CAMERA WARS: iPhone 7 vs $4,250 Leica Q
Are you capturing an image or are you memorializing life?
Is the traditional camera dead? Smartphones would certainly have you believe the coup de grace is imminent.
Whether you’re holstering an iPhone 7 Plus with Portrait mode or the latest Samsung or Pixel phone, taking pictures — and beautiful pictures at that — has never been easier. Just ask the folks uploading nearly 100 million photos daily to social media sites.
Now with the iPhone 8 bowing in the fall, smartphone-toting photographers are likely to have even more reasons to rejoice given the Cupertino, Calif., company’s penchant for having their device double as a photographic scalpel.
In fact, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the handsome iPhone 4 in 2010, he compared its solidity to that of a famous German camera maker: “Glass on the front and back, and steel around the sides. It’s like a beautiful old Leica camera.”
Today, there is in fact a very specific Leica camera that offers photographers the very same 28 mm focal length view of the world as the iPhone. It’s called the Leica Q, which at $4,250 sounds like pure folly in today’s camera-in-your-pocket age.
And yet I wanted to see if spending time shooting with this fixed-lens machine could revive this one-time shutterbug ’s passion for toting around an oldfashioned camera.
The odds certainly are against the Leica Q, despite the fact that it feels like it was hewn from a chunk of Superman’s spare kryptonite and has a lens that appears capable of peering into the soul. It also features a nose-hair enlarging 24 megapixel full-frame sensor, a light-sucking 1.7 f-stop focal ratio and ego-swelling brand bragging rights familiar to RollsRoyce owners.
Digital camera production plummeted to 24 million last year from 121 million 2010, according to the Camera and Imaging Productions Association. Over the same period, smartphone sales rocketed to 1.5 billion from 200 million, according to Gartner.
That said, Leica struts its highend wares undaunted. Although it makes sub-$2,000 point and shoots such as the TL2, it’s better known for the fabled M-line that costs more than $10,000, give or take a few thousand, for body and interchangeable lens.
There’s even a new model out that shoots only in black and white and celebrates the career of rock photography legend Jim Marshall. That’s around $15,000, and suddenly the Q looks like a relative bargain.
Leica released the Q a few years back — specifically to appeal to so-called “street photographers” smitten with the handy nature of the smartphone — and still has a wait list.
“We could see the smartphone in two ways, a threat or an entry drug,” says Roland Wolff, executive vice president at Leica.
“The classic path to photography has changed completely. New photographers don’t know what a dark room is,” he says. “But as they get more into photography, they also begin to see the limitations of the smartphone as camera. Eventually, many want to see what they can produce with a real camera.”
That’s certainly a rosy view of a dismal market predicament. And it’s also dead accurate.
While initially slinging a noticeably stout piece of metal over my shoulder felt as natural as worrying about a telephone’s tangled cord, in time its heft faded away in favor of a purposeful feeling. I was there to actively and obviously take photographs, not slyly fire off a few shots while staring at my smartphone.
There’s a difference, in both intent and result. The way subjects respond to you when you’re pressing a large black object up against your face, and theirs, is somehow more serious, as if they’re participants in a visual ballet as opposed to having their privacy invaded by a stranger.
While the Q has a large and sharp touchscreen on the back of its rugged body, you quickly find that looking through the viewfinder lens creates another level of intimacy to your interaction with the subject matter.
I came to love all those feelings back in the days that I would carry an old Nikon to assignments, eagerly hoping to capture a “moment” that would be worthy of publication.
In recent years, I’ve produced countless photos for articles using my iPhone, but somehow I don’t remember the act of shooting any of them. The Q brought all those fuzzy and deeply satisfying feelings back.
Then there were the photos themselves. In some instances, my standard iPhone 7 (shot on the left) seemed to handle the task just as well as the Q.
But beyond the pixel density of the Q shot, there was also, upon closer inspection, a richness to the colors that outstripped the iPhone. It may be a subtle difference, but it’s a real one.
Another shot, of an Italian town clinging to a hillside as the sun began to set, revealed even greater contrasts. In the iPhone photo, the town’s homes seem to disappear into the darkening hills. In the Q shot, their white facades pop with intensity.
A photo of a beached boat in the foreground with a town stacked like an elegant wedding cake behind it seemed to invite dissection if not contemplation.
Overall, what the Q managed to bring to the photographic party was layers — of detail, of light, of emotion.
And all in photos that more often than not were dashed off not by a National Geographic veteran, but rather by a lazy point and shoot amateur.
Another handy Q feature, and undoubtedly a nod to the smartphone age, is that the camera can connect with a Leica app and instantly transfer over selected high-resolution files to a phone which then can be easily shared.
But what it comes down to is this: Are you capturing an image or are you memorializing life?
Most good smartphones will make sure you never miss a thing, whether it’s an evening out with friends or the your cat’s latest yawn. Many of those shots we’ll never look at twice.
The Leica Q’s magic is that it makes you look — again and again.