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Excellent review David! I am looking forward putting my hands on El Jefe in the very near future!

Wow, what a complete and wonderfully timely review.
Looking forward to your S (007) review should you ever get one ahead of time.
Get some sleep now.
Jack

Great review David.

As a two-year owner of the original M Monochrom I've been eager to see how the new CMOS version would compare, and your review shows us that exactly.

Impressive as it is, I will sit out this generation of M cameras and go forward for the next three years (or maybe six?) with the original M Monochrom and M-E, which both still do just about everything I want them too with the singular exception of clean high ISO in color, which isn't worth the cost of a dual upgrade or of dealing with two hardware systems and their respective batteries and chargers.

For me the world is the same as it was last week, M-E (M9) for beautiful color on good to moderate light, and M Monochrom for incredible black and white no matter the conditions. ISO 10,000 is high enough for anything I want to do except deep depth of field in low light, which just isn't a priority.

Great images by the way.

All of the images were processed in Adobe Lightroom CC (v6).

Sure. Here is a screen grab from my basic settings in LR for an M246 file:

My biggest change is to pull down the blacks and bring up the exposure to compensate a little. I like rich shadow contrast. Really, though, these changes are fairly minor. Sometimes, I'll bring up the shadows or tone down the highlights more. It really depends on the image and my intended interpretation.

On the sharpening and noise reduction settings I use:

And that's about it. I don't change the sharpening settings, except at very high ISO, I will bump up Masking a little. And with NR, I will bring the amount up to 20-30 for shots above ISO 8000.

Hope this helps.

Did you try to turn off lens profile corrections in LR?

We first discovered a strange behavior in LR when processing M9M files a couple years ago when using lens profile corrections. Seems that there is sometimes some pattern noise introduced in B&W images with pulled up shadows. What was even stranger was that the artifacts were only visible once exported. In LR, at any magnification, the files were clean.

Some shots were manually set, but most were shot with Auto ISO, using Aperture priority.

Color filters work the same way on B&W digital as they do on film. The effect is much easier to accomplish in camera than in post processing.

Hi.

I am considering to Purchase a M 246 after reading your review.

I am a DSLR usar and I am kind of worried about the rangefinder and focus.

Do you have any recomendations about this transition?

Thank you!

You can't go wrong with the 50 APO. I switched from the 50 Lux to the 50 APO and never once regretted it. The bokeh of the 50 APO is still very nice and pleasing. The Lux will be a little softer, but will not be as sharp as the APO wide open. And on the Monochrom M246, the added sharpness really shows. Hope this helps.

I would welcome insight from others on processing software other than Adobe CC, PS, or LR with the MM246. Capture One appears to be not compatible and when I called their tech people they said they had no plans to do so, even though the M9 Monochrom is supported. Has anyone tried Luminar?

The raw version is the shinier silver one. The price is $59.

Komaru Titanium Soft Release – Raw