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How do you turn a smartphone-photo devotee into a bona fide camera nerd? You give them smartphone-style touchscreen controls on an excellent camera that connects to their mobile for easy sharing.
This strategy—compress the complexities of a high-end camera into a smartphone-style interface—has shaped Leica's playbook for its T-series cameras, the first of which arrived three years ago. Today Leica is announcing the newest member of the touchscreen-bedecked T family, the Leica TL2. The new TL2 ($1,950 for the body) is a mirrorless system camera with a 24-megapixel sensor. Overall, the camera is spec'd through the roof. There are a battery of native T-type lenses available, plus adaptors for screwing on other Leica system lenses. Use the hot shoe to attach a flash or the optional and very capable electronic viewfinder.
The most striking thing about the camera, however, is how close to the bone Leica has stripped the controls. You barely get the basics—two knobs on the back, a shutter button, and an extra button you can program to do whatever. In lieu of the traditional fiddly bits, a very nice 3.7-inch touchscreen is plopped on the back, where it stretches most of the length of the camera's chamfered, one-piece body. You use that screen to do everything: from selecting the ISO, aperture, and shooting modes, all the way down to the tiniest tweaks.
Almost every camera you can buy today has a touchscreen, but few come with an experience this nice. The main menu, which you summon with a tap, is fully customizable. When you add or remove functions (or even just re-order the icons) the experience is exactly like moving apps around on your phone's home screen. You also get full control over which functions you map to the physical controls—those two thumb wheels above the screen and the button next to the shutter.
Leica loaned me a TL2, and I shot with it for the entirety of the 4th of July weekend. The first thing I did was lock it aperture priority mode and change the left-most thumb wheel to adjust exposure compensation. This made it easier to get good exposure levels when shooting in low light—something I couldn't get enough of with Leica's photon-gulping f/1.4 35mm lens ($2,395, wooof!). On the first couple of days, I was opening the touchscreen menu frequently, fine-tuning the settings and mapping different functions to the other thumb wheel. On the third day, I opened that menu maybe twice. On the fourth and fifth days, I didn't open it at all.
There's a mental freedom in shooting with a camera that barely has any controls on it, sort of like driving a semi-autonomous sedan loaded with nannyware. You spend less time futzing and more time observing and enjoying. I realized I was treating the TL2 like a point-and-shoot—a ridiculously expensive point-and-shoot with insane image quality, a super-fast 49-point autofocus, and one of the tastiest pieces of glass I've ever peered through. But really, the best feature of the camera is that all of the controls aren't right there, in your face, constantly making you question your judgement.
OK, well, there's at least one other feature I liked: the Leica TL smartphone app. After a ten-second song and dance, your phone is connected to the camera and you can download and share your shots over Wi-Fi. If you buy a TL2, your Instagram game is going to get bonkers—as long as you don't consider shooting with a Leica to be cheating, which I don't, so don't @ me. I'll be too busy snapping gorgeous photos to reply to you anyway.
