Leica makes cameras for photographers who love the craft—and love it enough to lay out serious dollars for equipment that, on paper, offers fewer automatic conveniences than models from mainstream brands. Its latest specialty offering, the Q2 Monochrom ($5,995), is another love letter to black-and-white photography, matching a fixed 28mm Summilux lens to a monochrome full-frame sensor. The lens can’t be swapped out, but it supports autofocus and 4K video—options you don’t get with the M10 Monochrom rangefinder.
Built for Black-and-White Photography
Digital cameras all start out as black and white—image sensors use a complex color filter array to record more than just light and shadow. The Q2 Monochrom’s 47MP full-frame sensor drops the color filter, so it’s only capable of capturing photos (and video) in black and white.
And, apart from the ability to snap shots in color, the Q2 Monochrom is the exact twin of the Q2, introduced last year. It’s a full-frame camera with a fixed 28mm f/1.7 Summilux lens, housed in a (relatively) compact frame.
It exudes class. The metal exterior is finished in matte black, and wrapped in the same style leatherette as the M10 Monochrom. To match the sensor output, all engravings and markings are made in shades of gray, and Leica’s famous red dot logo is nowhere to be seen.
The Q2 measures 3.2 by 5.1 by 3.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.6 pounds. It’s small for a full-frame camera, but not pocketable. Still, you can feel confident carrying it at your side, even if you get caught under a rain cloud—IP52 dust and splash protection adds appeal for travelers and explorers.
Classic Controls
As you’d expect from a Leica, the Q2 sports fully manual control (when you want it). It skips a PASM dial in favor of discrete controls for shutter speed and aperture. The lens swaps between manual and autofocus operation with a push and twist of the locking focus control, and there’s a macro focus mode available, also via a control ring.
There’s a control dial on the top plate for direct EV adjustment, a four-way directional pad on the rear, and a trio of rear buttons—Fn, Menu, and Play. The Fn button, as well as the unmarked button at the center of the top dial, are configurable.
Another unmarked button, about halfway between the EVF and rear thumb rest, sets the camera’s digital zoom. You can shoot full-frame images at 28mm, or crop your shot to 35mm, 50mm, or 75mm.
The viewfinder still shows the full uncropped frame, but adds framing guides to show the cropped view. The experience is not unlike working with a Leica M rangefinder, just with an electronic viewfinder instead of an optical one. It’s especially appealing for documentary and urban street photography, a genre that lends itself to unexpected moments, as it provides a bit more awareness as to what’s happening outside the confines of the frame when working at tighter angles.
If you leave Raw capture on you’ll have the ability to open up shots later, in case your frame was a bit too tight. It adds some versatility to the relatively wide lens, and the sensor offers enough resolution where you won’t miss the cropped-out pixels.
Using the macro focus setting lets you get much closer to your subject, but it cuts the maximum aperture down to f/2.8. It’s a fine trade for most, though—you can get within a few inches of your subject, and the depth of field when focusing that close is razor thin, even at f/2.8.
Viewfinder and Touch LCD
The Q2 gives you two ways to frame images—an eye-level electronic viewfinder and a fixed-touch LCD on the rear. The EVF is as large to the eye as you find on high-end interchangeable lens cameras (0.76x), with a crisp, 3.7 million dots of resolution.
The 3-inch LCD is a 1.04-million-dot panel with excellent touch response. You can tap to set the focus point or navigate menus, swipe and pinch images during playback, and the like. It’s a fixed panel—it doesn’t tilt up or down like the screens on the Sony RX1R II or Fujifilm X100V—but neither of those are available with a black-and-white sensor.
Either view previews your exposure in real time, something you don’t get with an optical rangefinder. There are in-camera toning options available if you prefer shots that aren’t purely black and white—sepia, selenium, and blue tones are available and can be set to add a slight or strong tint to images.
Connectivity and Power
Leica skipped putting physical ports on the Q2—there’s no USB or HDMI to be found. Instead you get a removable battery and a single UHS-II SDXC card slot, separate, but both located on the bottom plate, and Wi-Fi for transfer to a smartphone or tablet.
The BP-SCL4 battery is rated for 370 shots—it should get most people through a day of photography, but without a charging port you won’t be able to top it off using a power pack during the day, you need to use the included wall charger. If you find yourself needing more battery life, additional cells are priced at $250.
Wi-Fi connects to the Leica Fotos app, available as a free download for Android and iOS devices. The app pairs with your phone and works for file transfer and as a remote control. It’s one of the aspects of the camera I wasn’t able to test (I was working with the Q2 ahead of its announcement), but I’ve used the app with other Leica cameras and found it to work quite well.
The Fotos app also has some editing features, and integrates with Adobe Lightroom if you have it installed on your phone or tablet. Leica has also dropped the yearly subscription fee from the iPad edition of Fotos, so none of its functionality is locked behind a paywall.
Auto (and Manual) Focus
The Q2 is an autofocus camera, and a speedy one. The focus system is quick to lock on, and while the autofocus system isn’t cutting edge, it’s straightforward and effective. You can set it to a wide area, which will prioritize closer subjects, generally speaking, or opt for a flexible area of interest, movable using the rear directional pad or touch.
Face detection is an option too, and it works well enough. I like that it’s paired with a flexible spot, so you can go between photographing people and not-people without having to fiddle with focus settings.
Manual focus is also available, and it’s implemented well enough to please rangefinder devotees. The focus ring turns smoothly, with a nice amount of resistance, and both frame magnification and focus peaking are available as focus aids. Peaking is especially effective here, as the colored highlights that show what’s in focus stand out starkly against the black-and-white preview.
Summilux Lens and Monochrome Sensor
The 28mm f/1.7 lens delivers crisp images and offers a wide aperture for available-light photography. It’s a sharp one, too. The resolution numbers from Imatest are a bit stronger than from the standard Q2, a benefit of not having a color filter array over the sensor.
Wide open, the lens delivers very good resolution, and it crosses into excellent territory when stopped down just a bit, to f/2.8, and holds steady down through f/11. There’s a bit of a drop at f/16, an expected result of diffraction—I’d avoid it, especially if you’re using the Q2’s digital zoom function.
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The sensor has a wide sensitivity range, starting at ISO 100 and going all the way up through ISO 100000. You can opt to capture images in JPG, either in plain black and white or with a tone. If you’re not one to edit photos, you won’t miss much by using JPGs—aside from clarity at ISO 25000 and beyond, it’s tough to tell them apart from the Q2 Monochrom’s Raw DNG output.
But working in Raw format, and processing photos in Adobe Lightroom, makes it possible to eke out a bit more clarity when working in the dimmest light. And, at the lower end of the sensitivity range, it offers loads of headway to tone and edit shots. I stuck to basic highlight, shadow, and contrast adjustments for my edits, but you can add grain or lifted black looks with a bit of Lightroom savvy or the help of film looks packs like RNI All Films 5.
Not every aspect of digital black and white is an absolute positive. One downside comes with color balance—if you want to darken skies, you’ll need to attach a 49mm yellow or red filter to your lens, just as you would when loading a roll of Ilford HP5 into your M6. With a color camera you can use color channel adjustments to digitally replace a glass filter—not so with the Q2.
On the other hand, the Q2 Monochrom nets clearer images in all types of light, with smoother, more natural gradients in tone. For black-and-white specialists, the trade-offs make sense.
A video function is included, too. The Q2 Monochrom records black-and-white footage (with an optional blue, selenium, or sepia tint) at 4K DCI (24fps), 4K UHD (24 or 30fps), or 1080p (up to 120fps). The lens sports optical stabilization, and it does a good job keeping handheld footage steady when you’re relatively steady yourself and the camera isn’t moving, but it’s no match for an interchangeable lens camera with IBIS, or a gimbal-stabilized platform.
But no one is going to mistake the Q2 for a serious video camera. We’re happy to see the 4K function included, even if Leica opted not to include support for external microphones and recorders. If you’re a video-first creative, think of this as a casual camera for travelogs and home movies. You’ll want to look at the Leica SL2, the Panasonic S1H, or the Sony a7S III if you’re after a top-tier video performer.
A Worthwhile Indulgence, for Some
Make no mistake, the Leica Q2 Monochrom is a luxury item. At $5,995, it costs many times over what run-of-the-mill full-frame cameras cost, but the Q2 isn’t a typical camera.
It trades versatility for specialization. You don’t get interchangeable lenses—instead the 28mm Summilux is married to the sensor—and you can forget about making color photos. But if you’re only interested in black-and-white photography, and love the idea of a fixed wide-angle lens, it’s a dream camera.
Leica, as expected, justifies the price with quality. The Q2 Monochrom is a head-turning example of industrial design. It feels great in the hand and is gorgeous to look at—Leica’s designers are very Bauhaus, putting as much emphasis on function as form. It’s a camera that’s built to be used, not put on a shelf.
We’re still recommending the regular edition of the Q2 a bit more highly. Its color sensor gives you the option to convert photos to black and white later, and it’s priced $1,000 less—that’s enough to make it our Editors’ Choice winner amongst its (few) full-frame peers.
There’s nothing else out there with a black-and-white sensor and a fixed lens, though. Leica has its M10 Monochrom, an interchangeable lens, manual focus camera, and Phase One sells very high-end monochrome medium format cameras like the IQ3 Achromatic—the Q2 is a bargain in comparison.
But that’s in comparison with Phase One, a brand that’s cameras cost more than cars. For the rest of us, the $1,400 Fujifilm X100V is a compelling alternative. It’s a color camera, with a smaller APS-C sensor, but it also sports a bright prime lens, an all-weather build, and great in-camera black-and-white film looks. If that’s not good enough, consider a shop that converts existing cameras to black and white—MaxMax is best known for its infrared camera conversions, but it also sells monochrome cameras. If you can afford it, however, you won’t be disappointed with the Q2 Monochrom.
