London with a Leica: The Q3 43 Review

So this year as well as Iceland I got to take a trip to London, and I got to go because my daughter is a Wildlife Photographer of the Year Highly Commended photographer with an image hanging in this years Natural History Museum exhibit. Full stop. Everything else about this trip was decoration around that one fact. I also am probably the most proud dad in the world but that doesnt have much to do with this review. You can see her image here.

Anyway knowing this trip was coming up, I bought a Q3 43 from a friend, I'd barely shot it outside of one concert, and I mainly talked myself into it because a week walking London felt like the perfect use case to dip my toes back into the Leica world I had missed. So the Q3 43 came with me, and nothing else did. Just the one camera. No backup. No “what if I want to shoot a bird” bag.

That’s not a decision I’d usually make, but I wasn't there as a photographer, I was there as the father of an award winning photographer. It’s also a decision I made because this camera, at this focal length, is a legitimately versatile travel setup. Which, if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, is a surprising sentence for me to type about a fixed-lens Leica.

Why the 43 and Not the Original Q3

I used to own the original Q3, which is a 28mm. I sold it. I’ve written about that elsewhere. The short version is that 28mm is a focal length I just don’t love. It’s wide enough to feel generic and difficult for portraits and tight enough that you can’t do real landscape with it. Honestly I just struggle with it how I shoot. I missed the Leica rendering the whole time I didn’t own one, but not enough to go back to 28.

The Q3 43 is a different camera. I bought mine from a friend a few weeks before this trip. London was really the first time I asked it to do everything.

What a Leica Lens Actually Does

Let me try to explain the thing that makes this camera worth its asking price, because it’s the part that doesn’t come through in spec sheets. And if I'm honest it still may not make it worth its asking price, thats a personal decision and there are great alternatives for a fraction of the cost but anyway.

Leica APO glass has a rendering quality that I’m chasing in almost everything else I shoot. Microcontrast, 3D pop, the specific way the lens separates the subject from its background even at middle apertures, a crispness that doesn’t feel digital. I spent a lot of time with my X100VI (which I love) and my Voigtländer APO-Lanthar 50mm (which I also love) trying to get close to this look. The Voigtländer actually does get there, optically, it’s as good as the Q3 43 lens, in my opinion. But the Voigtländer is manual focus and lives on my ZF, which is a different kind of shooting experience. The Q3 43 is compact, has autofocus, and gives you that same APO rendering in a package you can walk around with for ten hours.

*The way that red separates from the greens, the way the hedge in the foreground renders. That’s the lens.*

The X100VI, which is still a camera I love and recommend to everyone, doesn’t render the same way. It’s not as sharp. It doesn’t have the pop. In fact the lens is the most disappointing part of the X100 by far, its what holds back an otherwise brilliant camera and I just missed the Leica look, which is less Leica and more APO meets micro contrast lens tuning and crap, at least thats my understanding of how it seems to work.

Where I Have Real Issues

Here’s where I’m going to lose the Leica apologists. The DNG workflow is a mess.

Leica’s JPEG engine is first class. The in-camera files are beautiful, the color science is second maybe only to Hasselblad, and if you only ever shot JPEG you’d walk away thinking this is the best camera ever made. But I don’t shoot JPEG, I shoot RAW, and the DNGs out of this camera come out about a stop darker than the JPEG previews on the back, and the color is off in a way that’s hard to fix given adobe doesnt support Leica looks or even its base JPEG color like it does for Fuji.

I had to go buy the Q3 43 color profiles from a third party (Color Fidelity makes them) and bring those into Lightroom manually to get my DNGs anywhere close to what the camera was showing me on the back screen. And even with the third-party profiles, I couldn’t quite match the JPEG. Which is why one of the images in this post, the round library ceiling, is a straight-out-of-camera JPEG. I just couldn’t get the DNG to look as good.

*British Museum Reading Room. This is a camera JPEG. I couldn’t make the DNG match it, which is both a compliment to the JPEG engine and a frustration about the RAW.*

For a $7,000+ camera, the DNG situation is genuinely annoying. I don’t expect Fuji-level simulations in RAW, actually I kinda do, that should be my starting point and if I'm shooting Leica I should be able to take advantage of both the processing flexibility of RAW AND the incredible color science. Now I'll be honest here I don't know who is to blame, adobe or Leica, but someone needs to get that shit figured out and my instinct is that Leica needs to be pushing for it since it effects them way more.

For reference I'll put the unedited DNG next, so you can see the drastic difference.

It's so much darker and the colors are so much flatter, it's a ton of work to get to the baseline that Lecia's JPG engine gives you and thats a problem.

*Covent Garden Media Boxx. London is a city of phone boxes that aren’t phone boxes anymore.*

Wondering around London

While I was there for a reason, I did get some time to just wander the city and take pictures of whatever caught my eye, from postcard shots to my favorite place in the city by far, Camden and its rich punk scene.

Camden my favorite place in London by far

Low Light, Compressed and Isolated

*The Natural History Museum facade. Available light, handheld, no tripod. The optical stabilization and the lens do most of the work.*

*The warm light pooling against the cold blue of the stone is the kind of thing the Leica rendering handles beautifully.*

The Optical Stabilization on the Q3 43 is good enough that handheld low light is just handheld low light. No excuses. Both of those shots are handheld at shutter speeds.

The Reason I Was There

*The WPY exhibit opening at the Natural History Museum. The elephant is a cardboard sculpture, the people are everyone who had an image hanging that year*

This is a frame I’ll keep from the trip. Not the technically best image, not the one I’d print largest, just the one that holds the whole reason we flew across an ocean. My daughter, Highly Commended at Wildlife Photographer of the Year, standing in a room where her image was hanging on a wall of the Natural History Museum.

The Q3 43 handled it, by the way. Fast enough to grab candids, quiet enough not to disrupt the room, and the Leica rendering made the mixed-color lighting of the installation look painterly instead of chaotic. Which is exactly the kind of situation a travel camera has to handle, and the Q3 43 just handled it.

Would I Buy It Again

Its hard to say, like I want to say yes for sure, but one of the reasons I sold the Q3 28 was because of the DNG workflow and how much of a giant pain it was, the other was 28. I don't have the focal length issue but that freaking DNG issue is huge and still very much there, and only time will tell if I can live with it and the extra work it generates when I can shoot the Zf with the Voitlander APO and have none of the color issues.

That said the Leica rendering is a thing that matters to me, more than I always admit, and the 43mm focal length is the version of this camera that I actually want to carry. The X100VI is still an incredible camera, and if you asked me for one travel recommendation for most people, that’s still my answer. It’s a third of the price and it will make most people happier than a Leica will. But if you’ve shot the X100VI for a while and you keep looking at your files thinking there’s a layer missing, that layer is what a Leica APO lens gives you, and the Q3 43 is the most practical way to get it.

Just budget a weekend for third-party color profiles before you take it anywhere important.