30 Days with the Leica M10 Monochrom: Day 16
One thing I haven’t talked about yet that I’m really enjoying about this camera is the resolution. I’m not much of a megapixel junkie, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a situation where my 16-24 megapixel Fuji X-series cameras didn’t have enough resolution to produce a quality image. What’s nice about having extra resolution, though – whether it’s coming from the M10M or the Fuji GFX 50R or any of the myriad other cameras with higher megapixels – is that it allows for creative cropping.
This image works just fine in the normal aspect ratio, but I really enjoy playing around with XPan aspect ratios (64:24) and I thought it brought a little something extra to this shot. I can severely crop the top/bottom of the original frame and still have plenty of resolution to make a fairly large print (~40 inches by 15 inches would be totally usable). Of course, it’s not like I’d want to print the image, but I could definitely see myself wanting to print a panoramic image like the one I shot back in May and having a small/portable camera with such great resolution is a wonderful luxury in that department.
While 40 megapixels isn’t much of a differentiator compared to many modern day cameras, it is pretty impressive when its coupled with the fact that it doesn’t have a color sensor (remember all that stuff I talked about on day 3?). I’m pretty sure this means the 40MP M10M has a theoretical resolving power equivalent to a 160MP color camera! In practice, the demosaicing of modern day sensors/processors is really freaking good so maybe the effective resolution is more like an 80MP color camera…which is still pretty wild.
Now that I think about it, I’m a little upset with myself that I’ve had this camera for a year and a half at this point and I haven’t made a single print from it. That’s going to have to change soon…
kyle wurtz 