I grow weary. Weary of carrying around my SLR-gear when I go out shooting landscapes. Body, lenses, battery grip, big and heavy tripod, remote and so on… Everything for later posting a pic or two of the shooting 1200 pixels wide on the web.

What I often ask myself is: Do I really need all this stuff? Do I need to carry all this to get another 5% or 10% better image quality? Or would a camera like the Leica D-Lux 4 be sufficient. It’s not a bad camera at all, you know? 24-60mm with 2.0 to 2.8 max aperture. Thats a lot of low light possibility.  RAW capability, spot metering. Max ISO 3200 (usable 800 ISO in reality). And it looks purty…

But would it be a good replacement for my DSLR? Does it have a good dynamic range? I think it’s dynamic range would be sufficient. Depth of field is my problem. I cannot get any shallow depth of field with a small sensor cam. So it’s out of business for me. Too bad. Maybe a D-Lux 5 or the new Olympus serious compact.

Of course, a Leica M8 would be a perfect fit. Great lenses, and a good depth of field to be creative (1.3 Crop). It’s relatively small. And sexy.

But $5000 for the body alone? Not my league.

So basically all I can do is stick to the EOS 40D and work it, until a serious compact comes out to fulfill my needs and wants:

• - small form factor (bigger then a compact, though)
• - bigger sensor then the usual compacts
• - easy access of the needed controls:  aperture, iso, exposure compensation
• - a viewfinder
• - either a fast 50mm fixed lens, or the ability to change it
• - get rid of all the unneeded stuff like video, face detection, touchscreen, superzoom, scene modes and all this crap. It just distracts you from composing

Are we gonna see a camera like this? Sigma and Leica are moving towards it, but aren’t yet bold enough. Olympus might have something like this in development. We will see at PMA ‘09.

Lets hope someone will have the guts to do this.

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