Hiking across Spain a few months back, having to haul around 10kg of stuff on my back for many miles each day, I was glad to have robust cameras and lenses that could take the journey. The SL2 and -S tolerated day after day of steady rainfall without a blip. Weight was not an issue….

. . . so good. The a6700 has produced some very appealing results. AF has been dependable and accurate. With some doubts as to the quality of my APO-Extender-2X, which seems to degrade rather than enhance the reach of the 180mm APO, I turned my attention to finding something relatively lightweight that can serve as…

Looking for a change that could offer some decent wildlife capture options down the line, I decided to try the a6700. It’s the eighth model I’ve owned from what started as the NEX series, some of which ended up being among my most heavily used cameras. One of the first things I did was to…

Just as I’m in the process of trying to logicize a switch from L-mount to FE, one of the rumors sites announces that release of the successor to the S1R will be delayed until early 2025, and it’s based on the SL3. Great. It’ll be a year-old version of a camera that has a three-year-old…

A few months ago, I started losing shots late in the day because the BP-SCL6 battery would die without warning while one bar was still showing on the camera’s battery meter. Turns out that was almost a luxury. Today I lost a shot because the battery died after 24 shots during just under three hours…

What I’m about to say has been said many times in the thirty-seven years since EF lenses were introduced. It doesn’t matter how good a lens is if the camera can’t focus it properly. The 50mm Summilux-SL is capable of phenomenal image quality. But while the SL2’s usually dodgy eye AF works beautifully with the…

After the other day’s experiment comparing how Lumix S and Leica SL perform with the SL2’s “spot” focus, I added a Lumix S 20-60mm kit zoom and tested it, again against the Summilux-SL. Same result. The one failing of the zoom was that “spot” didn’t work well at MFD at 60mm, but did just fine…

More than once on these pages I’ve ranted about the AF area spot-that’s-not-a-spot on the SL2 and SL2-S. Out with the Summilux-SL 50mm this afternoon, I wanted to focus on a narrow strip of paper about 2 inches wide that was hanging from a string. AF balked a couple of times before settling on the…

I’ve long suspected that the CL’s internals were designed by Panasonic people and that the SL and SL2 were done with at least a significant amount of help from Panasonic. I could be wrong, but why else would Leica have cited the “disbanding” of the team of CL’s engineers as a partial excuse for offering…

Oh, those rumor sites . . . Sigma teasing about a sequel to their versatile fp series, Panasonic promising some interesting bodies, Leica . . . ummm, well, Leica finally admitting to a significant firmware issue with the SL3. For a while I stuck with M and R lenses because they could be adapted to…