AQUARIUM FILTER SIZE

With due apologies to Waterford Crystal, of course, lol!

Since acquiring a Sony NEX-5 camera five weeks ago, I have shot a variety of scenes with it, with both the Sony stock lenses and lenses made by Nikon, and especially Leica M lenses. I have shared some of the more interesting images on flickr over the past month.

Naturally, I was curious to see how the exact same lens performed on two different cameras, in particular, how images from the same lens compared between the Sony NEX-5 and the Leica M9.

The Leica M9 has a full size CCD sensor, but is a rangefinder camera with a small viewfinder that is partially blocked by all fast M lenses. This makes focusing and composition very difficult. The rangefinder limits focusing to the center of the screen, so it is impossible to accurately focus on a subject that is off-center. The M9 is also limited to a max ISO of 1250.

The Sony NEX-5 is far superior for both composition and focusing, especially with its live view capability. You can compose first, then sharply focus something in a corner with no problem. It is good in all situations except when it is very bright, enough to make the LCD on the back not viewable. But the NEX-5 has a smaller CMOS sensor. In theory, the NEX can go to ISO 6400, but in practice, it is clean up to 640, then starts getting noisy.

And typical of Japanese cameras, the Sony has a lot of other goodies, including panorama stitching, built-in automatic HDR, automatic face recognition, auto programmed exposure by selecting the right mode while using the Sony lenses (these features works exceptionally well), macro, a tiny add-on flash, and of course, full HD video that is excellent, including a neat optional long-range stereo microphone. The Leica M9 has none of these goodies but a pure 35mm range-finder photographer would consider all of that meaningless distractions. But for the rest of humanity, they are very nice features to have.

Oh, by the way - the Leica M9 costs about 14 times(!) what the Sony NEX-5 costs.

So can the little Sony give the Leica a run for its money?

The short answer is, the NEX-5 comes surprisingly close.

I ran several comparisons, and I am very impressed by how good the Sony is. I wish I could publish all the comparisons, but it takes too much time and effort. It is also very tough to get exactly the same scene imaged with both cameras.

Here is one of the more illustrative examples. The top photo above is the scene, more or less, in its entirety, shot with the Sony NEX-5, with the Leica Noctilux-M 50/0.95 lens @ f/0.95.

The same photo is repeated below in the comment section, at 500 pixels wide, which is the most flickr allows in comments. Below that is the same scene from the Leica M9.

Both images were hand held. so the two images did not come out with the exact same perspective. But they should be sufficiently similar to provide an idea. I have also included a couple of crops from both images, at actual pixel size. Both Leica crops are actual 100% pixels. The two Sony crops were slightly downsampled to match the Leica crops, since within the smaller overall image area, the Sony does have slightly more pixels.

Bottom line: when viewed in isolation, the image from the Sony is very good and very acceptable. But Einstein was right - everything is relative. In the town of billionaires, the mere millionaire is but a servant.

Placed next to an image from the Leica small and subtle improvements in the image quality can be seen. The colors are richer, the dynamic range and shadow details are superior, and most surprising - the image from the Leica at ISO 800 is far cleaner than the image from the Sony at ISO 640. The Sony CMOS sensor is evidently much noisier, in spite of its noise filtering. The Sony rendering is also harsh compared to the buttery smooth rendering by the Leica sensor, in spite of the Leica having no AA filtering.

Is that worth 14 times the price?

For small prints (5" x 7") or Web consumption (e.g., on flickr), the answer is no, I don't think so. The Sony is just as good as the Leica. The vast majority of notebook computers are incapable of even showing 50% of the complete Adobe color gamut, so most people will not be able to tell the difference. (Although, thanks to the Apple iPad and iPhone 4, that is changing - colors on Apple displays are far superior to Windows machines, and people will suddenly start appreciating better photos, I think!).

But with high end displays or for making prints of 8" x 11" or bigger, the larger sensor size of the M9 is clearly much superior. What price one is willing to pay for it is up to individual needs and priorities.

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Been a Mac user since 2003, but am suitably impressed with Windows 7. I was part of the extensive beta test that Microsoft ran over the last several months, and was more than happy enough to follow up with a superbly priced pre-order.

7 isn't revolutionary, and there's no way it's going to become my OS of choice over OS X. However, one of my biggest bugbears about life within Windows - the infernal taskbar - has been supremely improved with the new one in 7, which is similar to OS X's dock but in my view feels superior.

It is still Windows, and I still feel that non-gaming home users should give a Mac a go, but for PC users running Vista, or with a newish computer running XP, I urge you to give 7 a try. It is refined, it feels like it was designed with care, and is the antithesis of everything I hated about Microsoft at its height of arrogance, which was exemplified with the catastrophic Windows ME.

Installs and runs like a dream on my Early 2008 MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM, incidentally. :)