Hasta La Gadget!

Perhaps Leica has finally realized that its lenses are where the real action is. The M8 rangefinder might be a beautifully engineered tool, but it looks rather spartan next to other, much cheaper, digital cameras. And we don’t mean spartan in the good way, either — in the film days Leicas performed as well as any other 35mm camera as they all used the same film. Now, with low-light sensors, uncannily good autofocus and exposure meters that out-guess a human 99% of the time, the almost all-manual M looks like an expensive metal box.

The lenses, though, are magical. And now you can use them on the DMC-G1 and DMC-GH1, Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds “DSLR” with a pair of adapters which marry up the cameras to Leica’s R and M lenses. If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that these lenses are manual focus, and that both the G1 and GH1 lack an optical viewfinder. On of the things that makes the M-series cameras so easy to focus is the split image rangefinder. With these cameras, though, you’ll need to rely on a magnified section in the  middle of the LCD screen to judge if you have things sharp. Good luck with that.

Panasonic has not yet announced a price for these Lumix adapters, but you can be pretty sure they’ll cost more than Voigtländer’s $200 offering which does the same thing for any Micro Four Thirds camera. You’ll also have to watch out for compatibility issues, as some lenses won’t work with these adapters.

Press release [DP Review]