This past weekend the weather was gorgeous in Paris. I decided to take my good old M9 for a walk. It’s been a while since I touched it as I was mostly only shooting Portra 400 or 160 with my Leica M-A in the past few months. So much so that I forgot to charge the battery and ran out of it after a mere 20-30 shots.
The results weren’t too bad, though I couldn’t say that they were good either.
Typical winter scene in Jardin du Luxembourg
M9’s Black & White JPGs never cease to amaze. Though I said it a million times in the past 11 years that I’ve owned M9, its in-camera B&W JPG coming from the unique CCD sensor is just impossible to replicate. I’ve seen users of M10 and M11 talk about “how close to M9” these younger M’s were able to render. It’s all bullshit. I’ve never seen anything on the internet with M10 or M11 that comes close to what I’ve been seeing for 11 years with my M9 when it comes to B&W. That’s not to say M10 and M11 could not generated great B&W JPGs, it’s just that they are not the M9 look.
To be honest, the fact that users of new M’s keep referring back to M9 fundamentally validate the uniqueness of the M9 rendering. By now probably even Leica itself gave up — there will be no way of reproducing M9 rendering on CMOS sensors, period.
That said, I used the color rendering a lot less with my M9 than when I first started. The thing is I have had unfortunately the same sensor erosion problem and only got around in the end of 2018 to get it serviced while I was in Tokyo for a biz trip. Though I have never done scientific A/B tests, the color photos (basically RAW files rendered in Lightroom) after that the CCD was replaced never came close to what I enjoyed in the first few years with the original CCD sensor.
When the lighting is right, such as dry cold sunny winter in Tokyo, the camera would still give me beautiful color results every now and then, but it lost that consistency of transparent color that was there with the original sensor. The protection layer on the serviced CCD probably took away some magic of the original that suffered commonly from erosion. This makes a few magical color photos in my portfolio from the early days even more precious, such as this one taken in 2012:
Baroque dance in Château Versailles
Luckily I’ve been very happy coming back to shooting color film. Portra 400 is just amazing when given tons of light while Portra 160 is no slouch. Not having to fiddle with post-processing in color is also amazingly liberating for the shooting mind.