Leica Q3: A one-year review, photographing the people of Skye by night

Now that my Leica Q3 is one year old, and well-used, it’s a good time to do a comprehensive review of this little camera. It’s only once you’ve used a camera in real-world, highly stressed situations that you get a true understanding of its capabilities. I’ve had plenty of those situations in the past twelve months! And here’s what I think.

I got my Leica Q3 on launch day. How? I asked Red Dot Cameras in London if they had a waiting list many months before the official announcement. They hadn’t started a list. So, I asked them to take my name and set one up, which they did, sticking me at the top of it. Months of waiting followed as I did the usual thing and read every rumour and shred of information before release. On launch day I was in London to collect it. The cost was £5,400 with a spare battery.

Previously I had a QP, the “special edition” first version of the first Q, and had fallen in love with it. Why? The lens, and the unique image rendering it delivered at f/1.7, was very appealing to me. The physical controls, build quality, small-ish size and built-in viewfinder were other big plus points.

I was tempted by the Q2, but decided to hold out and wait a generation for the Q3, which I predicted would have a larger sensor and some new functionality. Meanwhile, I sold my QP to release some cash for my motorbiking addiction, and filled the gap with a Fuji X100V which shares many of the same traits, such as physical controls and a fixed lens.

When rumours of the Q3 were becoming more solid, I decided it was for me and switched back to Leica-land, selling the X100V at a small profit.

Why spend so much on a camera?

An excellent question. One that can be rationalised with convoluted “price per use” logic, or what good value it is compared with a Leica M and three Summilux lenses. But it remains an extremely expensive item. In reality, I wanted it, had worked hard to save the money to afford it, and knew I’d be using it extensively on this Skye At Night project. And I loved using my QP. Getting personal happiness and satisfaction from the use of an exquisite object is important to me.

Emotional justification aside, I also knew I had much people photography coming up for the project, and wanted to use one camera setup for the majority of the shoots, to give me a consistent look throughout.

Why not use the Sony A7III?

I also own a Sony A7III, and a couple of lenses. It’s a very efficient and capable camera, but I really dislike using it. It’s fiddly, the controls and menus are not intuitive, and it is inelegant.

For sure, it gets the job done. It is technically excellent, but has no character. Do I need character in a camera? Not really. Do I want character in a camera? Yes, definitely.

I could have saved over £4,000 and bought a Sony 24mm f/1.4 lens to put on the A7III, and got similar framing and focus dropoff (bokeh) as the Leica. My purely rational and logical calculation was that I required a second camera for redundancy, didn’t like the Sony, and the Q3 was it. Good enough for me.

What have I been using the Q3 for?

Eighty percent of my use has been for what I call “environmental portraits” for my Skye At Night book project, where I am photographing people in their workplace, home or just enjoying themselves. The inclusion of their surroundings is important to provide context to the images. Typically, I’d light the images with one or more flashes (it’s all about Skye, at night, so often light levels are low).

The other 20% has been for nighttime landscape photographs. I usually use my Sony A7III for most of this work because I need a 16mm focal length (the Leica is 28mm minimum). If I had a wider lens on the Q3 I’d be using it instead of the Sony.

When photographing people, there’s typically a lot of pressure. Time is frequently short. Whoever I’m photographing is typically working as well, so hasn’t got lots of time to do countless poses and try different locations. As a result, my workflow has to be extremely fast and efficient, and I need to be able to use the camera without it getting in my way. The worst thing is for me to be faffing about in the camera menus looking for some obscure setting. It doesn’t look professional or inspire confidence in my subjects.

Best to worst features in order

Rather than having a binary pros and cons table, I have decided to create a list of features and capabilities, starting with what I like most and ending with what I’m not keen on. This in order, from “best” to “worst”. Note that “worst” may not necessarily be bad, that is, a con, it’s just a thing that I like less than the thing above it in the list.

Lens optics. The 28mm f/1.7 lens on the Q series is phenomenal. Why? Apart from being incredibly sharp, the way it handles images at f/1.7 is unique to my eye. The closest I’ve seen is the Leica 24mm Summilux-M, which is several times pricier. There’s something extraordinary about a wide-aperture wide-angle lens. It makes environmental portraiture a breeze, allowing subject isolation through background focus falloff, simplicity itself. Amazing.

Image quality. Closely related to the lens, and the sublime pairing with the sensor, I’ve been impressed with the images coming out of the Q3. Why? The amount of detail is fantastic. The flexibility for editing afterwards is superb. You can effectively pull back underexposed areas. A feature which is great for night photography (see ISO later in this list, though). The RAW files are rich and need minimal tweaking.

Controls. Simple, visible, minimal, easy. Just what you want from a camera, and so refreshing compared to just about everything else out there on the market. The only thing I’d like to see added is a visible physical ISO dial so a simple glance down at the top of the camera reveals ISO, shutter speed and aperture. It takes a short time to get familiar with the controls, after which the camera becomes an extension of the body. Just great. Leica does this so well.

Size. It’s small(ish). Given the flexibility of digital zoom (see next point) with the large pixel count, you are essentially carrying a 28–75mm or 28–90mm camera with you. With amazing image quality. The packaging is excellent. I can throw it (gently) into a bag (well padded) and barely notice it, which makes things a lot simpler on location or going up a mountain.

Digital zoom. The 60mp pixel count provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to in-camera digital zoom or digital cropping. The implementation of this on the Q series has always been outstanding in my view. I like the frameline concept, being a recovering M-user. The fact that the exposure reading is taken from the scene within the framelines is very clever. And it gives you a lot of flexibility for framing. I use digital zoom often, and even at 90mm, the resulting images are full of detail. I skipped the Q2 to wait for the Q3 for this reason. The higher-resolution sensor makes the Q3 an effortlessly flexible all-in-one camera. I have one of the rear thumb buttons (the sticky-out one) set to trigger the digital zoom, so it’s fast and easy to use.

Build quality. Tank-like. Solid. Everything clicks beautifully. It feels heavy in the hand, as though it were hewn from a solid block. Leica did that with the T and TL series, by the way — wonderful little cameras. My Q3 has taken a lot of abuse in the heat of on-site shoots and just eats it all up. The only thing I’d nitpick about is the USB port door, which feels rather flimsy. I’m waiting for it to fall off.

Fast shutter sync. For someone who often works with flash, fast shutter sync is crucial. Because the Q3 has a leaf shutter in the lens, it can work with flash at much higher shutter speeds than other cameras. This means that I can take a flash-lit shot with a wide aperture and low ISO in light that would normally overwhelm another camera that would need a much higher shutter speed than it can use with flash. The result is much more interesting looking flashed images with proper depth of field fall-off due to the use of wide apertures.

Menus. Starting to get into good, but trending to just OK territory now. The menus on the Q3 are really nicely laid out, and a lot simpler than pretty much anything else. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve got lost in Sony, Olympus or Fuji menus and not been able to find some obscure setting that has magically reset itself. However, the Leica Q3 is starting to suffer from a bit of “menu stuffing”. They are getting a bit too nested, too fiddly and too complex. Leica needs to take care to keep things as simple as possible.

Tilt screen. OK, the implementation is rather ugly. Actually, it’s a lot ugly, and very unlike Leica which usually tries to ensure elegance flows through its cameras. It could have been blended into the back of the camera far more harmoniously, as with the Fuji X100VI. However, it’s very useful and another reason to go for the Q3 rather than the earlier versions. I’ve used it a lot.

Battery. The battery is OK. I’ve never run out, but I’m not shooting hundreds of shots per session. I have a spare just in case.

Leica Fotos app. It’s a lot better than previous iterations. I’ve used it a few times to do quick exports to social media or for sending to the people I’m photographing. It does connect more quickly, and transfer faster and more reliably. But it’s just OK and nothing to write home about.

Cost. It’s pricey compared to other cameras. But it’s also good value compared with a similar Leica M setup. I hate changing lenses, so having a crazily good 28–75mm compact camera with me at all times makes it worth the money.

File sizes. Blimey! They are huge. Comes with the territory. And the fact I shoot DNG + large jpeg all the time doesn’t help. With DNGs at about 80mb and jpegs at 25mb, you’re talking a lot of disk space. It requires significant brain recalibration to handle large quantities of images from the Q3. It also needs some beefy disk space and large backup drives. Add this to the cost of the camera — don’t forget!

High ISO. It’s a bit shonky to be honest. This is one reason I don’t use the Q3 that much for nightscapes and stars, where I need to keep the shutter speed to about 10–15 secs to avoid getting elongated stars. Usually, this requires a high ISO to get the right shutter speed. Comparing files from my older Sony A7III with the Q3 taken at the same time and place and with the same ISO settings, the Sony is a lot cleaner than the Leica. High ISO is relatively immaterial due to the exceptional AI-based noise reduction in Lightroom now (more massive files!), but the cleaner images have always come from my Sony.

No visible ISO dial. This is a miss in my opinion. Yes, it’s nice having a dedicated soft button on the top of the camera, but I want to be able to look down at the top of the camera and see ISO, aperture and shutter speed in one go. Therefore, I’d like to have a physical ISO dial like the M10 and upwards.

Sticky-outy lens. While the Q3 is relatively small, the lens does stick out a long way. Even more when you put the angular hood on it. This stops the camera being pocketable like a Fuji X100VI for example. I know that there’s only so much you can do with optics and focal length, and drive motors for autofocus. In fact, it’s a miracle that they can create an autofocus 28mm f/1.7 lens of supreme quality in such a small package. But I wish it didn’t stick out so much. Maybe they can do a fully optimised curved sensor version with a flatter lens next?

User profiles. I’m in favour of saving settings in user profiles. But blimey, they can be confusing. Thankfully, firmware updates are set up to not wipe them out these days if you do them right. However, the amount of time I’ve spent setting up four or five user profiles only to find that one buried setting is incorrect and having to do them all again is crazy. Overall, they are just really annoying.

Touch AF. Very poorly implemented. Every so often I’ll inadvertently turn it on, usually because it is mistakenly set in one of the aforementioned user profiles. Then the focus point moves about all over the screen when I’m putting the camera in my bag. Then the focus point size changes randomly due to my nose pressing on the screen for long enough to trigger the size setting. Overall very confusing, and I try and always turn it off. But there’s always some bloody user profile that switches it back on again.

Useful Accessories

I’ve added three useful things to my Q3.

First, I splurged and bought the Leica thumb grip. It’s silly money (£200) for what it is, I know, but Red Dot Cameras had one in stock and I had the cash. On its own, it is a nice addition for giving you a bit more control over the camera.

Combined with the IDS grip, it transforms the security of the camera in hand. Both accessories significantly improve the feel of the camera. I no longer feel like I could drop it if my arm gets knocked by someone, or if I’m sweating in the heat of a crowded club during an album launch. It also makes it easier to manipulate the controls, as the weight of the camera can be taken up with the lower fingers of your hand on the grip. The IDS grip is better than the cheapo eBay one I got initially with a Q2 fitment, as it allows full access to the memory card slot and battery, which are different to the Q2.

The built-in Arca Swiss tripod rail on the IDS grip is great as well, and very neatly done. A useful bonus feature is that it allows the camera to sit on a table without falling on its lens. An L-bracket would be even more useful — maybe that’s next.

Together, the thumb grip and hand grip don’t add any significant size to the camera, and they make it a lot easier to hold and use.

Everyone will use a strap at some point. I like the Peak Design system a lot, having used it for years. I have a “Leash” quick adjust neck strap and a wrist strap which fit onto the little dangly lugs that go onto the camera.

In Summary

You might have gathered that I’m a fan. Yes, it’s a lot of money. Yes, you could get similar-ish results from other cameras. But in my view what you can’t get is the whole combination of size, lens, image quality, usability, build quality and satisfaction in another camera.

My Q3 has been an invaluable tool for creating the Skye At Night book, and I anticipate it will remain my favourite camera for a long time to come. 10/10, would recommend.

---

Link to Skye at Night website

More from Andrew Tobin

---

Want to contribute an article to Macfilos? It’s easy. Just click the “Write for Us” button. We’ll help with the writing and guide you through the process.

---