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The Legendary Kodak Sensor in the M9 Had a Problem No One Talks About

Chris Gampat
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Last updated on 06/24/2026
06/26/2026
4 Mins read
Woman with curly hair and bright pink lipstick sits outdoors, wearing a floral top, looking at the camera.
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I’ve often been one of the journalists who speaks about the colors and the way that the images from the Leica M9 always felt. But I’ve also been one of the very few going beyond that to discuss how the Leica S2 also was in the same boat. That camera was basically a medium format Leica M9 — and how can you beat that? Well, in 2026 I’ve been reindexing my archives of images that I’ve made over the past 20 years. With that, I’ve been able to find and catalog the images I made in 2012 with the Leica S2. And I’ve found a problem that no one else seems to know how to talk about — and it’s not the ISO noise.

The rest of the text of this article is an update to our review of the Leica S2. You can find the full review here. Why update it? Because photographers still talk about how great old CCD sensors were. And I agree with them. But they don’t understand how editing images from them also needs to evolve if brands are going to bring them back.

Update in 2026: The Kodak Sensor in the Leica S2 was Something Special, With a Big Problem

Woman with curly hair in a floral dress poses confidently outdoors beside a tall yellow building.
Sample image from the Leica S2 edited in Capture One in 2026.

Yes, back then, medium format sensors weren’t great for high ISO output. That’s because they were a CCD sensor with a processor that just wasn’t developed for it. The time period was early digital still, and CMOS sensors were starting to become more of the norm over CCD. They used less power, could offer arguably better high ISO output, etc. But still, the older CCDs still had a charm of some sort.

What a lot of folks don’t know is that the Leica S2 was more or less the same sensor as the one in the Leica M9. To that end, they had very similar image quality.

Woman with long dark hair in ripped jeans and a white shirt sits on a stool against a plain background.
Sample image from the Leica S2 edited in Capture One in 2026.

Though there was one big problem that I’ve only really realized now as I’m older and have become a much more experienced editor and far more outspoken against issues in the camera world.

This sensor was pretty terrible for photographing people of color specifically with noticeable amounts of melanin in their skin. What do I mean by that? If you look at someone from Germany and someone from a country like Argentina who tend to be more fair-skin brown, you can tell the difference. And in my Leica S2 review, I mostly photographed women of color. When I went to edit the RAW files in Capture One, I found the color depth to be pretty lacking. Below are images that I’ve edited in Capture One; the program considered by serious working photographers to be far superior to Lightroom when it comes to editing.

Woman with curly hair wearing a floral top, looking at the camera with a serious expression, dark background.
Woman with long dark hair, white shirt, and ripped jeans sits against a white background, looking at the camera.
A bearded man plays an acoustic guitar outdoors, surrounded by green shrubs and a white wall.
Woman in a bright blue outfit smiling outdoors at a lively street event with people and buildings in the background.
Woman with long curly hair and face paint looks to the side, wearing a black top and beaded necklace outdoors.
Woman with curly hair in a pink and gray outfit stands in front of a restaurant with a red awning.
A man in glasses stands in a crowd on a colorful city street during a daytime event.

Put bluntly, the sensor in both the Leica M9 and the Leica S2 wasn’t great for people of color when it came to editing the colors in the scene. You often need to really adjust the color channels for their lips.

And even then, there are some a fair amount of oddities that I haven’t encountered with newer cameras as much. The key word there is, “As much.” To that end, I’ve still found that editing my images for different skin tones to be annoying.

A boy rides a scooter on a city street as a performer swings on a hoop, watched by a crowd.
Sample image from the Leica S2 edited in Capture One in 2026.

Overall, it reminds me of an old teaching from Steve McCurry about making sure that the colors in your portraits have three colors that really stand out from one another. Here’s a quote from an article I wrote in 2024 explaining his methods:

Steve McCurry is known for something called the three-color portrait method. This process more or less doesn’t include black or white in the method. Instead, it focuses on the ROYGBIV colors. It states that in order to not overwhelm the human eye, you have to make the colors pretty minimal.

Steve basically uses the following:

  • The color of the person’s skin
  • The color of the outfit
  • The background color

And he makes them stand out from one another just enough. But he also uses light and depth of field to make the image even more effective at emphasizing the subject. By default, lots of his backgrounds are some shade of green. And the science behind that is pretty simple. Like black, white, and gray, the color green is found naturally to work with everything in nature. Here are examples:

  • Red and Green: Roses, tulips, saffron
  • Orange and green: Mandarin trees
  • Yellow and green: Lemons and limes. Also flowers
  • Blue and green: Seaweed. Landscapes alongside rivers.
  • Indigo and Green: Spiderwort flowers.
  • Violet and green: Violet flowers

With all this said, green is a color that you can easily try to make the background for every shoot that you do.

So why bring this up in 2026? Well, photographers have been getting into digi-cams and the older CCD sensors quite a bit. To that end, they’ve been requesting camera brands to make them again. If the brands are to do this, they need to also work on the processors and the color science quite a bit more to make the image files more inclusive. But they only need to do a bit of a tweak. Not a lot. The sensors are still, to this day, quite capable and deliver a look that’s really wonderful.

A traffic control box with graffiti reading BURN THE BANKS and STRIKE on a city street corner.
A woman in a white shirt and jeans leans forward on a stool against a plain white background.
Woman in a striped shirt and denim shorts lounging on a black leather sofa against a dark background.
Woman in a striped shirt and denim shorts sits on a black couch against a gray background.
Woman with long dark hair in a striped shirt and denim shorts standing against a plain white background.
A black motorcycle is parked on a street in front of colorful graffiti and two vans.
Woman with curly hair and bright lipstick posing in front of large green leaves, wearing a floral dress.
Woman with curly hair and bright pink lipstick sits outdoors, wearing a floral top, looking at the camera.
A woman with dark hair holds a large knife near her mouth, looking intensely at the camera.
Woman with long dark hair in ripped jeans and a white shirt sits on a stool against a plain background.
Woman with long dark hair in a cream shirt leans forward, looking at the camera against a plain background.
A person rides a BMX bike on a city street with ramps and people in the background.
A person on a BMX bike jumps off a small ramp on a city street during a public event.
A man poses in the street as a woman takes his photo; colorful storefronts and people are in the background.
A small dog in a harness sits on a persons lap at a busy outdoor event with people in the background.
A street performer does a handstand as people watch on a lively city street with colorful shops.

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camera sensor CCD color editing kodak sensor leica leica m9 leica s2 people of color processor
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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