Right now, My Open Letter to Leica has garnered 370 signatures from photographers like you who see and appreciate the wonderful qualities of CCD sensors.
Leica‘s announcement of ongoing support of the current CCD sensor has been welcomed by many in the Leica community.
However, if you are a fan of the “magic” of CCD, please join me in asking Leica to also introduce an updated CCD sensor in a future M camera.
Thank you,
—Peter.
Prosophos 
🙂 🙂 🙂
I admire your effort on this subject, (I am sure even Leica do as well) but from the Leica view it must and always does come back to units sold and profit. I am only guessing here (does anyone know?) the M240 has sold better than the M9. From what I hear the company is doing very well.
The big Medium format players also appear to have droped CCD for CMOS.
The big MF players have indeed gravitated to CMOS… but they’ve lost the CCD look!
740 eyes can´t be worng; Peter this is your success!
I would highly recommend beneath “ME” “IMAGES” and “BLOG”, “Letter TO LEICA” as another headline, because I think more people take notice of this important subject!
Merry Xmas to you and your family!
Andreas
Good to hear from you Andreas, I was wondering where you were hiding.
Thank you, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours.
I’ll consider your advice regarding the “Open Letter to Leica” tab, but as you know I prefer a simple website interface, with few tabs (and no advertising).
—Peter.
Don´t you know?….I was there,….. every single day ……at pbp.com 🙂
As you know no “stage direction” 😉 , but sometimes when I want to look how many people did sign, I must rummage on your site and I ask myself if new readers will find it perhaps only by accident, but if that is your intention, I agree! And let us be honest Peter: the name of ” Leica” is mentioned in nearly every comment. Peter, probably I am egoistic, just want to have a new M with CCD in 2015! 🙂
Happy New Year!
Andreas
Hello all, I was following this debate since months now. I have played with an M9 for several years, doing a lot of photos with it. On the side I also played a lot with Fuji camera, Nikon hi-res and hi-ISO cameras and also with the A7. My main concern was obviously this particular CCD touch. How to address this programmed obsolescence issue with the technology change on the sensor. Like the lenses remains the same, it’s definitively on the sensor side that everything is done. I have tried the Sony, good images, sometimes really looking like Leica, but in my opinion awful ergonomics. So what to do? I recently chose an M-P as upgrade. But how to get the M9 look?
I think that Leica could do something interesting with a modern camera like the M and CCD inside, obviously. But this is probably not the industry direction. So what can we do? To get straight out of the camera result, it’s complicated. But with post processing, maybe there’s a solution. To understand that, it good to know the differences between the two technologies and the impact on an image. As I told you, we are using the same lenses. One of the main differences between the CMOS and the CCD redressing are in the transitions between the darks and the lights. It’s softer. It’s done using more pixels and we have probably a wider palette of tones. What could be interesting is if we can recreate the look and feel of a CCD in Lightroom or CR per example. The idea here is to check the post process parameters to get an image that is looking similar to the CCD. I’m trying right now to see if this is possible by playing with two three parameters on LR. The first topic is to have softer transition. I’m first playing with the contrast, adjusting it around -50, -60. Then there’s the clarity, pushed by +10 to increase a little bit the dynamics of the image. Then you can also play with whites, blacks, light and shadows parameters. I’m voluntary not playing with colours. You can change them upon your preferences.
I’m trying to get good results with it. I’ll see if it works in a couple of months. It’s important from my stand point to validate the concept with several images. Then I’ll see if I can get a good result or not. But I have to try. If anybody has made already such experience, I’ll be glad to know.
Cheers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
I wrote some technical’s on the 10th Dec. Leica corrosion piece. Which you may want to look at. Basically CCD and CMOS do actually work differently, CCD pixel only job is to collect light, and therefore more dynamic range information. CMOS pixels collect less light and rely on electronic signal boost. Cameras like the Sony 7s with larger CMOS pixels counter this to a degree, and for anything like a CCD look, larger CMOS pixels is the way to go, rather than relying on the boosting. A CCD using CMOS boosting tech would produce ultimate image quality, all be it more expensive to produce and more power hungry.
That’s perfectly correct from the electronic stand point, with this the CCD is better, for sure. Now, all the electronic devices are sending their signals to a “so call” DSP, that will process the signal. That’s the point where we can act, and that is my assumption. The boost made on the signal is different on a Cmos that on the CCD. We can potentially correct the output signal to gimmick the CCD in PP, that’s the idea. But, maybe I’m wrong…
interesting:
http://www.ptgrey.com/white-paper/id/10795
Yes, interesting. I’m not sure what to make of it, until I see it “in action” however. Thanks for pointing me to this Nickolas.