Picking On Complete Strangers – Food Truck at Night Edition.

Testing the High ISO performace

I’ve been out testing the new (new to me at least) Leica M Monochrom Typ 246 lately, and one of the things that everyone raves about with this camera is just how great it is when the sun goes down. 

Part of having a camera with a missing Bayer filter means that the camera should have decreased noise and more detail because it isn’t splitting the light into the red, blue, and green channels. While I believe this to be true based on the science of how it all works, I was very curious to see if that truth results in actual, noticeable benefits in the real world.To that end, I decided to put these low light/high ISO abilities to the test – picking on complete strangers-style.

And what better place to push some ISO’s to the max than going for a good old photowander on the streets of downtown vancouver after dark. I wandered up and down the Granville strip, around the Art Gallery and Robson Square, and basically just here and there, and the one thing that I kept being attracted to was all these perfect strangers bathed in the glow of late-night food trucks.

You see, these food trucks’ lights just blazed so bright against the dark streets and sidewalks of downtown Vancouver, so the contrast between the super bright brights and the super dark darks was crazy. The Leica M Monochrom typ 246 has about 13 stops of dynamic range when shooting at its base ISO of 320, which is an entirely respectable amount, particularly for a camera that is ten years old now. Canon and Nikon are just now offering cameras that match that, and it is amazing that they were able to get that just by removing the Bayer sensor. The Leica M-D 262 that I have (Doogie) has the exact same sensor but with the Bayer filter intact, and it has at best 11-12 stops at the base ISO of 200.  

I keep talking about the base ISO, but being that I was out to test the High ISO performance, I must not have been getting this great dynamic range that is reported in the best-case scenario, right? We all know that the dynamic range gets less the further away from the base ISO you are, right?

Well… as it turns out, food trucks are really well lit. Like, floodlight bright. Like, “you’ll never get past ISO 800” kind of bright. So while I went in thinking I’d be maxing out the sensor’s low-light performance, I was actually shooting at or very close to Base ISO for all of these shots, so I was able to notice the benefits of that increased dynamic range.

Because I was shooting on auto ISO, I will be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention to what it was, just assuming that it would be high because of the night. I was also shooting with the The Light Lens Lab 50mm f/1.2 ASPH “1966” at my usual f/1.4 to f/2.0 so I was plesently surprised to find out when I got home that most of these a se where in that ISO 400 to 500 range with some of them being ISO 320 which was great as I think I was able to really benefit from that increases Dynamic range with these.

All in all more research required and more testing to be done. Is a monochrome camera better than a colour one? Well that is a question that only you can answer. Is the monochrom better than converting a colour image? Way more research required.