Leica S2

Leica S2 review

Twenty grand is a lot of money. By today's prices that will buy you a brand-new Mini Cooper, a deposit on a house, or even a university education. With £20,000 you can buy a lot of camera kit, too: a pair of Nikon D3X bodies with 14-24mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses plus an Apple MacBook Pro, 27-inch screen and the whole Adobe Creative Suite doesn't come to that much. But what if you could also spend this princely sum on just one camera body and a standard lens. Would you? That's about what the Leica S2 costs when paired with with its standard lens, the Summarit 70mm f/2.5. The Leica S2 is a medium-format camera, meaning its sensor is bigger than you'd find in a full-frame DSLR – 56% bigger in this case. There are many other medium-format cameras on the market of course (all of them expensive), but when Leica came to the table with the S2 it wanted to offer something different.The trouble with medium-format cameras is their size and weight. The famous Mamiya RB and RZ series of cameras, as well as Hasselblad's legendary V-system, have been professional workhorses for years, but you wouldn't want to sling one over your shoulder and use it to shoot travel photography in an Indian marketplace.