I’m sitting in a coffee shop on a bright sunny Friday morning in Tulare County, California with the Leica Q3 in my bag. After a full day of traveling with this camera, my thoughts are pretty straight forward – the Q3 can basically do anything.
Coming into this trip with this camera, I initially didn’t really see a strong purpose of a variable resolution sensor. I’ve always been a 24-megapixel guy (at most), but having the options available on the Q3, I’ve actually found myself changing and utilizing the variable resolution sensor – a lot. I’ve programmed one of the back buttons for this, so for my snapshots (which is mostly how I shoot) I’ve been keeping the camera set at 18 megapixels. I’ll use my customized back button to very quickly switch to 60 megapixels when I want to use of one of the insanely competent crop modes (which I use a lot) – and they always blow my mind.
But onto the sensor itself: I’ll admit that all of this resolution and dynamic range proved difficult for me to crack for the first couple of days. I’m used to the limitations of older digital sensors, and for a very long time now, I’ve even preferred them – at least for my personal work. But when I started to accept and really lean in to the dynamic range and utilize those modern sensor strengths, I’ve been incredibly pleased with the results. The added data in the shadows and highlights hasn’t been quite the issue for me that I thought it would be, but it DID take me a good day or two to figure out exactly how to best make this sensor “work” for me and what I want. With every new camera system and sensor that I try, there is always that process involved in finding the balance between what the sensor WANTS to do, and what I WANT it to do, and when I struck that balance a few days in with my Q3, we were off and running.
This camera as a whole, with the variable resolution sensor, feels almost limitless in what you can do with it. The fixed wide lens (wider than what Leica calls 28mm – I think it’s closer to 25mm) is actually perfect for documentary style snapshots – which is something that I do a lot of. In real world use, I wouldn’t have any hesitation in using this camera as my only piece of equipment for a work shoot under the right situations, particular very general event type photography. I’ve never loved 28mm for portraits, even with the crop modes, but aside from that, the Q3 would be up to the task for just about anything that I’d be throwing at it.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the Q3 versus the Q2, and this is tougher to nail down with an obvious answer. I think the variable resolution sensor is by far the main selling point of the Q3, and for someone like me who thought I would never use this feature (or even want it) – it’s proving already to be almost invaluable to me. I found the megapixels to be too high on the Q2 for most of my personal needs since I always shoot in RAW, so uploading everything to Lightroom CC’s cloud was simply cumbersome to me – all the time – with the Q2. But I’ve been truly satisfied with the Q3’s 18mp snapshots, with the occasional 60mp raw file thrown in for when I want to use a 75 or 90mm crop mode.
As I finish up this article from the airport – about to board for the journey home, my overall simple thought about the Leica Q3 is that it is *easily* the best travel camera that I have ever used. I really find no limitations with this system, and now that I’ve cracked my own “code” of this newer sensor, I find myself wanting to shoot it more, and more, and more…
I’ll end this post with a large selection of Q3 shots from the trip. Some of these are with the 75 and even 90mm crop modes. See if you can tell which ones, and thanks for reading!
