I've never been satisfied with the IQ of any of the cameras I've owned, I have been reading up on the Leica X1 for quite a while but was reluctant to buy one since they are supposed to be announcing its replacement next month. Long story short I decided not to wait on the purchase, and got a Leica certified used X1 from a camera shop for $1495. It seemed like the used prices were going up after it was officially discontinued, and I didn't feel like waiting perhaps a year for the replacement because I know the new ones will be back ordered.
Here are my thoughts so far:
1. Awesome image quality. I'm an optics guy, kind of a fanatic about IQ, and have generally never been satisfied with the cameras that I've owned. Now I'm happy.
2. I love the controls, the camera gives me quick access to everything I need and it just gets out of the way when shooting.
3. Autofocus is slow, but not unbearably so... I took it out with my son to the playground, I figured what test could be more difficult than shooting a speeding 5 year old? I got some really nice images, below is one of them and a 100% crop. Resolving individual cat hairs on his coat while he's going down a slide? I'll take that.
4. Metering in bright light was problematic, the camera kept washing out the highlights. I'll have to work on a more manual approach, although it's tough when much of what I shoot is my son. And he never slows down.
5. JPG's out of the camera are awesome. I've been shooting raw with it, I have Photoshop CS5 and yet in a lot of ways I struggle to match the JPG outputs. I thought it was a drawback at first that the camera forces you to record JPG's while shooting raw, but now I'm glad it does because it gives me a benchmark to compare against when post-processing. (I've almost always shot JPG's with my D90 so this whole raw thing is new to me).
Below is a quick self portrait of my ugly mug, taken cell phone style. Clearly I need to find better subjects, but I don't think any camera anywhere near the ballpark of the price of the X1 provides this kind of optics. Not to mention, the thing is so small that it will be going with me almost everywhere (unlike my Nikon D90, which is too bulky to bother with most of the time).
gary
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