Leica M10 Monochrom

Leica is a company that plays by different rules to everyone else. By building cameras in low volumes and charging a premium for them, it's able to pursue different avenues from the mainstream Japanese makers. It's maintained a healthy market for its M-series rangefinders, despite this type of camera having generally fallen out of favour in the1960s, and it also makes cameras dedicated to black & white shooting, with its M Monochrom series.

So how, and why, would you do such a thing? The basic principle is simple: conventional cameras sense colour by arranging red, green and blue filters over the light-sensitive photodiodes of their sensors, with the recorded data being converted to a visually meaningful photograph through a complex process of demosaicing, noise reduction and sharpening. While this works very well, it delivers less detail and introduces artefacts compared to recording full colour data for each pixel. To produce a black & white image, the colour has to be removed again, but you're still stuck with the after-effects of the processing. In contrast, by doing without a colour filter array (CFA) over the sensor, the Monochrom cameras are capable of recording black & white images directly. This gives visibly superior tonality and detail, along with higher sensitivity and lower image noise.

The latest M10 Monochrom is the third generation of this line, after the original M9-based version from 2012 with its 18MP CCD sensor, and the 2015 follow-up, the Typ 246 with its 24MP CMOS. However while these previous models used existing sensors without a CFA, the latest differs by employing a completely new 40.9-million-pixel full-frame CMOS sensor that doesn't, as yet, have a