Leica SL camera borrows much of its design from Leica S
Cameras
Leica takes on Sony with the full-frame mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, the Leica SL.
Although there's a lot to like about this camera, there's some really annoying aspects to it as well.
I'm Lori Grunin for CNET and this is the Leica SL.
It's certainly one of the fastest full-frame cameras around and it's the closest to the speed and responsiveness of a DSLR that I've seen.
Going with the [UNKNOWN] design allows Leica to reach a maximum burst of about 11 frames per second.
Though its continuous auto focus and auto exposure, that tests out to about 7 frames per second for JPEGs.
Still faster than all of the Sonys but not quite up to the [UNKNOWN] D750.
And the auto focus is quite fast as well.
You don't get some of the size benefits of [UNKNOWN], though.
It's huge.
It's not heavy until you add on the DSLR size lenses.
But it has an exceptionally nice viewfinder, it's big and bright, and it has the same novel, but intelligent menu design system of the Lika F medium format model.
Most of the design is very well thought out But it has two real drawbacks.
One is the grip, which has to be the least comfortable I've used in years.
As one of my colleagues described it, you need action figure hands for it.
The other negative is the placement of the front adjustment dial and function buttons, both of which are set a little too far out for comfort.
And while the control operation is nice and mostly I love the joystick.
i constantly push one of the buttons with my nose when using the viewfinder and the joysticks a little too sensitive.
I kept accidentally moving out of focus points.
As for features it really has about everything you need except an articulating LCD.
The photo quality lives up to like a standard, though you probably wanna underexpose a bit in high contrast scenes, and it's not obviously better than Sony's.
The 4K video is also quite good, with a lot of room for grading if you shoot with like his log out profile.
In very low light, though, it's much noisier than even Sony's A7R2.
The question becomes how much is the better performance and the like a badge worth to you.
Because those are its two main differentiators over its competitors.
For more detail, you'll have to check out my full review on cnet.
