© Andy Westlake

New Year’s Greetings!

On a noble quest to rein­vent a tra­di­tion, Leica AG made a sur­pris­ing move with three of their lat­est prod­ucts. It is an expen­sive bet they are mak­ing, and it looks like they have found their path once again.

The S3, The M9 and The X1 are to Leica, what BMW offers with their 7, 5 & 1 series sedans; they are lay­ing a new ground­work for their future path and they are tak­ing it seri­ously; not only they are going back to basics to look for new answers as their core of these new prod­ucts, they are rethink­ing big at the small­est details with their lat­est incar­na­tions of Leica’s aging legacy, no longer they are rely­ing on out­side help to dis­cover what they really can do.

With the ris­ing sen­sa­tion of pock­etable pho­tog­ra­phy, Leica has crafted a unique blend of beauty with their new X1 line; mas­quer­aded on a min­i­mal­is­tic high-end (yet tiny) mag­ne­sium cast and its leg­endary opti­cal per­for­mance; Leica has suc­cess­fully unite art, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy & fash­ion that will change the shape of pock­etable high-performance camera:

It’s impos­si­ble not to con­clude that the X1 has the best high ISO per­for­mance of any ‘coat pock­etable’ cam­era yet. But it’s also worth not­ing that in prac­ti­cal use, its advan­tage over the GF1 (or E-P1) is almost com­pletely wiped out by the stop and a half more light the 20mm F1.7 can gather

Read DPreview’s 28-page excel­lent take on the Leica X1