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The film camera that can be converted into a digital camera in few minutes

It became a mantra at Leica when they entered the digital camera market that "the last real look of photography we knew is the Kodachrome film look." So the sensors were tuned towards that Kodachrome look, with the help of Kodak, who delivered the sensors, and Imacon, who were responsible for translating the digital signals into color photos.

Watch the video above and read my updated Leica DMR article.

For my article about the HISTORY OF LEICA, see my extremely long article about more than 100 years of history here.

 

Leica R8/DMR with 35-70/2.8 @ f/2.8, 1/90, 200 ISO. © Thorsten von Overgaard.

 

Transcript

The transcript it provided for search possibility only.

The Most Amazing Camera Ever
By Thorsten Overgaard

Today I'm going to take you into the time machine, we are going to go back to old Leica film cameras and we're going to make them digital!

So, this is going to be be exciting and it's going to be a little bit nerdy. Here I have the Leica R8 and I also have well, I have a film roll, we're not going to need it because we're going to make it digital and I have here also a Leica R9 film camera. The Leica R8 camera is one that came out in 1996 and in 2002 came the Leica R9. They're very similar, the only difference between those two film cameras is that the R9 that came later has a lock here so you don't automatically change "Aperture Priority" to "Manual" and so on. So you have to unlock it. And it have a picture counter here, and that's more or less the difference between the two cameras, else they're identical. These cameras, I have used a lot with the slide film. So back in the 1990's and beginning of 2000, I was shooting Fuji Astia slide film mostly. So that means I would put in a roll of film with 36 pictures, I'll go out and take some portraits or do reportage and when the film was done I would rewind it. And when I came back home, I would sent it to the lab and I would pick up the slide film. Next day I would scan it in the Imacon scanner and clean it for dust and everything. That was the way it was done. And slide film is what have the best quality. So I was late to go into digital. Basically, I had a Leica Digilux 2 that I used for some stuff but not really serious stuff in the beginning of 2000's and I did see that other photographers had Nikon digital and so on for sport events and it was like, it's always ... With press photographers it is always speed so you would have one of the first Nikon cameras that came out with digital would be one that you would go to the football match at the stadium on Sunday and you would take photos and you could transmit them wirelessly to the newspaper so that they could make it for deadline. And that's mainly the reason a lot of the press photographers would use cameras, depending on speed, and that's also how that in the past, we had motor winders, the faster motor winder, and the bigger rolls of film and everything. All kinds of tricks, and auto-focus to make it fast. So speed have always been an interesting thing not so much for me. I like the image quality and the soul of an image. So anyways, I used these cameras and other Leica film cameras to shoot slide film and i was kind of waiting for, When will there be digital solutions that looks like film?" And that actually happened in 2003 that Leica came out with a digital back for these cameras. And this is a film camera and this one also looks exactly like a film camera with a motor winder. The Leica R8 and Leica R9 are really cool cameras. I mean, they're chunky but they're really nice to work with and you have a good grip on them and they just work like tanks, they're beautiful. But this camera also have a digital back and this is a digital back that Leica came out with in 2003. They didn't actually start to deliver it until 2004-2005. But this one is a digital back they made together with Kodak and Imacon. Kodak of course knows how to make color film and know how to deal with colors. So that was like their area and also they were the one actually who invented the digital sensor and digital photography. So Leica worked with Kodak and it's always been like, almost like a mantra with Leica that, "The last real look of photography we knew is the Kodachrome look." So the sensor here is tuned towards that look of Kodachrome and Imacon is the company that was in Copenhagen that made the high-end scanners. So if you were in a museum or you've a high end photographer you would have an Imacon scanner to scan your slide films or it could be your originals, even if you put, ... in the big scanners you could put an original drawing or painting it into them. So Leica, Imacon and Kodak made this thing together and when it came out the idea was like, now you can have a film camera and then you take off the back and you put on a digital back and then you take some digital on you take it off and put back the film back again. That was kind of the idea because somehow nobody really believed that it's going to be, the film was going to be dead. And there was even at Leica, in 2002-2003, they had a CEO that he said in the interview that, "No, film is superior". "We're going to keep making film cameras because when people are done with this digital stuff they are going to come back to film because it is superior". and we're going to develop new types of films, it is going to be much higher resolution, better colors, more dynamic range and so on. As we know now, that's not how it went and that's also why Leica made this digital back. There were some changes in Leica, so they came with a digital back. There was like a request from the customers you could say. This is genius and I have two of them.

 

Leica R8 DMR with Leica 35-70mm f/2.8. © Thorsten von Overgaard.

 

So I have this camera, I have used extensively for fashion weeks, I've been doing reportage in Africa, I've done tons of portraits, product shots and everything with this camera. It is beautiful! There is a CCD sensor, it's 10 megapixels, It's also a crop sensor, so my favorite lens that I would use for most of my photography would be the 80mm Summilux-R f/1.4, here and it's an 80mm f/1.4 and it has very much a look like the Noctilux f/1.0 in the of M series, beautiful. So you could say as soon as I went from slide film to digital, I had a crop, so this was suddenly a 105mm lens instead of a 80mm lens. It didn't matter, I would just step back, further away, and the look would be the same. So, and the R lenses that goes on the Leica R system are amazing. You could say that the M system of Leica that is the one that came from 1925, that's when it started, have small lenses and they're amazing and they are high quality. The R lenses are better, always considered to be better just simply by the fact that it's more glass, it's easier to make quality optics the bigger size you can deal with. So all this goes on this and I've had an amazing time with it this one. So, then in 2009, the Leica M9 came out, that was the first full frame M camera and I got one of those and I used it and after a while, I realized I can actually do with the small Leica M9 the same as I could do with this. Actually, a lot of the stuff had more freedom to it. and that's how I went with the M camera series from then. And then this one almost got into retirement. Then something funny happened because two years ago, I was in Porto, in Portugal, I was doing my workshop and then I visited the Leica Store in Porto, Portugal and there's also Leica Gallery in Porto. And I walk around and in a corner somewhere, I see to have second-hand equipment and up there they had on the shelf, they had a Leica R9 with digital back and I asked, "How much is it"? And they said, "It's $3,000". And I said, "I'll take it". And I got this thing, they packed it for me and I picked it up and I took it home and I'm home and I'm wonder, like, "Why I'm doing this?" I already have one now I have two and I don't really use it anymore. The only answer to that is just that it's such a beautiful setup, this DMR. So I just, it was like seeing an old friend. I said, "Okay, you're going to come with me", and that's what happened. So today I'll give you the exclusive experience that I'm actually going to put on a digital back so you can see here how genius is this system. And, what happened back then in 2003, 2004, 2005, when you got this, you would get a big box like this with your digital back, and this is the one. I actually haven't used it yet. It's not an unboxing video because I don't like unboxing. This is the manual and we're going to keep it here just in case. And then there's a warranty card and stuff, I'm sure there's no warranty on this one anymore. Here comes a charger for the battery. I don't need that one right now. And then comes here a battery, I'll get back to those. And then comes what looks like a motor winder for the camera but this is a digital module, so it's a little bit different. And then comes the actual digital module. There's also some funny things here, there's a firewire cable, and this is a mobile charger so you can charge the batteries in the car. And then, see what else we have here, that's about it. Well, there's a new screen here because of the crop sensor so you have to change the matte screen in the camera. So it has like a line for what's going to be in the picture. That's basically what is in this box, more or less. I'll put it down here. So, let's open ... This is the real goldmine. This is the digital back and let's see if there's anything in this pocket, no, it has nothing in this pocket. So here it is, this is the beauty and you could say it's pretty simple. It's kind of compact. If you look at how big the camera is, this is ... that you have a whole digital back here is kind of amazing. So what I would do, we're actually not going to use the manual. So what you would do here, you would open the camera here and you can see everything is film in here, just like the old days. And then we have to change the back, so I can just take off, this one is like watch straps that you just can press this one. If we can do that, there we go, off it goes. You can put it away, we're not going to need that anymore and now I just have an open film back. And the next thing that I'm going to do then is I'm going to put on the digital back and this is literally made, that, the idea is that you go to Africa and then you shoot some tigers and then you take off your digital back and you put in the film again and put on your film back, and you take off your film and then you put on your digital. So it's kind of made in a sneaky way that you have this one, you just put it in one side here and then you press this one and then let's see ... it presses this one in if you can find where it's supposed to be. I need to look at it from this side. There we go, now it sits there. So now I have the digital back then I just have to remove this cover that protects, there we go. And here I have to sensor and you can see. So this is how the sensor looks and the whole back and have digital contacts here that meets these contacts, or electronic contacts. And that's one thing I will say, is that if you have a camera like this, it's old, so suddenly things stop working. And one thing you can always do with stuff like this is that you can clean the contacts with alcohol. You can also take a piece of metal and scratch it so if there's something sitting on it, it's going to work again. I tried that several times, something stopped working, you clean the contacts and it works again. So this is basically how it's done. I'm just going to close this there we go, now it's closed. and then I have more contacts here, so now I have to put on this one and see, to do that I first have to remove the battery compartment here and it's this one. There we go. So this is actually where the batteries at sitting for the camera, and it's also a hand grip. This one, I don't need it anymore, I'll put it over here. And then that gives space so I can actually attach this one. And there's lots of contacts all over the place here for this, and then see how it can fit this one on. It should be fairly easy but you never know. See how does this go, there we go. And then I'm going to screw it on, It's just like a motor winder, basically. And then, that's my camera. Then, that was the protective thing, I don't need that one anymore. This is actually the old matte screen so the one sitting in here actually is the new one which have the crop factor. If it wasn't there, I would have to go in here and remove this one. You would just take, there's a tool here to grab it with and also to mount the new one. I don't have to do that because it's already in there. And then lets just put on a seksy lens for the fun of it, the 80mm f/1.4, and then I can put in the battery here, there we go. So now this is ready, it weighs not a ton but it does weigh something. It gives you good, It's good, It's almost like going to the gym using this camera. And now I can turn on the camera and I simply just go on the dial here I would go to, for example Manual and then I can see it blinks ... here comes. Yeah, it's beautiful. So here we have it. Now there's light in this display down here. That gives how many pictures are left on the card and the format and everything and up here would be the preview and I actually have also, here, I have a menu here where I can go in and set the sharpness and different things. It's not really something I need to use a lot. One of the funny things with this camera, I don't know how fun it is, is if you are like photographing, and you're running out of battery, you pop out the battery and you put in a new battery when you do that it actually reset the settings sometimes, but it always reset the date back to 2000. So that's a thing to watch out for. You should turn off the camera first which you do on this one. You just turn it off and then you take out the battery, put in a new one. So somehow it doesn't have any memory in the camera, battery memory, It's one of those things you just, you learn to deal with, with this camera. And now if I take a picture. I can go to 1/125th of a second because I'm on Manual and then I take a picture here. That's how it sounds. And you can hear from the sound that it actually, the shutter goes up and the sensor in here get exposed to light that comes through the lens and then the film rewinds but there's no film in it. And it's just part of it that when you put on a digital back you pretend, it's kind of like a film camera, It's going to behave that way, It's going to even use battery to rewind the film. It's just a part of it and it gives this interesting sounds. I remember when I used this a lot in the press pit. So you're standing with other photographers, they have digital cameras that makes different sounds and then they hear this sound, and it is like, "Are you shooting film"? And then you'll have to explain, "No, it's actually digital, but it's a film camera". Very funny and of course, this is all manual focus and the camera does have Aperture Priority program mode and everything so it can do a lot of stuff. But that's basically how this thing works.

 

Kelly Preston in Coco Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld. Leica R9 DMR with Leica 35-70mm Vario-Elarit-R ASPH f/2.8.© Thorsten Overgaard.

 

Let us talk about the batteries. This camera is either one of the most ridiculous things you've ever seen or the most genius thing you've ever seen. To me, it's like, I don't know what it is, but the pictures from this thing is beautiful. The problem with this one is that Leica only made 3,000 of them. They started announcing in 2003, "We're going to do this" and they did them with Imacon and Kodak, and then what happened was that they made 3000 of them and then Imacon in Copenhagen, the scanner producer was sold to Hasselblad in Sweden, and Hasselblad apparently said "Okay Imacon, you cannot play with Leica anymore" and that was the end of this digital back. So only 3000 of them exist. I mean, you can still find them. A lot of people who have these maybe gave up selling them because who wants something like this. It's still possible to find them and the price is around 3,000 for a camera and a digital back, 3,000 Euros or $3,000 depending where you find it and usually it comes with one or two batteries. Sometimes you lucky you get four batteries. And the reason why it's very interesting how many batteries you get is because that, the battery sits here, just going to take it out. So this is the battery and it's not that it's super powerful. A normal battery maybe can do 100, 200, sometimes 300 or 400 pictures. The problem is that you cannot get the battery anymore and you can see is very special, it's not a standard battery. It's made for this whole unit. And Leica don't have them anymore. People who have them don't want to get rid of them. I had four batteries and then there was a facility in Germany I could send them to, a third party facility that could fix the batteries because they were getting like slow or low on energy, whatever it is called. So I sent them two batteries and I never got them back. So I asked them, "Have you seen my batteries?" And they never saw them. So either they didn't arrive or whatever happened. And that's one of the problems you could say with batteries is you send batteries with DHL or UPS or in the mail. They might actually get destroyed on never arrive because batteries are considered dangerous goods. So that's a thing to remember that if you only have one or two batteries left and you want them refreshed well, then you better be careful how you ship them and where you ship them. There's also, funny enough because I was looking. Before I did this video I said "I'm just going to go see if I can find some batteries before any of you going to get them." So you can see on eBay, there's actually "re-battery" or whatever. What they do is that it is actually two iPhone 4 batteries. they put together and prepare them so you can open this one and you can a mount them into this one. And according to another website that there's a link below the video also to that. According to that website is going to give you battery for around 100 photos. That's a little bit less than they had originally, but they do tend to go down in power. The two batteries I have here, I think that's the ones that came with this camera. This one have a very low serial number and it's probably one from the factory in Portugal, somehow that they got via somebody to the Leica Store Porto and that's where I got it. So those were two good batteries. So the two batteries I sent to Germany was the weak ones and I haven't gotten them back. And I really don't know what to do about it when I run on our batteries in this one then I'll have to get into trying something. And one of the differences between Leica R9 and Leica R8 is that on Leica R9 you can just press on and off and it will actually do it. On the R8, which I actually prefer because when you're photographing for example, fashion week going to want to change this wheel you can do it. You don't need two fingers and you don't need a lot of something. But when I turn on this one, then it is going to light up and what I wanted to show you is that the battery on this one has basically been blinking. Now it doesn't, I charged it little bit, but this battery was blinking, that it's "empty, empty empty". And it's been doing that for like 90 photos. So the whole battery thing is like, you put in a battery and then you have to test how many shots do I have because, of course if you go out and want to take photos, and then you have four shots that's nice to know that you have four photos. If you have 100 or 200, you want to know that. So that's ... you can really trust this, and I mean, there's a lot of things with old cameras like this that you have to get used to. You put in a battery, you turn on the camera and nothing happens because it takes it 5 to 10 seconds to wake up or do something. You press a button and then it takes three seconds before the screen actually turns on, you press a button and it takes four seconds before the screen disappears and stuff like that. So a lot of quirky things, but it's not unusual for this. I mean, I tried with ... you take for example, like Leica M9 from 2009, that's a camera that you dig it out again, you haven't used it a long time, you put an SD card in and it doesn't work and that's because you have to remember that the Leica M9 can only go to 16 GB cards. So any bigger cards the camera doesn't know what this is and never seen one of those. Back in 2009, it didn't exist. And speaking of SD cards, this one is also very special. This one have a 2 GB SD card here, and it's a non-SDHC. And basically the only card that will work in this unit is 2 GB and 4 GB, non-SDHC. So you cannot just go online and order a 2 GB or a 4 GB, you have to see that it's a non-SDHC because else the camera doesn't know what it is. 2 GB is perfect and I mean, they're so cheap now you can just order a stack them from B&H Photo or somewhere and then you have cards forever. The battery, that is the issue. So let's just talk about image quality for a moment, because back when the digital back came out, of course there was Lightroom and you could import the pictures into Lightroom, and the great thing about Lightroom is that it is a workflow tool. That means you import 100 photos you go through them and mark, this one, this one, this one and you edit them and you can even copy-paste the edits you did so you can get work done fast. The problem was that it didn't look that amazing. So at that point the Imacon software "Flexcolor" that they used for the scanners would also work for the files here. You had to go put them into an "FFF-format" and stuff like that ... very cumbersome. But what I would do is I would select and say okay, "This portrait here, I want it to sing". So this is the one that this file I'm going to import into Flexcolor and then I would tweak it there or basically just the way that it went through Flexcolor would clean it up and make the colors look beautiful and make everything jump at you. And then we'll save it as a TIF. And the reason I wouldn't use Flexcolor for everything is that it's just, you can work at one file at a time and it just takes forever and It really took a long time to open up. You can't really use Flexcolor anymore. You can still download it from the website, now it is Hasselblad's website. You can download the software, the problem is just that it doesn't work with the current Mac computers. So if you want to work with these files you have to downgrade your system or you have to find an older MacBook or an older Mac computer to have an older system that can still run Flexcolor and then you have that. I actually do have a computer like that connected to my Imacon scanner but I don't really use it anymore. What I did with these files is I imported them into Capture One Pro and that's version 20 now, it's called and it actually looks amazing. So I wouldn't go around Flexcolor. Capture One have actually made a profile for this camera. Even it's an old camera and they didn't start including Leica profile to cameras till a few years ago they actually went all the way back and took all the old Leica cameras, including this digital back. So the edit you get in Capture One is actually satisfactory. It looks really good. And just for the fun of it, I imported also these files today into Lightroom, and Lightroom will import the file and then when you want to crop it and want to edit it, it says, "Cannot find the file". The file is there and you can actually export the file from Lightroom, but you can't edit it. So somehow Lightroom doesn't recognize it. You could say, doesn't really matter because Lightroom is not great to edit those photos, and never was, great to edit those photos anyways. It doesn't matter. One of the advantage with this camera is that the photos looks amazing from the moment you import them. You usually don't have to touch a lot. So let's just talk about Image quality. I mean, you can see the pictures here in this video, that it is a pretty good camera. There's not really much reason to try to do a comparison but nevertheless, I did a comparison between the DMR and the Leica SL2 with 47 megapixels. So here we have a CCD sensor picture, 10 MP, and we'll just zoom in here for the fun of it and see how the things look. And one of the things that is really great about the DMR and CCD and also Leica lenses is their ability to make things look alive. You look at the leather here, it looks, you can feel the texture, even here, this paper-plastic on the frame here, that's something that you could say the CCD sensor, the Leica DMR, the files are almost ready when you take them out of the camera. Also look at the hat here it's amazing how detailed it looks. Then I'm going to jump, you keep your eye on this one, now I'm going to jump straight to the Leica SL2 and it looks like this. And you can see it's more cold and blue, the colors are a little bit off. It needs some warmth which is you could say it's what the CCD and a DMR has with the Kodak tuned sensor and the Imacon have fine-tuned it also. So this one is a little bit different and is a general thing with Leica SL2 and I think it needs fine tuning from the firmware. It has too much blue in it and this is one thing also I have actually played with now that I had the chance here, let me just show you. So here we have, this is what 47 MP looks like and if you notice, you will see that actually the CCD sensor of the DMR have more clarity. So even this one have more megapixels the CCD have more clarity. And so just for the fun of it, I'll make it available later from my website. I made a fine-tune, I made a profile for the SL here. I said, I like these colors, I'm going to jump to the CCD from the DMR, like this, I like this look, it's so nice and soft and friendly. This I don't like, so I made a profile so I can apply this to the SL2 so it would look like this. And you'll see, this is the refined, with my preset SL2, 47 MP and then the CCD from the DMR. One thing I haven't checked with this new online digital back I just assembled is, how does it focus. These things, like anything mechanical, can go out of focus. And I mean, if you look at it like your mount a digital back where the film used to be and then it's like, if it's just a little bit off then it's not going to be there. This one, you used to be able to send them into Leica and they would adjust the focus on them. You might be able to find somebody who can handle this. I haven't tried to do it. The thing to know is that if the focus goes out here you could say, or, you can take it apart, dismount it and then mount it again and see maybe that works better. But the thing is that when you focus with this one, it's actually very easy to focus, you would think it is difficult because it doesn't have EVF and stuff, but the viewfinder is extremely clear. It's really bright and you have the matte screen with a center in the middle. So you can really see when it focus. And somehow it's almost like a miracle. You just really nail the focus, that's what I always did with this one, I always nailed the focus even so many things could go wrong. So if the focus is off, you can take the back off and you can put it back on and see if that helps. More likely, where you would get the source, is that you can go in here and you have ... the mirror can actually be out of placement. So, if the mirror is not sitting straight then this distance you'll see is not going to be correct. It can also be the matte screen. If the matte screen is a little bit moved, just a tiny bit then the focus is not going to be the actual focus that the sensor sees. So that's the thee factors: Where does the sensor sit? Where does the matte screen sit? And how does the mirror sit? That's the three elements that can go off in a mechanical camera, the three things you would adjust and you could say you're can adjust the matte screen yourself and you can adjust the mirror, you can try and see if you can find anything to clean up or something in there. You could say the sensor itself, start moving it around with a screwdriver or something like that. I wouldn't do it. It sits already very precise. But I know that's one of the things that Leica did they had a way to adjust a sensor and then we could measure if the plane is straight. So it's not tilting to one side or something like that. Not that it would happen a lot but it is a camera that you would say that, you use it a lot, if you look at this baby you can see this has been through a war and everything. So that's the thing with the focus, it's just, it usually works and if it doesn't, then you have to fix it. The last thing I think I will say about this camera is that when you get old cameras there's a lot of things that is not like it used to be. And what I usually do, because I had somebody who wrote to me the other day, he had bought a Leica SL which is a camera from 1964 and this extremely simple camera but still this camera is kind of advanced for the period. And it does have different things that you don't know what is. What I used to do is I'll find the manual and download it to my iPhone, iPad, computer on whatever. So when I'm out in the field somewhere and something doesn't work, or I wonder about something, I can actually look it up. I'm not going to carry the manual that came with the camera, but I'll put that on my computer. I will just look at this funny thing here, you actually have a release button here. Then you have one here and you actually also have one here. And the thing that sits here is that you can actually lock it so it doesn't go off by accident. Then it has here like, believe it or not, it has a Firewire port and firewire cables. You're never going to use that you just take out the SD card. You could, with this one you could actually connect it into to a computer, back when I think, with the Flexcolor and you could shoot the camera from the computer in the studio for example. I don't think a lot of people going to do that. Here you have some flash connections behind this one. Then it has some stuff here: If the mirror goes up with flash, the first or second shot. Here you can test the depth of field, with this one so it just presses whatever the apertures is, it presses it to that. Here is the R button for rewind of a film and it's also if you want to do a double exposure. I don't think that actually works on digital back, but on film you would press this one down and you could shoot three or four pictures on the same picture frame on the film and do multi exposure. This is the rewind that you don't really need for the digital. And you have here plus and minus exposure you can use. And then you have here a diopter so you can adjust the viewfinder for your eyesight. And then you have the menu and the buttons here on the back that maybe is very similar to actually the M8 and also other digital cameras. And then you have the interesting things on this one. You have down here that you turn this button here to set the white balance. You can change the resolution, it should always be raw. This one when it came, it was set to JPEG, but it should be raw. And a 2 GB card will give you 96 pictures. It's kind of cool compared to film is not cool compared to modern cameras where you can put 2000 pictures on a card, so you just have extra cards. And then you can have the compression and you can set the ISO. And the ISO with this camera should be a 100 ISO. That's the base ISO of the sensor it looks amazing, beautiful. You can go 200 ISO, you can go 400 ISO, 200 is still okay If you have to. 400 you get on the edge of what looks good, 800 is just, it doesn't look good, so forget about it. Then it has a special thing here, "moiré". And that is ... "Moiré" is when you photograph for example, a dress with lots of stripes on it, then you get this confusing pattern. A lot of cameras have a moiré filter in front of the sensor. So it kind of blurs everything but it blurs everything! So that also blurs skin and stuff. But then you avoid those patterns. This one have a moiré filter you can turn on and off because the sensor doesn't have this blur filter in front of it. Cool little detail, I never used it. And then you can also set users here and you can set self-timer. If you should ever want to do a selfie with this camera and that's it. And it even have a button here, so you can turn on light in the display if you work at night. Sounds ridiculous but that is actually a good thing. I've been at really dark fashion shows and and stuff like that where I needed to see what does my display say. And that's basically it, of course there's lots of other funny buttons and things on this camera yet You can change the exposure to plus a half, or one stop and you can go single and continuous for the motor winder and stuff like that. And you can also close for fingers over here. Yeah, you can close for the viewfinder here so if you're doing night shots, then there's no light coming in through here, so you don't get light that shouldn't be there and stuff like that. This is a high end film camera from back in the nineties, So this have everything and it's made to last forever and you can say, it will. The only problem is how long can we get SD cards and batteries for this one? That's basically the only thing that determines how long is this going to stay alive That's all I had to say about this camera. It's amazing, I have two of them and I really like to go and use them again. And maybe you're already now on eBay and everywhere else trying to look for one. There's not a lot of them in circulation, I would say if you want to get one, I would put an ad on a Leica user forum or on Facebook or somewhere else and say, "Hey, does anybody have a functioning Leica digital back with camera and maybe some lenses I can buy"? and see what it comes up with. I would expect that a camera with a digital back would be in the area of $2,000 - $3000, maybe sometimes $4,000. That's probably the range of it. I think they cost like $4,000 or $5,000 when they came out. That's all I had to say for today. I would love to hear your take on this camera. Till I see you next time, thank you for watching. And remember to Always Wear a Camera.

 

On the table:

Always Wear a Camara leather desk blotter.

Eyevan 7285 glasses 147 S.

Eyevan 7285 glasses 557-3241.

 

Disclosure:

Thorsten von Overgaard is a Danish writer and photographer, specializing in portrait photography and documentary photography, known for writings about photography and as an educator. You are always welcome to send an e-mail to Thorsten for questions, suggestions and ideas.

Thorsten Overgaard is an independent writer and photographer who write, teach workshops and publish user reports about the equipment he uses. There is no affiliation with Leica Camera AG or any camera dealers, no free gifts, no sponsorship, no kickback and no paid content. All you see is real and based on the life of an eccentric and hard-working photographer who makes his own money, buys his own equipment and form his own independent opinions - and shares with you. Enjoy the ride.

 

Video credits:

Produced by: Thorsten Overgaard (www.overgaard.dk)

 

Equipment:

This video was made with the Leica SL 601 and Leica 35mm Summilux-L ASPH f/1.4, using Sennheiser wireless microphones. Additional light by Kino Flo DIVA LIGHTS.

 

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