Leica Q3 arrives 🔗
DPReview’s initial review of the Leica Q3 says:
- Tilt screen
- Actual ports (USB-C, micro-HDMI)
- Bigger sensor
- Some rearranged buttons
- Option for wireless charging
- Hybrid AF
- $5995
They stuck with the previous 28mm lens and are standing by digital crop if you want to get to tighter focal lengths. I’d still prefer a native 35mm, but you’d lose a little “take anywhere” versatility.
Anyhow:
The tilt screen is very welcome, and will make the lens’s macro mode more useful/practical.
The rearranged buttons caught my eye, because the Q2’s arrangement felt pretty unergonomic, and it was easy to accidentally press them with your face when shooting in portrait orientation. DPReview says it helps:
In addition to the new tilting touch panel, the buttons for ‘Menu’ and ‘Play’ and a custom function button have been moved, now appearing on the right to join the four-way controller. Having used both cameras, within a few hours of shooting the new one I found the layout to be a marked improvement that let me reach all the buttons with just my right thumb while the left hand stayed on the lens ready for the next shot. It’s a much faster and less cumbersome arrangement that let me get in and out of menus quicker.
Having a USB-C port is welcome. The wireless charging part sounds like a nice-to-have that makes it a little nicer to just keep near the door.
All in all, sounds like a nice step forward for the Q series, and with the tilt screen it sort of does become the $5995 Fujifilm X100V you always wished would happen, with its 35mm digital crop still outresolving the X100V by a few megapixels.
Speaking of the X100V, I did compare it with the Q2 a few years ago:
I don’t think the Q2 is four times the camera an X100V is, and I can’t think of anyone I’d be in the position of recommending a camera to for whom I’d recommend it as the better choice: Dollar for dollar, the X100V is a much better camera for almost everybody interested in a premium compact camera. At the same time, now that I own the Q2 and have not returned it or sold it in a fit of guilt, I wouldn’t easily part with it: I love shooting with it, love what I get out of it, and expect to keep it for a long time. The only reason it is not my only camera comes down to its fixed, very wide lens, which makes portraits and some outdoor photography a relative challenge.
One thing that changed a lot for me since writing that up was the arrival of IBIS in the Fujifilm ILC lineup. It wasn’t something I weighted as heavily then, but definitely started weighting more heavily as I learned how much it expanded my horizons. With the changes showing up in the Q3, I’ll just say that the gap between the X100 series and the Q series has narrowed. There’s still 4,200 actual dollars of daylight between the two to account for, but the Q3 is a more flexible camera than its predecessor.
So:
- A bit shy of 2x the resolution, uncropped sensor
- Faster, more versatile lens
- Image stabilization
I’m not sure how to go about doing a parts list that would account for the differences and leave me with some objective calculation of the brand tax you’re paying, but it’s easy to imagine an X100 Pro series because we have that in the form of an X-Pro3 with the 23mm/f2 Fujicron, and MSRP on that rig is around $2,300. So, following this reasoning, we’ve got about $3,300 to account for. You’re still a stop shy on the lens and don’t have a macro mode, you’re still trading away depth of field and resolution thanks to the sensor difference, you still don’t have image stabilization.
Okay … so maybe we stick the newer Fujiflm XF23mm/f1.4WR on our theoretical X100 Pro. That’s $500 over the 23/f2. We’re down to $2,800 difference. We’re still contending with the sensor difference and IBIS. Tough to call.
On IBIS, the Fujifilm X-T4 was an incremental change over the X-T3, and it came in at $200 more MSRP, with IBIS being one of the larger differentiators. The X-T5 introduced a much larger (but still APS-C) sensor, but kept the MSRP. So … we’re down to $2,600 difference, and still have to account for the sensor, which sort of throws the math on the lens, too. I’m not sure how to square that. Call it $500.
So, we’ve found about $1,300 in component differences (IBIS, lens, sensor)? Leaving us with around $3000 to account for.
I am assuming the red dot involves pigments mixed from the blood of unicorns.
I kid.
Silos and Denote 🔗
Last night I was finishing up some note cleanup in Denote and realized that a lot of the stuff I’d atomized from my job search was sort of interesting and useful, but not in a day-to-day way. And that I wanted to have some way to segregate, eventually, “work” from “personal.”
Denote has a siloing feature that lets you keep separate directories of Denote notes that can’t see each other. If you operate in one of those directories, all your Denote activities (creating a new note, etc.) treat that directory as home. Outside the context of any particular directory, your default Denote directory is home. There are a few other features related to suggested keywords in those silos, but for now it’s enough to be able to make broad distinctions.
There’s also a useful function for pre-selecting a silo then running a Denote command targeted at it, so you can be out and about elsewhere in the filesystem and dispatch information to different silos as needed.
For now I’m siloing by default/personal and “career,” which is what I am calling all the interview notes, work-oriented biographical stuff and generic management writing I’ve had to do. I’ll probably put my job search log, interview notes, and other stuff that’s currently all in a monolith into that directory as well, for long-term storage. And eventually there will be a “work” silo for day-to-day work stuff.
I vacillated about the segregation of big-picture career-related writing from day-to-day work writing, but realized most of that career stuff is a prompt. Interesting to read through, and good grist for first-30-day planning and thinking, but not pertinent to the day-to-day. If I end up feeling like some part of it is, I’ll just pull it into a metanote as a link.
I guess the other Denote thing of, er, note, was that Prot’s whole “this is also a good way to just learn Emacs” direction with Denote got a workout tonight. I watched his demo video, where he marked a selection of files by regexp in dired, then made the unmarked ones disappear from view in the directory. It took three or four scrub-throughs to catch which commands he was using to make that happen, because he was just doing it the way you do when something is deep in your muscle memory. But eventually I caught it all – %m to mark by regexp, t to invert the selection, then k to “kill” the lines (but not kill kill them, just hide them). It sounds like a lot, but most of my Doom menus are two or three keystrokes deep. Once I had it, it was a lot easier to narrow and triage my collection and get everything dispatched into a silo.
Update on that … 🔗
One thing I didn’t like so much about that “just use the native commands” approach was that in Doom, you’ve got to switch in and out of evil mode to use all of dired’s keystrokes. I ended up grabbing dired-narrow, which dynamically narrows a dired buffer, and then recorded a quick macro to restore the buffer view (using the native dired command, which would need a shift out of evil mode):
(defun mph/dired-unnarrow ()
(interactive)
(evil-emacs-state)
(execute-kbd-macro (kbd "g C-z")))
Then I added dired-narrow and my new macro to my Denote menu structure:
(map! :leader
:nv "n d" nil ;; Doom has deft here, so we have to nil it out first
(:prefix-map ("n" . "notes")
(:prefix ("d" . "Denote")
:desc "ripgrep" "/" #'mph/denote-rg-search
:desc "Backlinks" "b" #'denote-link-backlinks
:desc "Move subtree" "c" #'mph/denote-org-copy-subtree
:desc "add keywords" "k" #'denote-keywords-add
:desc "remove keywords" "K" #'denote-keywords-remove
:desc "Move subtree" "m" #'mph/denote-org-move-subtree
:desc "New note" "d" #'denote
:desc "Rename with frontmatter" "r" #'denote-rename-file-using-front-matter
:desc "Pick silo, then command" "s" #'mph/denote-pick-silo-then-command
:desc "Narrow dired view" "n" #'dired-narrow
:desc "Unnarrow dired view" "u" #'mph/dired-unnarrow
)))
Technically I guess those narrow/unnarrow commands belong in some other hierarchy, but I will tend to use them when I’m doing stuff with Denote, and they can live in more than one context if I wish.
I have the sense there are other things I could be using, like Embark, but I am still struggling with the whole Vertico ecosystem, so one thing at a time.
Update to the update 🔗
With Vertico/Embark on Doom, I don’t need dired narrow to get what I was after:
SPC .to start finding files- Once things are narrowed,
C-c ;moves all the candidates into their own buffer - Do stuff
qto quit the transient buffer