Leica has created some wonderful cameras. The company is known for a luxury camera range, but they also offer some fantastic longevity. Leica is also known to engineer some of the best offerings for street photography, and today we take a look at the one that’s a perfect fit for young photographers.
The Leica XE was introduced in 2014 and features a 16MP APS-C camera. It comes with a 24mm f2.8 lens, a 230K-Dot TFT LCD, 11 AF points and an ISO of 12,500. Ergonomically, the point and shoot is stylish and fun to use. The controls are at the top and the backside, with the back also offering a nice focusing dial. There is also USB access and HDMI ports, to make transfer easy.
The Leica XE feels really nice in your hands, and seems a lot like old rangefinders. The grip is conformation and overall it is a solid camera for most needs. The menu system is straightforward but also very long. You can choose between JPEG and DNG RAW files to make your life easy.
The camera’s autofocusing abilities are fantastic, and is at par with other point and shoot cameras launched in the same year. The system also offers focusing points such as one point, 11 point, face detection, spot, and manual focusing. The single point is very fast, but for street photography, it is better to use zone focusing or manual focus.
As for the image quality, the XE produces solid images. Since the sensor is from Sony, the results are pretty wonderful. The RAW files are pretty versatile, and you have to work on them to make things better. The ISO results are great at ISO 12,800, and the editing was fantastic, including the colors. In fact, we also realized that the Leica XE retains lots of shadow details but not so much from the highlights. As we further added:
Beyond that, you’ll also really enjoy turning ISO 12,500 images into black and whites since the fairly low noise grain looks very nice and very film-like.
The Leica XE offers a big improvement over the company’s previous entries into the X series of cameras. There is a lot to like about the camera, too, such as the design, compactness, and so on.
At the moment, the Leica XE can cost about $1100 to $1500, which means it costs only a fraction of other offerings that you see today. If you are someone who has always thought of buying a Leica, then this model is a great start.
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