Just a quick post; these are from the first day I had the new camera (Leica M11) and took it out in the world a little. My little walk for sanity, as I’ve come to think of it. I’ve had it a month now, and I’ve got some opinions. With one notable exception, everything is better than the M10 was. Resolution, obviously, but that’s not even that important to me; I’ve had enough pixels since the d700 gave me 12MP. The battery is bigger, such that a whole day’s shooting will likely only require one. The menus are simplified, easy to use, and the wifi connection to my phone seems more reliable, too. The optical viewfinder is the same, excellent, the just best rangefinder. Live View is more responsive, both on the back display and through the Visoflex EVF (More on that in a minute). The shutter lag is the same, or at least I can’t tell a difference; if the camera is ready, and you’re fast enough, it’ll get the shot.
That is the camera’s one flaw though, that you have to make sure it’s awake. you turn it on and have to wait 3-5 seconds for it to be ready to take a picture, and what’s worse, the shutter opens and the viewfinder lines light up but it actually needs another half second to be ready. 3 seconds is an eternity. And the wake from sleep is also slow, on the order of 2ish seconds. Leica: please, dear god, figure your shit out. Nikon, canon, sony, even my dang Ricoh GR3, all get this right, ready to go in under half a second. The nikon is ready to shoot faster than I can roll my finger from the on switch to the shutter button. I feel like this is something I could fix with a couple weeks with the source code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
A could other minor things: the internal memory is nice to have and has already saved my bacon once. I only took one card with me to OKC for a week, and that card started acting up on day one. 64gb, as it turns out, is plenty for a week in Oklahoma. The rear screen glass is nothing special; I can say this because mine is already cracked. Edit: turns out it was a screen protector the previous owner installed, which I discovered after my screen protector also cracked. Moral of the story: screen protectors suck.
