad back, if you're a lazy lover of physical intricacy, look no further than the Pentax MX.  

Not Reasons I Shoot Film

Shooting 35mm film in a digital age is an expensive pain in the ass with a rabid following that includes yours truly. I will mull publicly over why this might be in good time, but first I want to mention some factors that don’t play in my attraction to film.

1. The Film Look

Is it real? Or is it VSCO? Can you tell at web resolution?

Is it real? Or is it VSCO? Can you tell at web resolution?

Well, yes, but no. I do like the film look, but that’s not reason enough to endure the trials of shooting film. Can you really tell the difference between a digitally captured image that’s been skillfully processed to look like a film scan and something that started on emulsion? I’m sure some folks out there can, just as I believe that some people can hear the difference between vinyl and CD audio. I’m generally fine with MP3s.

But the thing for me is I only like the film look if it’s arrived at through film. Otherwise I just feel silly. And here we get into authenticity: the uncut cocaine, the fresh-dug truffle, the 1980s American dollar in an imploding banana republic of our cultural moment.

So it seems what I’m really after is the authentic. Is the image seared into emulsion more authentic than the one that’s read off a sensor? What if you digitally scan that emulsion to see what’s on it? What if you slap some curves on the result to get the tonality you want? Just shut up and let me enjoy my film.

2. Film is Cool (or Hip, or Whatever)

Even if I'd shot this on film, I'd never be cool enough to inhabit this bachelor pad or bestride that magnificent iron steed parked in the living room.

Even if I'd shot this on film, I'd never be cool enough to inhabit this bachelor pad or bestride that magnificent iron steed parked in the living room.

I’ve never been cool and have no intention of changing that. I’m married and out of the mate selection game. There are relatively few people I care to impress, and none of those could be impressed by my taking pictures on film. Film may well be cool, but I don’t care.

3. Film is Forever

My negatives won't outlive the fury of the sun, the grandeur of the ocean, or man's hubris.

My negatives won't outlive the fury of the sun, the grandeur of the ocean, or man's hubris.

Some people worry about bit rot, orphaned media, electromagnetic pulses, abandoned file formats, lost-to-the-grave passwords and other technical problems that, they imagine, will prevent future generations from accessing their trove of would-be immortal images. A film negative is sometimes held up as the solution: a physical thing firmly attached to reality, supposedly safe from the ravages of time. I don’t know. Maybe. But you’d have to have some damn curious great-grand kids if you expect them to do anything with that binder of negs they find in the attic in 2100. It’s hard enough to read film now, when you can buy a film scanner new on the internet. Don’t even talk about enlargers and the associated papers and chemistry. Our great-grand children will, unfortunately, have a few more pressing issues to deal with than looking at our photographs. If you really care about sending photos into the future, shoot however you want and then print up a quality book on acid-free paper. Maybe include “DO NOT DISCARD” on the cover and spine. In a few different languages.

4. Film is Cheap

You may laugh, but I’ve seen the argument that film is cheap compared to digital. This involves building a straw man of fantastically expensive digital bodies and the assumption that you have to get a new camera every couple of years. With the right accounting gymnastics you can almost make this work, but for normal people using consumer-grade gear for a reasonable amount of time and taking a reasonable (by contemporary standards) number of pictures, shooting film is more expensive than shooting digital and that’s that. I include this not because it’s a widely held belief, but because it speaks for the attractions of film that people are willing to contort their thinking so creatively in an effort to justify something they want to do even when it doesn’t make sense.

5. This Film Kills Computers

Neg Strip Taking a ShowerThis is not the end of the process. The scanner waits in the other room like a malevolent blue toad.

Neg Strip Taking a Shower

This is not the end of the process. The scanner waits in the other room like a malevolent blue toad.

People claim that shooting film frees them from their computers. No post-processing! This has not been my experience. I scan my film, like, I suspect, the great majority of my contemporaries. Then I almost always have to tweak the scans. Not too much (authenticity!) but a bit. On the other hand, I can select, edit, and tag a week’s worth of digital photos on my tablet, from the comfort of my couch, in a fraction of the time. Without the blood-pressure-spiking hassle of getting neg strips lined up in the carrier *.

6. Film Smells Good

I’ve seen this offered as a good reason to shoot film and… actually, yeah, it does. The smell of a freshly opened canister is a fine reason to shoot film, though this might only work for people old enough to have that chemical odor tied into the lizard-brain memories of their happy Kodak-tinted childhoods. Every time I pop the top, I awaken my 8-year-old self, tearing open the foil on a 110 cartridge.

 

* I mostly wrote this before I got a scanner that eats a whole roll of 35mm in one go, so now I find #5 to be mostly true. The reason I've hesitated to post the piece for a while is because I'm not totally sure about #1. How important is the look for me? Can I tell film film from from digital film? How long do I have to look in the mirror to satisfy your demands for self-knowledge? Leave me be. 

 

An Appreciation of Ashley Pomeroy's Women and Dreams

Ashley Pomeroy has haunted me for years. He is a writer. A photographer. A musician. A poet, a video game player, a critic, a historian. He is a man with a lady's name, and he is the wholly singular author of a blog called Women and Dreams, one of the most remarkable online texts I’ve encountered.

When Pomeroy writes a post that doesn't lend itself to illustrations, he often scatters his own photos around to break up the text. I'll do the same here with shots from by back catalog.

When Pomeroy writes a post that doesn't lend itself to illustrations, he often scatters his own photos around to break up the text. I'll do the same here with shots from by back catalog.

In 2018 it’s hard to recall that once, most blogs were about nothing, the neuronal noise of brains suddenly connected to a global network. That rambling impulse is now expended on Facebook and the like, precious seed spilled on poisoned ground. Today a blog must be about one thing. The penalty for straying out of niche is flogging with thorned branches. According to what law, you demand? The law, of course.

But Pomeroy flaunts the law. Though it seems that at first, he toed the line. He’s written a lot about old cameras and expired film. The first post on Women and Dreams, dating from 2009, is about the Nikon D1x, a digital camera that was dead and buried when Pomeroy published nearly 6,000 words about it. The piece goes deep into the camera as a historical object, its context and position in the flow of technology. It’s well written. There are hints of what’s to come, but what most sets it apart is the depth of attention focused on a camera that most people wouldn’t care about. If Pomeroy continued in this vein, I’d be impressed but not rapturous.

But as the blog goes on, something besides meticulous research creeps into Pomeroy’s camera reviews. In his review of the Olympus OM-1, he writes, “During the 1950s and 1960s Olympus had been a lone wolf hunting away from the pack, its mouth stained with the flesh of its prey as it dove through banks of snow, driven by a satanic lust for warm blood; it had long since filled its belly, now it hunted in a futile quest to discharge the mounting howl of rage that swelled within its hot black heart.” A sentence later, Pomeroy is back into a more trenchant but less fun analysis of what Olympus was up to. But the digression sets a tone: you’re not sure what’s coming next, and its perverse humor flavors writing that might otherwise read straighter.  

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Still later, Pomeroy moves beyond brief digressions. His review of the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S lens opens with the line, “Wesley Willis had names for his demons.” He goes on to discuss what Pac-Man’s psychology and the psychology of the few men who have achieved perfect scores playing Pac-Man have in common, then systems analysis, the modeling of human society, Katy Perry’s wardrobe choices, and Hitler and Stalin’s efforts to forcibly mold social systems. He writes over 1,600 words before mentioning the lens, and when he finally introduces it, we see his trademark style of violent non sequitur:

“Hitler cared only for the good of his tribe. But the great machine of humanity has its own course, and cares not for individual tribes; its ultimate destination is unknowable and perhaps not to our satisfaction. We may not recognise it when we arrive. Perhaps the program has already run its course, and we are simply swarf left to blow away in the wind, patients left forgotten in the waiting room of a dental practice that shut half an hour ago. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S.”

Pomeroy stays with old cameras, old lenses, until 2011, when he takes on a video game called Manic Miner. This piece is actually a capsule history of the British video games industry in the 1980s. It’s great.  More camera stuff follows, but then you get a post about Fermat’s theorem and a Paul Simon song.

Pomeroy compels me. I learned about him from a friend, word of mouth. In a small restaurant in Paris run by an old man who fled persecution in Vietnam to start a new life among his former colonizers. The air in this restaurant is often thick with those tiny flies that are attracted to fruit and wine, fermenting things, just as a typical Pomeroy post is thick with ideas, digressions, surreal asides. Restaurants without flies are not completely beyond my means, but I like this one because I’m cheap and it has lots of atmosphere. 

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I’ve spent some time trying to find the perfect entry point, the post that will give you the flavor I want you to taste, but this is surprisingly difficult. Women and Dreams works as a cumulative experience. The edifice that Pomeroy has built must be lived in to be fully appreciated - it’s not enough to quickly tour a few rooms. 

So start anywhere. Read a few thousand words about ambient music or The Beatles, a classic film, a long-dead lineage of cameras, an old laptop, or a video game. I haven’t really played a video game since the mid 90s, and even then I was a dilettante, but I like Pomeroy’s game reviews. Like New Yorker reviews of books I’ve never read and will never read, but would like to know about. 

The only times Pomeroy’s really lost me are some particularly deep dives into music. What music do I like? The grumble of history breaking up in the past like a glacier calving into an endless sea of forgetting. And Lorde, obviously.

But if you’re not just going to dive in, if you expect me, the reviewer, to do my job, fine. Here’s Pomeroy on the city he often documents:

“Me and London. London matters. Because every genius needs something to feed his mind, and London has a lot of things to look at and think about. And eat, too. It has shops as well. An integrated transport network. Staggeringly expensive houses, filled with people who are not there.”

Pomeroy is angry about London’s transformation into a storage vessel for global capital (a recurring theme for him) in a way that’s not fashionable today. We are supposed to be measured, or we are frothing fundamentalists. Pomeroy is neither, which is refreshing.

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His movie reviews are majestic. He writes not just about the film, but about the making of the film, the perceptions of contemporary audiences (when reviewing older movies, which he does often), the film’s place in the sweep of cinema history. And he writes things like this:

“In my mind Star Wars and Empire belong to the world of myth and legend whereas Return of the Jedi belongs to a world where it rains on Sunday and cats die and life consists of stupid people hitting each other.”

I’ve mentioned his digressions. Many of the best are stand-alone bits of flash fiction (or non-fiction). I’m confident that no other review of the Sony PlayStation 3 game console addresses this issue:

“A few years ago Pathé News uploaded its archive to YouTube, but most of the clips only have a few hundred views, probably from bots. Occasionally the robonews that passes for internet journalism digs out one of the clips and there's a brief flurry of interest but otherwise Pathé's archives are trapped in a kind of eternal living death. We dream about people and things that are lost to us because the mystery is intriguing, but while the dead sleep the taste of the living moves on and the past becomes small.”

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I’m just going to keep going. Pomeroy’s not a big Leica guy, but he does write a little about the R system. Consider this, from his review of the R8. Many camera reviewers include a snippet of the maker’s history. Pomeroy is no exception, but he’s exceptional:

“Leica was founded in 1849 and has survived a period of human history that killed millions and obliterated empires, that saw the conquest of space and of the atom - and, as a consequence, the possible end of human civilisaton and all multi-cellular life on Earth. In Leica's time we realised that death is the end, that the stars are beyond us, that there are limits to our reach, and that without restraint we would kill ourselves and everything we wanted to keep.”

He hasn’t reviewed a Leica M camera, but he addresses the system in his R8 review with characteristic flair.

“Leica is most often associated with its famous, long-running line of rangefinder cameras, which are popular with fat rich Swiss people, rich Chinese people, rich Russians. In the grim future of Frank Herbert's Dune, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen will own a Leica. With his fat fingers sliding over the controls he will use it to photograph the bodies of all the boys he strangled, so that he can look at the pictures and imagine what it must be like to be dead.”

No one could have said it better, no one else could have said it. I still pretend I’m Henri Cartier-Bresson when I fondle my M2, but in my darker moments the Baron now intrudes on the fantasy.

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Let’s stop with the specifics and return to generalities. You might find just about anything in a Pomeroy post, but a few blog-standards are missing: typos, sloppy language, unpolished thought, lazy fact handling. Outside of the better professional outlets, it’s difficult to imagine any substantial body of text online in 2018 that doesn’t lean into these elements, but here it is, a unicorn that can only be made mortal by the touch of Mia Sara’s hand. 

But it’s not just good writing. It’s strange. It rambles in the most engaging way. It is manifestly not for everyone, and the fact that I like it makes me feel special. I want everyone to know about it, but I don’t want everyone to get it. Not that there’s any danger of Pomeroy becoming mainstream, not in this world, nor any of the worlds adjacent to us. As near as I can tell, very few people benefit from the astounding effort he puts into his writing. The Twittersphere doesn’t erupt when he drops a new post. Apart from the friend who originally introduced me to him I’ve never come across anyone online or off who knows of him, any reference to the blog.

That is why I’m writing this, I suppose. If Pomeroy had a million Instagram followers, I wouldn’t bother. His stuff is great, but what also seduces me is the idea of a man pouring this effort into the void of an indifferent universe. I must read his work in that context, and it moves me. It is proof of purity. No art exists in a vacuum: everything has a social context. The Mona Lisa has actually been obliterated by its context, even though it's hanging right there in the Louvre -- it is a thing seen so much it has become impossible to see. When Khloé Kardashian posts a selfie on Instagram, she knows she is doing it for 76 million people, and the million-odd people who “like” it know they are among those millions. I’m trying to say that sometimes the world makes me want to scream, and other times it actually does make me scream, into a pillow, so as not to disturb the neighbors, but there are still many good things in it, and many things more terrible than vapid celebrity.  

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I’ve toyed with the idea that Pomeroy doesn’t care if people read him or not, but I’ve had to discard the notion – there are hints, here and there, that he’s open to expanding his audience. A Twitter account, a few forum posts linking back to his pieces, links to the site in old bios. Comments are disabled on Women and Dreams – is it because he can’t be bothered to moderate the incoherent railings of mouth-breathers, or because he likes the mystique of appearing not to care about generating "social engagement" around his writing, or because he doesn’t like to see a 5,000-word-post with 0 comments any more than the next guy?

The site itself, hosted on Blogger, seems designed to blend into the background noise of the internet. But Pomeroy isn’t technologically naïve. This is a guy who installs Linux on old PCs for shits and giggles. I think he chose Blogger rather than something hipper because he expects it to be around for a long time. Google (which owns Blogger) is the Great Archiver. The company keeps Usenet posts from the 80s preserved in amber. Perhaps Pomeroy just wants to make sure his words remain accessible. Sometimes he wrestles with this theme explicitly. In a post that opens with a meditation on a photograph of Audrey Hepburn, he writes:

“Ostensibly this blog is about photography, although in practice I find it hard to stay focused on one thing and there is only so much to say about photography. The equipment doesn't move me any more; it's the art I care about, specifically the topic that drives all art. The desire to live beyond death.”

It's an unusually earnest tone for Pomeroy, who most often uses hyperbole and semi-fiction to communicate his deeper truths. 

I’ve also considered the possibility that there actually is a modestly large readership for the site -- not Kardashian-large, but, say, tier-two-literary-fiction large -- but that like me, those people don’t mention much of anything on Twitter. They might be telling their friends about it in restaurants and bars, in back alleys and shallow cave networks, rather than on Facebook. This is my preferred version of reality, and where it doesn’t exist, I seek to make it. The end.

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P.S.

Although Women and Dreams seems to be the focus of Pomeroy's current efforts, he's left other noteworthy evidence of his passage. Most interesting is his contribution of articles to Everything2, a kind of Wikipedia-meets-Urban-Dictionary-meets-LiveJournal that apparently flourished around the turn of the millennium. I had never heard of it and only encountered it in the context of stalking Pomeroy across the internet. Reading his pieces there, I realized that the weirdness that grows in Women and Dreams was actually there from the start -- he was just reining it in. He’s also apparently a prolific Wikipedia editor, though there his effort is subsumed into the hive mind. He also co-wrote two printed books. I’ve read one, a tiny collection of illustrated absurdist wit, but the other appears be wholly unavailable. And he's written entertaining reviews on Amazon, though they seem to be tapering off of late.

Film, Digital, and Paradoxical Simplicity

One of the allures of film is that in its relative simplicity, there is supposed to be some tighter connection between the scene before the camera and the recorded image. The lens impartially draws on the film, and that’s it (not really, but let’s pretend). This stands in stark contrast to the computational photography creeping steadily into digital capture, particularly in the case of phones. All sorts of digital magic goes on behind the scenes: compositing images, automatic "best" selection, massive distortion correction, post-process background blur. It’s all very complicated, and if you’re of a certain mindset, it reduces the authenticity of the final image. The traditional camera, by contrast, is supposed to be more like a human eye, with its organic lens focusing light onto a retinal film and none of this digital trickery. What could be more perfect, more true, than the very organs with which we see? Would that it were so simple.

Things were simpler, better, before.

Things were simpler, better, before.

The dichotomy that sets the purity of film photography against the artifice of digital capture overlooks the fact that vision itself is a tremendously elaborate and notoriously unreliable example of computational imaging. What we “see” is disturbingly detached from the photons that hit our retinas (retinae?). It's dependent on the way our brains put together flickering nerve impulses as the eyeball saccades around the scene and melds multiple moments with preconceived schemas to form an illusion of continuous, coherent vision.

Consider the classic Harvard study in which subjects watched a video of people passing balls around. As they carefully tracked a ball, half the participants failed to notice the man in a gorilla suit who sauntered across the screen. So much for the reliable fidelity of our built-in cameras.

So the human eye is more an eye-Phone than a classic L-eye-ca (oh yes, I did that). But maybe it's film's divergence from the eye rather than any parallels that justifies our attachment to the impractical and antiquated. Human vision is complex and unreliable. Much like a smartphone, much like the world. And digital photography, which is as much about computers as optics, suffers from the fundamental opacity common to so much modern technology: nobody understands it.

No single body, I mean. As a product of humans, of course “we” understand it. But consider the thousands of minds, the millions of lines of proprietary code, that go into a smartphone. Could any one human really know, end to end, how the thing works? Of course, most people (myself included) don’t fully understand all the optical principles of a multi-element lens or the chemistry of light-sensitive emulsion, but we intuit that with some reading, a substantial but totally human amount of effort, we could. And this lets us feel more in tune with the technology, more aligned with it as we use it. It’s a tool, like a sharp stick, not magic. Magic, despite its appeal, has a dark side. They burned witches, you know. And they burned David Copperfield. Or if they haven’t yet, David, you better watch your back.

Digital natives performing strange rites. The smart ones may one day recognize the poison of convenience, the corruption of algorithms that presume to create an idealized memory of a fictional moment. Whose ideal? Whose moment? Get off my lawn.

Digital natives performing strange rites. The smart ones may one day recognize the poison of convenience, the corruption of algorithms that presume to create an idealized memory of a fictional moment. Whose ideal? Whose moment? Get off my lawn.

Perhaps it's digital technology's transformation into a subjective, active partner in image making that's freshened analog photography's appeal. Digital, having largely achieved the goal of total fidelity that photography has aspired to since its inception, is now trying to out-think us. We want what we remember, or wish we remembered, whether it was there or not. This is how human vision and memory already work, after all -- the perpetual golden hour light of childhood afternoons half-cribbed from old movies, the moment when everyone laughed that never actually happened.

And to some extent, this is what all photography does. The moment of family bliss caught in the frame is what carries forward across the years: the sulking and hair-pulling that bracketed it are allowed to fade. But film, when you understand it, feels more dutiful, more reliable, perhaps more beautiful, with its opto-mechano-chemical process that affords no judgement in the moment. Once the shutter is tripped, a chain of events rooted in the physical world leads to an image hiding in the film emulsion, waiting for developer. It's magic, but it's a small, predictable magic. Nothing you're likely to burn for.    

On Film: Forestalling Disappointment

For a while I’ve been tormented by the feeling that not enough people are writing about the joys of shooting film. It’s as if nobody got tired of digital and discovered a whole new world of arcana to master, nobody knows how much sexier an already sexy person is when they’re wearing a metal mechanical camera casually on one shoulder as they cavort with their lithesome friends – or, as if people have discovered these things but are selfishly hoarding the pleasures for themselves. Not me. I’m breaking the silence. Internet, prepare yourself.

In this first of a series of posts about the awesomeness of film photography that I’m calling “On Film,” I will explore how shooting film protects (albeit transiently) the photographer from the burden of failing, again and again, to capture the vision he or she reached for in releasing the shutter.

I think there was something here a split second before I took the photo, but maybe not even then. I continued on my merry way, hopeful in the sunshine. The failure was locked away in a latent image.

I think there was something here a split second before I took the photo, but maybe not even then. I continued on my merry way, hopeful in the sunshine. The failure was locked away in a latent image.

Now, there’s a related but different element of shooting film that’s already been thoroughly mapped out by those few folks who delve into such things on the web: delaying gratification. The idea is that film photography thwarts the instant gratification underlying the appeal of so many things digital. Digital chimping vs the languorous wait to develop film. Although it’s worth noting that the most commercially successful form of film photography of the millennium has the morpheme “insta” right in it and only makes you wait for a few minutes to see your image, let’s ignore that for the moment. The consensus among film shooters is that delayed gratification is part of the fun, and I agree.

I might have been a little drunk for this one. I probably saw something in the looming mass of the back, and hoped the low angle would lead somewhere fruitful. I didn't notice the other head on the right, and even without that, I wouldn't have caugh…

I might have been a little drunk for this one. I probably saw something in the looming mass of the back, and hoped the low angle would lead somewhere fruitful. I didn't notice the other head on the right, and even without that, I wouldn't have caught the thing I was after.

But this understanding of delay elides (in a way that’s very symptomatic of our moment) the fact that film also delays something else: disappointment. I don’t think I’m breaking confessional barriers when I reveal that my own photographs often disappoint me. They not infrequently fail to convey the emotion or thought I intended when I tripped the shutter. With digital, this brutal truth is immediately accessible, and even though I leave instant review turned off I can’t always resist a peek. There, scant seconds after taking the picture, everything still in working memory, I must confront failure. Failure deserves its own time. It should be considered in private, like (and possibly with) a glass of nice whisky. It shouldn’t interfere with the moment of seeing, of experiencing. Film enforces this separation.

There was potential in the situation but it needed something else to bring it together, and in any case it's much too far away.&nbsp;

There was potential in the situation but it needed something else to bring it together, and in any case it's much too far away. 

Of course, there are happy surprises after development. All of life is not pain, no matter what those emo kids say. Gratification, however fleeting, is possible. But in the real world, there is also failure of vision, technical error, and always the slap of fickle chance. To review a roll of film is to discover all of this with our attention whole, not chopped up and ground into the flow of experience like so much sausage. And that is something good about film.

Scanning Film Doesn’t Have to Hurt: The Pacific Image PrimeFilm 7250 Pro3 / Reflecta RPS 7200 / Magical Wondermachine Casual Review

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Shooting film is fun. Developing film is kind of fun. But scanning film with consumer equipment is not fun. At all. It’s fiddly, it’s boring, and it’s a massive time suck. I used to laugh when I’d hear people say they shot film to “get away from the computer.” With a digital camera, the only time you have to spend in front of a computer is when you’re looking at your pictures. With the vast majority of dedicated film scanners (like the OpticFilm 7200 I started with), you’re fiddling tediously with the film holder every few minutes, for hours. In front of a computer.

Shot on film, scanned with close to no effort. Come closer, and I will whisper my secrets to you. Fujufilm Superia 400.

Shot on film, scanned with close to no effort. Come closer, and I will whisper my secrets to you. Fujufilm Superia 400.

Now, some people swear by flatbed scanners, especially the Epsons, but that still involves film carriers and several passes to do a whole roll. Plus, I don’t have a permanent place to set up a scanner – I pack it away between uses, so size is a factor.

My dream, and here I admit to a notable lack of ambition if not vision, was something that would just suck a whole uncut roll of 35mm through at a go. Something like a Pakon 135, but a lot cheaper and more recently in production. I’d come across the Pacific Image / Reflecta models in my research, but remained unconvinced. People complain bitterly about them in the few user reviews that are available. They aren’t hideously expensive, buy they’re too expensive to take a flyer on.

Then, one fine day, Amazon suggested I buy a Pacific Image PrimeFilm 7250Pro3 (or Pro 3, or Pro3 – nice job, marketing -- alias Reflecta RPS 7200 in the old world), not for the $400 or so I remember it selling for, but for a mere $170 (as I write this a few months later, it remains on Amazon US at that price; if you're reading this in the distant future, perhaps as part of a university course about the most influential digital publications of the early millennium, or even just a few months from now, it'll probably be gone) . By then, I’d been suffering with the OpticFilm breadbox for long enough. I took a chance. And I do not regret it. If that’s all you want to know, you can stop reading now. Peace be with you.

Behold, two machines. They work together, despite having almost nothing in common. America, can’t you do the same?

Behold, two machines. They work together, despite having almost nothing in common. America, can’t you do the same?

 

What is Pacific Image? The company is Taiwanese, with an American beachhead in Torrance, California. Unlike Epson, Canon, and (in the time before) Nikon, it is not an imaging powerhouse or a household name. There’s something charmingly amateurish about its English-language website, which lives at “scanace.com.” The website, as well as the product packaging and documentation, suggest there’s not a big budget for marketing or visual design. The English translations are passable.

But Pacific Image is the only company making a consumer product that can scan a whole roll of 35mm film at a go. Which is amazing, when you think about it. Or not. Perhaps the problem with film scanner production is akin to the problem with film production itself. It’s not that there’s not enough demand to sell film profitably. Consider Ilford, happily cranking along all these years, with only black and white emulsions. Consider Astrum (Svema). The resuscitation of Film Ferrania. The problem isn’t that film can’t be made profitably – it’s that it can’t be made profitably at the scale that Kodak, Fujifilm and the various former big players used to do it. When Fuji kills an emulsion, it’s not because nobody wanted it – it’s because not enough people wanted it to make running an enormous production line economically feasible. That “not enough” might still be a lot of people, and someone who’s set up to for lower-capacity production can meet that demand profitably.

Straight analog to digital conversion. There aren’t many options to mess with in the included software. No film profiles, for example. Kodak UltraMax 400.

Straight analog to digital conversion. There aren’t many options to mess with in the included software. No film profiles, for example. Kodak UltraMax 400.

Thirty seconds of curves work improves the color. Is this cheating? When people begin to get brain implants and don’t disclose that in job interviews, will that be cheating? It’s a trick question, of course: by then there will be no jobs.

Thirty seconds of curves work improves the color. Is this cheating? When people begin to get brain implants and don’t disclose that in job interviews, will that be cheating? It’s a trick question, of course: by then there will be no jobs.

Similarly, maybe Epson can’t afford to pour the R & D into a dedicated 35mm film scanner that would sell quite a few units in the absolute, yet nothing at all relative to the volumes at which multinational conglomerates operate. But making a good scanner is frickin’ hard, which keeps Joe-Blow Kickstarter from just whipping one up for a couple thousand backers. So that leaves us with Pacific Imaging, which, like Ilford, somehow ended up in the goldilocks spot to meet current demand.  

So, I bought a scanner from Goldilocks. She has a pentagram inked on the back of her left hand these days, you know. Her sinister hand. All grown up. How time flies. The PrimeFilm 7250Pro3 is not perfect, but it’s not as bad as the user reviews would have you believe. I think I know why.

Firstly, many people’s woes are tied to the included CyberViewX software. The name and the UI design harken back to the days when PCs were commonplace but a camera was assumed to require film. The program is not that old, but looking at the dates of the reviews and the number of revisions the software has undergone, it seems that Pacific Image has straightened it out quite a bit since the scanner was introduced. And apart from being plug ugly, there’s not much to complain about. If you’re familiar with the basic concepts of film scanning, you can almost use it without reading the instructions. And if you have any experience with scanning software, you know that’s not a trivial achievement.

I ended up cropping this to fit Instagram. You, dear reader, get to the experience the original. Feel special. All that dead space on the top and bottom is intentional. Not because I didn't want to get too close. Superia 400.

I ended up cropping this to fit Instagram. You, dear reader, get to the experience the original. Feel special. All that dead space on the top and bottom is intentional. Not because I didn't want to get too close. Superia 400.

And that leads to the second reason people bitch and moan, which is that you can’t unpack a film scanner and expect it to work like a toaster. A typical user review goes something like this: “I bought this to scan a suitcase of negatives I found in my uncle’s basement, and it didn’t work right.” Under the best of circumstances, these things are complicated. Pacific Imaging is selling specialized, niche products to ordinary people who are used to Apple products. They get pissed off if they can’t just turn it on and have it do what it says on the tin. But our world is not their world. And this is not, as I mentioned above, an Epson or Apple or Nikon product. This is from a small Taiwanese company you’d never heard of until you spotted this weird scanner on Amazon.

If you are one of us, and not one of them, and if you’re already suffering with a scanner that requires attention for every frame, you’ll find the 7250Pro3 a soothing balm on your fevered brow. You feed in the uncut film strip, line up the first frame, and away it goes. I set it at 3,600 dpi, half of what it’s rated for, which seems to be about the scanner’s true resolution limit (irrationally exuberant resolution specs are not unique to Pacific Imaging, I should note). It’ll do a roll of 36 exposures in two or three hours, I think. I’m usually asleep while it’s beavering away, and I haven’t really timed it. This is a casual review, remember.  

I routinely lift my face to heaven and thank the stars for having been born in the era of great television. Also, in this brief sliver of time between the advent of antibiotics and their exhaustion, the end of nuclear brinkmanship and its resumption…

I routinely lift my face to heaven and thank the stars for having been born in the era of great television. Also, in this brief sliver of time between the advent of antibiotics and their exhaustion, the end of nuclear brinkmanship and its resumption, the discovery of carbon fuel's apparent blank check and the revelation of its horrific true cost. I exercise prospective nostalgia as a form of prayer. Agfa Vista Plus 200.

Are the scans perfect out of the gate? No. But the same can be said of my OpticFilm's output, and honestly, with my casual approach to home processing, my negs are not perfect to begin with. Luckily, I have years of experience in the digital darkroom, so correcting the images is a snap. If you don’t know how to process a digital image, scanning from film is likely to be problematic.

The ICE dust removable works a treat: I don’t even bother to dust my color negs before running them through. ICE doesn’t work with black and white, which actually discourages me from shooting it. Once you’ve experienced the infrared joy of automatic dust removal, the spot healing tool feels like washing dishes by hand, or raising your own children instead of dumping them off on the help. The little villains.

Ease of use aside, the scanner isn’t perfect. But who is? I’ve woken in the morning to find it frozen halfway through a roll, or that it misaligned the frames. I don’t care. It takes a couple of minutes to initiate a new run, and then I can get on with my life, away from my computer.

And what about quality? The short answer is: plenty good for me. If you really care, read this guy’s review. He seems to know what he’s talking about, and you’ll note that his tone is quite positive once he gets the vitriol about CyberView out of his system.

I like the Dutch. They have wrought their share of pain, but they did it early, and got out while the getting was good, and now we have largely forgotten. They mostly spent their money on the right things and now we can enjoy their beautiful houses …

I like the Dutch. They have wrought their share of pain, but they did it early, and got out while the getting was good, and now we have largely forgotten. They mostly spent their money on the right things and now we can enjoy their beautiful houses these centuries later. Superia 400.

The one thing about a 35mm film scanner is that it only scans 35mm film (this one also does mounted slides, btw, but only one-by-one). You 120 shooters, you microfilm super-spies, you closeted 110 lovers, you sheet film dinosaurs, you daguerreotype mercury huffers, you’re out of luck. Go flatbed, or go home.

One tip: the manual says to scan emulsion side up. This results in the images being reversed, so I assumed it was an error. But no: I once scanned the same strip from both sides, and scanning with the emulsion up resulted in slightly sharper images. But then I discovered that doing it the right way often causes the scanner to choke a few frames into the roll. So doing it the wrong way is actually the right way, especially for Superia 400.

Harrow Technical: The Robin Gowing Interview

I’m going to detail at some point how I got embroiled with the Pentax MX, and almost escaped, and then, just when I thought I was out, got pulled back in. For now, I’ll just admit that recently I bought a particular MX knowing full well it had a problem, and planning to send it to Harrow Technical for the cure. In this manner, I reasoned, I would get the camera cheap and then end up with a perfect MX that I could trust. The devil made his usual appearance in the details, but I still ended up with a not-quite-cheap perfect MX thanks to the excellent service provide by one Robin Gowing, the man behind, or inside, Harrow Technical. (If he'd done a bad job I could have titled this post "A Harrowing Experience," but you can't have it both ways.)

Fancy camera fixing paraphernalia in Harrow's workshop. Is that a lens collimator? A shutter speed tester? I don't really know but I'd love to poke buttons and twist knobs here.&nbsp;Robin would probably frown on that, though I doubt he'd raise his …

Fancy camera fixing paraphernalia in Harrow's workshop. Is that a lens collimator? A shutter speed tester? I don't really know but I'd love to poke buttons and twist knobs here. Robin would probably frown on that, though I doubt he'd raise his voice. Anyway, I wasn't there -- Robin courteously, and with minimal prodding, provided the photos for this post (apart from the one I stole from Google below). 

Who is this Jesus to my metal Lazarus? Who chooses to labor, not in the rich, loamy fields of Leica Land, but in the stony talus of Pentax? I called him to find out.

I reached him at his office in Harrow, a suburb of London. He sounds much younger than he must be, and comes across as the kind of person who might stop to help a stranded motorist, even if that motorist wasn't particularly attractive or deserving looking. And if that motorist was your daughter or mother and you tracked down Robin and tried to explain to him how grateful you were that it was him that stopped that night, he would just smile affably and suggest that it was nothing, which is what anyone would say, but he would actually believe it, which is the thing. This may be a lot to infer from a twenty minute phone call about old cameras. I'm just trying to say, he sounds like a nice guy. 

Robin began working at Pentax only a couple of years after I was born, and I am no longer particularly young. He eventually became the technical service manager for Pentax in the UK, the title he held until the company cut its internal staff loose and farmed service out to a third party. In a twist, he stayed on, occupying the building of his former employer, which today is still proudly designated “Pentax House” in large white letters. Are the halls gray lino? Do they echo with the ghosts of film's glory days? I didn't ask, and Robin didn't volunteer. In any case, he’s been repairing Pentax cameras on his own for the last 22 years, a solitary light in a vast darkness.

Pentax House, as seen by Google Street View. If it was called House Pentax, I would have made a Game of Thrones reference. It would have been more clever than something about winter coming. This post is trying to write itself across multiple timelin…

Pentax House, as seen by Google Street View. If it was called House Pentax, I would have made a Game of Thrones reference. It would have been more clever than something about winter coming. This post is trying to write itself across multiple timelines, alternate realities.

So Robin, how's tricks?

“I’m very busy at the moment,” he said. “I find that a lot of people who’ve bought a Pentax digital camera have sold a film camera to fund the purchase, and now they’ve gone back and bought, second hand, the film model they sold.”

What about the “film renaissance” we’re always hearing about?

“I’m certainly a lot busier than I was a couple of years ago,” he said.

And who are these people that send him their treasures for resuscitation?

“A character just came in today with an MX that he’d bought new and looked like he’d used a lot. Or somebody will just drag something out of a cupboard. And a lot of stuff is inherited from deceased parents.”

An MX (not mine, possibly the character's) on Robin's work bench.

An MX (not mine, possibly the character's) on Robin's work bench.

But central to Robin’s business is, of course, the entity that is the cause of and solution to so many of the problems faced by people with an unhealthy interest in old cameras.

“I find a lot of people buy stuff on eBay, and it’s not always faulty, but it always need service.”

Still, he thinks it’s a good deal.

“You can buy an MX on eBay for 50 or 60 pounds, then you factor in [my] service cost, about 80 quid, so for 140 pounds you have a camera that’s going to last you indefinitely.”

What’s coming in?

“I get a lot of MXs, LXs, any sort of Spotmatic, the KX, K2, K1000 [which he called a K-thousand – have I been saying it wrong with the one all this time?]. That’s the bulk of what I get.”

I wanted him to dish some dirt on the Pentax family, who’s made of the sternest stuff, but like a loving father, he refused to play favorites, even though he obviously prefers the star footballer.

“They’re all reliable. I still get SVs, S1As, S3s, going back to the late 50s and early 60s. I get quite a few of those from overseas, and touch wood, I’ve not had one back yet.”

I was surprised to learn that Robin doesn’t shoot film himself (“I have a Panasonic bridge camera that I use, and that’s all I use.”) but in retrospect I suppose I shouldn’t have been. He’s a tradesman, not a hobbyist or a camera fetishist. This is his job. Outside of it, he’s probably a normal person.

Robin was bullish on film in general: “It’d definitely not a flash in the pan. It’s kept me busy for 20 years, and as I said I’m busier now.” But I wondered about the future of his profession. Is there anyone to pass the baton to?

“This is a question I’m asked quite often,” he said. “There are a lot of people my age in the trade, and eventually they’re all going to retire or die off. Who’s going to replace them? They’ve got a lot of knowledge, and there’s nobody else coming into the trade, so it’s a bit of a worry really. Eventually there may be no one left to repair this old stuff.”

This strikes me as particularly true for Pentax. The high value of Leica gear justifies high service fees, which seems to feed a fairly vibrant service ecosystem. Plus, Leica itself still exists as a maker and servicer (albeit at exorbitant cost) of Leica film gear. Nikon seems to have its own world of film-era specialists, and there’s a lot of Nikon gear floating around to support. But when it comes to people who just do Pentax, I’ve only come across Harrow and one other option. Robin has heard of him, too.

“There’s a guy in the States, Eric… Hendrickson, I think? He’s very good. Apart from him, I don’t know anyone else who specializes in Pentax anywhere.”

(And yet Eric offers us hope, in an interview conducted by one K David last year: “I’m training this gal on the K1000, and she’s really good, really talented.” Can I be forgiven for imagining emergent-Jedi Rey deftly removing the top plate, guided by an old master and her innate sense of the Force?)

A wider view of the work bench, since Robin took the trouble to photograph it. The same MX in déshabillé, fumbling hastily for its bottom plate. Looks like some Bonne Maman jam jars back there, probably full of specialty greases and oils. Let's hope…

A wider view of the work bench, since Robin took the trouble to photograph it. The same MX in déshabillé, fumbling hastily for its bottom plate. Looks like some Bonne Maman jam jars back there, probably full of specialty greases and oils. Let's hope Robin doesn't get his marmalade mixed up with his Nye 140C!   

I asked Robin for some maintenance do’s and don’ts.

“I wish people wouldn’t squirt WD-40 into their cameras,” he said. “You’ve be surprised how often that happens and it’s a real pain to deal with. Oh, and the foam where the mirror goes up, that’ll start to disintegrate and they’ll pick and pick at it, and it’ll get all over the focusing screen. It’s a bugger to clean off, or it’s impossible. And screens aren’t available… I have to harvest them from my stock of faulty cameras, which is time-consuming.” Consider yourself warned.

I also asked him about something that I’m kind of embarrassed to have worried about: Can he tell if a camera’s been sitting on a shelf for ages with the shutter cocked?

“Yes, you can tell. It doesn’t matter so much with the ME Super [which has a metal, vertical-travel shutter] and stuff, but on the cloth shutters, you’ll see that the material will have little ridges in it because it’s been wound over the drum for twenty years.” But wait. “That in itself isn’t detrimental, it just looks unsightly, but strangely enough it doesn’t affect the shutter speeds.” So there you have it. Relax, or don’t, depending on whether or not your obsessiveness extends to the appearance of your shutter curtains.

Walker Evans Shoots Junk at the Pompidou, with David Hockney Bonus

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I went back the Pompidou Center, this time as a paying customer, to see the Walker Evans retrospective. The fact that Paris had been burning acetylene-hot for four days was a factor, because I remembered (correctly, happily) that the Pomp is air conditioned. And I wanted to see the pictures.

Once you've seen my phone snaps of these photographs, you don't really need to drag yourself to a museum to look at prints and breath air recently exhaled by other humans. (Please note that I am an entirely unironic person.) On a sincere note, I lov…

Once you've seen my phone snaps of these photographs, you don't really need to drag yourself to a museum to look at prints and breath air recently exhaled by other humans. (Please note that I am an entirely unironic person.) On a sincere note, I love wrecked cars, and the older, the better.

The graduate theses on Evans alone could probably fill the back of a Depression-era panel truck, not even touching the virtual reams on the web. I have no intention of going there. This is my uneducated, off-the-cuff reaction to the work of an acknowledged master. I came to this show as most people would come to it – with a vague idea of its importance, a readiness to appreciate tempered with the cynicism of someone who, more than once, has found work in the canon to be more pop-gun than howitzer, but without the stamina or intellectual rigor to really set out why.

I was of course aware of Evans’ shining position in the firmament of Great American Photographers. I learned that Evans was a rebel. Not quite in the same vein as Koudelka, but they are definitely spirit-brothers across the decades. There’s a video interview with Evans at the end of the show, I think made in the 70s, where he says that he basically just did what he felt like doing. One gets the sense that he didn’t much care what other people thought, which is one thing. But he also claims to have not really thought much about it himself when he did it. He didn’t start with a big project – he just did what felt right, then fit the results into some kind of project later, so the world could deal with it. This gave me some insight into just how crazy his documentary impulse might have seemed at the time. Now, we take photographs of any damned thing. But Evans was leading the pack when he indulged his interest in random store fronts. Advertising. Junk cars. Ruined architecture. Poor people, for the love of god, though I suppose he was in good company with the rest of the Farm Security Administration team, and you probably couldn’t shoot a frame in Depression-era America without having someone hard-up wander into it. But Evans wasn’t just about extremes. He not only shot the craggy, now-picturesque sharecroppers, but also the not-poor, not-rich, not-beautiful people. Just schmoes and schmoettes, schmoing along, like me and (if I dare) you.

Signs, advertising, grinding poverty, wry commentary on consumer capitalism. Nicely done, Mr. Evans.

Signs, advertising, grinding poverty, wry commentary on consumer capitalism. Nicely done, Mr. Evans.

He’s not a street photographer, though he did shoot some street photography of a kind that prefigured a million Instagram posts – random snaps of random people. Like, he’d literally set up a frame and wait for people to walk through it, snapping, I gather, pretty indiscriminately. Same with a series he shot in the New York subway, reportedly with a miniature hidden camera. These are just straight shots of whoever happened to sit down across from him. The expo text said he cropped these tightly to focus on just the individual(s). On a technical level, I wondered how he managed this with a discretely-sized lens and cropping a miniature format (though perhaps this means 35mm) in 1940s emulsion with natural underground light. The expo was not interested in answering this, nor does cursory internet probing. I preferred the subway series to his man-on-the-street snaps, perhaps because of the purity of their voyeurism.

Ordinary schmoe, rando-snapped.

Ordinary schmoe, rando-snapped.

The show text (in French and English, with the English in legible font, I’m happy to report) points out Eugene Atget’s influence on Evans, and I could see that. But from my admittedly casual exposure to Atget, Evans’ flavor of vulgar documentation is much tastier. Atget’s Paris street tableaux often have a sterile, depopulated vibe, or at least that was my impression when last I checked. As I write this, I wonder if getting older might have changed my appreciation of that work. Because part of what really turned me on with Evans was that it distills the time-machine, necromantic power of photography to a potent tincture of something you can’t get in a drugstore anymore. With his early, most-famous work, you’re definitely looking at dead people and vanished places. A lot of Atget’s empty Paris street corners from the edge of photography’s first century look much the same today, and that of course carries its own appeal. But Walker was fixated on the ephemeral flim-flam of a burgeoning consumer society. Great America. Store windows full of boots and pants and gloves, diner menu boards (comparing the prices on the two, either food was basically free or clothes were staggering expensive back then). Peeling posters for minstrel shows, which, good Christ, you hear that term used derogatively even today but they were real things, and they look to have been unspeakably awful. Even actual piles of trash and random sidewalk debris – I’m not talking picturesque or clever stuff, not Riboud’s plastic bag rabbit, just unvarnished garbage. I imagine this was a little mind-blowing at the time, and even today, it kind of makes you stop and think, dang, that’s some ugly trash, and it reminds me of a heap I passed on my way over here.

When it came to documenting the ephemeral, Evans had a particular interest in recording advertising in situ. These images are endlessly fascinating as windows into the charmingly naïve mindset of consumerism in the early part of the 20th century, when so much advertising focused on convincing you that “X” was the best version of something you needed (i.e., the soap that gets you cleanest, the razor that shaves you closest), rather than today’s general practice of associating products with fictional identities and lifestyles. Something about Evans’ interest in these signs painted on barns and pasted on walls reveals that he is, presciently, already in on the joke.   

Evans seems to go out of his way to remove himself from much of the most famous documentary work – we’re talking straight on, full-light, what-you-see-is-what-he-got style, minimal style. But there are occasional flourishes, though you’d be forgiven for wondering if they’re really there, not just chance. In this photo of the Cherokee Parts Store, he catches two female profiles amidst the tires. One woman strikes a classical sculptural pose. The face of the other seems to float in darkness, isolated by a a black fur coat and the shadows of the garage beyond her. Another face looks straight into the camera. This photo is interesting as a document, but it works on the level of pure image and emotion as well. It is a good photograph without qualification.

 

So, if you’re in Paris, check it out. And then wander over to the David Hockney exhibition. I’d seen a Hockney show once some years back at LACMA, which left me with an overall impression of swimming pools and 1980’s Los Angeles art-world gayness. This show confirmed that recollection. I’m not honestly a big one for painting in most cases, so I don’t consider myself able to judge the work that Hockney is best known for. I did like some of the portraits.

But along with his large canvases, the show also included some of Hockney’s collage-style photography, which I vaguely recalled from LACMA. Hockney shoots dozens of images of a scene and then sticks the photos (either 4 x 6-ish prints or Polaroids) onto a canvas. It’s not just analog photostitching though: he’ll include multiple views of an individual, for example, resulting in a cubist version of photography, collapsing multiple angles and moments into a single two-dimensional image. It’s cool, and I’m surprised it’s not something I’ve seen imitated much.

Photos weren't allowed in the Hockney section, which I find pretty damn petty. So here's something I stole off the Christie's site, of a piece I'm pretty sure I saw in the show. I was going to add a snarky little dig at the auction house, but when I…

Photos weren't allowed in the Hockney section, which I find pretty damn petty. So here's something I stole off the Christie's site, of a piece I'm pretty sure I saw in the show. I was going to add a snarky little dig at the auction house, but when I went to their front page I ended up reading a whole article there about a guy who bought a Leica and randomly fell in with Picasso, Matisse, Braque and company immediately thereafter, making his very first exposures of these luminaries and in the process providing Christie's with some expensive stuff to hawk 60 years later but still, a neat article. Nothing is black and white except black and white photography and penguins and zebras to a certain extent, and if you allow yourself too much time to think it becomes difficult to insult anyone properly or even make a decent generalization.

There was also a video version of this concept called “The Four Seasons” that’s beautiful but not really as intriguing as the photo work. It looks great but doesn’t really deliver more than conventional video would have done.

I didn’t regret taking it in.

* I wrote this back in June but I don’t like to post anything too topical or relevant so it’s only now seeing the light of the Internet. Depending on the future you’re reading this from, it might still be on or not.