So far, this year, the highest recorded temperature at my local weather station is 117°F (the absolute low for the year was 16.9°).

That’s pretty hot! It’s tempting to imagine that the temperature only stuck there for a little while, and then settled back into something more reasonable. Looking at the graph of the temperature, however, shows a different story.

The table at the end really helps illustrate the extremes. Every day in July and August was over 90°s, and so far, as of writing this on the 9th, every day of September has been as well. Let’s compare that to the same chart from the previous year.

And the year before that.

It’s fairly dramatic.

So, how do we deal with this weather? For most people it’s a question of trying to stay out of the sun as much as possible, but that’s not always possible for the jobs that exist in West Texas, oil field work especially. When faced with that: lots of water and correct clothing goes a long way.

It’s not uncommon to see work trucks with cases of water in the truck beds. Sometimes I’ve even seen entire pallets. Speaking of pallets of water: at our local HEB curbside pickup they have huge stacks of bottled water cases outside. It’s not even worth it to take them in so many people buy them. They just pull one off the stack and put it in the cart as they come down the ramp to deliver groceries.

In the past I have used other methods to stay safe during hot weather. My favorite, which is no longer feasible for me, was getting up at 5:00 AM and walking in the dark before the sun came up. It necessitated an afternoon nap if I wanted to stay up to my usual hour, but made the prospect of exercising outdoors a lot more feasible. I suppose that I could have opted for an indoor gym, but I’ve never particularly liked them, and I have outdoor areas around me to use.

This year, I’m just doing my best to walk early and give myself lots of time. It involves being very aware of how hot I’m feeling. It’s tricky, though, because if you aren’t careful the heat will sneak up on you. You might not even notice that you have gotten yourself in trouble. More than once this year I’ve realized that I have become light headed and a bit dizzy while simply walking. That’s what 99°F can do to you, and todays high is already 104°!

My previous experience with EVs is fairly limited. I’ve driven several Tesla Model 3 vehicles, and prior to that I drove a Toyota Prius (not a BEV, but still an EV in a sense) for several years as my primary car. I’m not going to talk about the Bolt in comparison to the Toyota, because that would be a little silly.

The Car

The exterior of the vehicle is a classic small crossover. I don’t have the raw numbers in front of me, but it felt slightly smaller than a Toyota Rav4. The copy I drove was white, with good paint quality. The lights are standard for a vehicle in the price range (the base model has an MSRP of USD$ 27,800). There are multiple lights in most of the fixtures, and the illumination seemed good across the break and turn signals. Though I didn’t drive it at night, I was in a parking garage where the headlights turned on a few times, and the result was good: good illumination and well aimed. As one would expect from a modern vehicle, there were basically no unacceptable panel gaps. I don’t usually like how domestic cars look, but this one was good.

Interior

At higher trim levels the EUV is available with leather seats and higher end stereo equipment. The version I had was a base model, so it featured cloth seats and all manual adjustments. Regardless, it was comfortable. The controls will be familiar to anyone who has used a modern gas vehicle. It feels high enough of the ground to be pleasant to drive in a busy Texas city. While entirely manual, I found the seat and steering wheel comfortable to use on the highway and on city streets.

The instrument cluster is entirely digital, showing range and battery level on one side and energy consumption/regeneration on the other. I found the display easy to read, the speed is large and central on the display. The energy consumption area serves double duty during charging: it also displays the current kW rate. My one complaint about the instruments was that it was impossible to change the display from estimated “miles to empty” range to percentage battery remaining. There is actually no way to see the battery percentage level in this vehicle, though you could estimate it by looking at the 5% granular bar chart behind the range display.

The entertainment system is fairly bare bones, not featuring maps without a separate subscription (which I did not have). You can pair Android Auto or Apple Car Play with the vehicle, but only over Bluetooth. You cannot use the USB port for anything but charging a phone. You will have to charge your phone, in this case, because Bluetooth Car Play is a battery drain. Charging controls are basically non existent, as is charging status besides the speed being shown on the instruments. This could use improvement, but wasn’t a huge problem for something that is basically a commuter car.

Driving

I can only really compare this car to gas vehicles and the Tesla Model 3. I think, for the price range of the car, it’s more fun to drive than a similarly priced gas vehicle. It’s a little less sporty than the Tesla Model 3, but it’s also more than ten thousand dollars cheaper. It has all the thing you expect with an EV: instant torque, smooth acceleration curve, and good one peddle driving. I didn’t ever feel like I couldn’t come up to speed when merging. It was a pleasant car to drive, not sporty, but practical. There isn’t much to say here because it didn’t get anything particularly wrong, and for the price it was fun to drive.

This isn’t so much the driving dynamics as a comparison the Model 3, but the vehicle was extremely quiet on the highway. Where every Model 3 I have rented had some sort of whistle while driving over 50mph, the Bolt was very solid in this regard. Road noise was still, obviously, present, but not distracting.

Charging

I think it’s safe to say that most people aren’t buying an EUV as a road trip car. It’s a commuter vehicle which likely expects you to charge at home the vast majority of the time. That said, it does feature CCS DC Level 3 fast charging. I took it to a EVgo 50kW station as well as an Electrify America 250kW station. Both connected to the car without issue. I was renting the vehicle, and needed to return it at a relatively high state of charge. At the EVgo station I charged from 83% to 99% over about 30 minutes. At the EA station I charged from 90% to 99% over 15 minutes. I don’t have the data from EVgo at the moment, but EA shows that my max speed was 27kW. I didn’t keep a graph, but this was only briefly, as you would expect at such a high state of charge. At the end I was down to closer to 17kW.

Would I Buy One?

If I were commuting in a city with a daily drive of less than 150 miles, I think the answer is yes. The car highlights one of the things that I think EVs are going to really change, which is that cheaper cars can still be fun to drive. The US doesn’t have that many cheap EVs yet, but hopefully that changes over the next few years. I’ve driven plenty of rental cars priced at about the same range as the Bolt EUV, and they were nowhere near as fun to drive as it was. Is it as fun to drive as a Model 3? No, not really, but I found that mostly I didn’t care.

Featured image credit: Image by: ZZZico, originally downloaded on September 2, 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Bolt_EUV#/media/File:Chevrolet_Bolt_EUV.jpg

The Kindle Scribe is a weird device. Unlike most Kindles that have been released over the last several years, it’s much larger than a traditional paperback size. Compared to a Kindle Paperwhite it is positively gargantuan.

Reading experience was the one issue I was concerned about before buying the Scribe. I mostly read books on my phone when I’m home, and the Paperwhite when I’m traveling. Those are both fairly small devices with fairly short line lengths. There is a common idea that shorter line length leads to improved reading experience (or just reduced strain). There might be something to that; however, I have spent long enough reading most everything on a laptop that longer line length doesn’t really scare me. I find reading novels on the Scribe to be different, but entirely pleasant.

Reading comics and manga on the Scribe is transformative. In the past I mostly used my phone for this, and while it’s fine, it’s very small; an issue that I think caries over to the Paperwhite as well. While the 300dpi on the Paperwhite is great, the screen is still small enough that I often found myself holding the device perilously close to my face to make things out. On the Scribe everything is easy to read at a normal distance from my eyes. Lettering (even small lettering) is easy to read. You sacrifice no resolution going from the 8 inch screen to the 10.3 inch screen, so all the lines and content are as sharp as they would be on a printed page.

I didn’t buy the Scribe to take notes, though I do take a few notes on the Scribe. I’m a pretty dedicated Pen and Paper person. Some of that is my age, I grew up learning things by writing them down and so that’s basically still how I work. The other half of that equation is that I really like pens: fountain, ballpoint, fineliner, dip. I also really like notebooks, researching different papers and bindings is enjoyable to me and I (like many notebook fanatics) have a large stash of notebooks waiting to be used. All this to say that I’m not looking to replace pen and paper anytime soon.

Still, the Scribe is an enjoyable note taking experience. The basic pen (I didn’t spring for the more expensive version with an eraser, something I might change my mind on later), has a nice scratch feeling when you move the nib over the screen. It’s not exactly paper-like, but it’s also light years beyond the perfectly slick surface of an iPad. If I had to compare it to something, it’s a lot like the textured screen on my 2000s era Fujitsu Tablet PC. It’s scratchy without feeling like you’re dragging grit over the screen. The device is responsive to the pen, lines appear with so little delay that it feels very much like writing. Compared to writing on an iPad I don’t think there is any comparison, the Scribe wins without question.

The front-light on the device is good. It’s even and bright enough for most situations. The warm light is also a nice touch (an improvement over previous Kindle versions, I found the warm light in the Paperwhite to be excellent as well). The light is partially there to allow of the device to be used in dark situations, but this is only a small part of what it’s for. When there is plenty of light the screen often still engages the front light to improve contrast. It might not need this bump, but it helps. Compared to the Paperwhite the Scribe’s screen is less contrasty overall. Likely this is because of the Wacom EMR layer to allow for pen use. If I didn’t have the Paperwhite next to the Scribe, however, I likely wouldn’t have noticed this difference. The screen is still very contrasty.

My overall take on the scribe, after two weeks of ownership, is that it’s a solid buy. I think Amazon has a long way to go on the software for note taking, but I don’t mind that so much since I bought the device primarily for reading. For a reader with a few notes on the side, it’s very good. I think it’s worth a try for anyone looking for a larger screen, especially if reading is your primary use case.

I’m drawn to creating things. That’s the same motivation that has pulled me into programming. I like to craft intricate little toys and then set them up and watch them run. Docker fulfills this need in me in the same way that writing does. I can set up carefully crafted little toys and watch them work. I’m a classic world builder, though I don’t particularly like to describe my worlds. I want the side effects to tell you about what happens.

I’ve written several novel length works, for my personal entertainment, in the last five years. I see many posts online about how one writes a novel. There are a lot of ways that people suggest, systems, programs, plans. For me the only real way to produce anything of any length is to be consistent. You don’t have to write much, but you have to keep yourself engaged in the process of it. For me that means writing every day, but I don’t think this it he only way one could work.

On days when I don’t feel like writing, I always make an attempt to take notes. A few jotted ideas about where a story is going or what they main character might thing about something tends to keep me engaged in a story.

That’s one of the tricks, for me. If you aren’t engaged writing something it will usually show when someone tries to read it. If it’s a slog to write it might be a slog to read.

Just like photography, writing is an art that benefits from process. I like to imagine that I’m not predictable, but my photography style and my writing style aren’t all that different. When it comes to both I like to explore. I rarely use full outlines, and when I do outline at all it’s usually just to give me an idea of what’s going to happen in the next chapter of a story. I have an explorative style. In photography this means that I often have to throw away photographs, sometimes many of them. This is true for writing as well, being willing to rewrite or remove parts of a story I’ve written is essential.

This is just a little introductory post, I’ll come back with discussions about specific projects and goals, and how I accomplish them, in a later post.

The M9, like all the Leica M series devices, is a rangefinder camera. That means you don’t focus through the lens, but rather through the viewfinder. The camera uses a clever bit of mechanical coupling to link the focus ring on the lens to a series of optical devices in the body. If you ever focused using a classic SLR you likely used the “split prism” focus system, where you aligned to two halves of a reticle in the center of the viewfinder to achieve correct focus. Rangefinder cameras, since they don’t focus through the lens, rely on a separate small view superimposed over the image in the viewfinder. To focus you align a small central rectangle with the larger viewfinder view. It is both different and the same to focusing on an SLR. Plenty of videos exist online if you want to see the two systems in action.

The camera body follows the same basic layout as the M8 (which preceded it) and the M240 (which succeeded it). It’s slightly thicker than the older M series bodies, most notably the M6 and M7, to which it is often compared. Having used both the M6 and the M9, the difference is noticeable but perhaps not overly annoying. Holding cameras like this, with no grip and very boxy edges, is always going to be something of a challenge, especially for people with smaller hands like me.

The M9 is heavy for its size, and feels well built. The screen was terrible even when it was new, so don’t be too surprised. Images shown on it are bare approximations of what the end result might be. Along with this deficiency, the plastic they used to cover the screen is prone to scratches. These scratches were one of the reasons I opted to get the M-P 240, which a sapphire glass screen.

My one gripe with the device was always the shutter recock sound. The shutter itself has a pleasant snick, not at all unpleasant. The internal motor used to reset that shutter, however, is very loud. You can clearly hear it from a few feet away. The sound is somewhere between a buzzing and a whirring, with an emphasis on grinding. It was so bad that Leica added a special mode, only found on these cameras, that allowed you to delay the reset of the shutter until you released the shutter button (saying shutter so many times in a sentence sounds wrong). Is it the end of the world? No, but it was a huge nagging annoyance that I had with the device.

The M9 image quality was always great. The sensor’s color profile was great right out of the camera, even in RAW. The files were pleasantly malleable when edited, and the sensor resolved very well with all lenses produced up to its point of production. Some of my favorite images I’ve taken came from the M9. As long as you were careful with exposure, the camera was a delight to use. I always used it as if it were a heavy M6 loaded with slide film, and was very rarely disappointed.

People go after a digital M camera for the lenses, of course. Leica has been producing M series lenses for many decades, and has a huge used catalog available all over the world. With the exception of a few collapsible lenses, the entire catalog works ver well on the M9. Modern, optically coded lenses even have their data encoded into the RAW file for easy reference later. For less modern lenses, many could be optically coded after the fact.

The M9 is not a great low light camera. This is largely due to the CCD sensor, and the technology at the time. Push the shadows much in post at all and you will see banding, color cast, and unpleasant color noise. While the camera has a pleasant noise profile in general use, it gets worse quickly as the amount of light available to the sensor falls. That doesn’t mean the camera couldn’t take some pretty great long exposure shots, the problems only occurred when trying to rescue a poorly exposed image.

The M9 uses a CCD sensor rather than the more common CMOS we see in all subsequent M series cameras and, in general, the majority of all other digital cameras released since. While the color and grain pattern of the CCD sensor is impressive, the sampling rate and low light performance left much to be desired.

Ultimately all M9 series cameras will need sensor replacements, or at the very least a sensor coating replacement. The original and replacement sensors suffered from a specific sort of corrosion that ate away at the surface. Over time all M9 series cameras will experience this. It manifests in many ways, but it often starts out looking like persistent dust. Over time this can grow much worse, eventually covering the entire sensor and resulting in obvious artifacts in images.

The original solution provided by Leica was a replacement sensor, a practice they have since ended. While the replacement sensors worked for a time, they are also susceptible to the corrosion experienced by the originals.

So, Leica no longer repairs the cameras, and there are no new sensors being produced, what are your options? There are a few, at least two companies now offer repair for corroded sensors, though how durable their solution is has yet to be fully tested. Apparently these are not replacement sensors, but rather a repair to the coating and glass. There are slightly different light transfer characteristics associated with the change. These same companies often also offer conversion to monochrome.

How do all these work? I have no idea! I sold my M9 back to Leica when I bought the M-P 240.

I, personally, cannot recommend that anyone buy an M9. They are a doomed series of cameras. Can they be repaired? Possibly! But, like all electronics, digital cameras have a lifetime. The parts needed to repair them stop being made and become obsolete, the expertise required to repair them is replaced. While I liked my M9 very much, I do not regret selling it.

Interior Mutability

Before we talk about anything else, we need to discuss the single largest stumbling block when porting anything from Java: Interior Mutability. If you aren’t familiar with the concept I will briefly summarize it: a type has interior mutability if its internal state can be changed through a shared reference to it. Interior mutability is fundamental to many object oriented systems, it allows shared references to be modified. In fact, nearly everything in Java (importantly, this includes arrays) is passed by reference to all methods and functions.

Imagine a “window” object in a GUI application. You might want to have a reference to that object available to many different (potentially simultaneously running) functions. You also might want to make changes to this object from multiple places. In rust, this concept is much more complicated.

A common pattern in Java is to pass a reference to an object to a function and allow that function to modify it. In bigger systems, things like cached values are a great example of this. In rust, shared mutable references are not permitted.

Solving Interior Mutability

There is not one single solution. That’s probably obvious, but it needs to be said. There simply isn’t a one size fits all way to resolve the issue. Each time I have found an interior mutability situation I have pulled different tools out to solve it, not because I like complication, but because there are different benefits and tradeoffs to each.

RefCel<T> is a popular option, and could be used for many situations where interior mutability exists, however I don’t believe that it’s the best option. If one were trying to literally port the exact API from Java to Rust, then RefCel would be unavoidable, but it’s not the best pattern when dealing with Rust, partially because you loose many of the memory and access protections for which Rust is famous.

In Java, many classes will have functions which modify the values of the object. While this is possible in rust, having every function be &mut self would likely be an unappealing solution. Instead, I often found myself using functions instead of methods and passing in the struct that needed to be modified. That is something that comes up a lot in porting from Java to Rust, many methods in Java actually make more reasonable functions in Rust.

Java is happy to let you have as many mutable references to an object as you might want. Linked list types are very common in Java, partially for this reason. In many cases the only way I could find to port these types to Rust was using the Rc<T> type, which allows counted references to a value to exist in multiple places at once.

Another common Java pattern is a cached value for a complex calculation. if this.something == null { this.something = GenerateThing() } else { return this.something }, trying to do this in rust without every single method being &mut self would have been impossible. Fortunately OnceCell solves this problem without extremely complex and unwieldy mutability patterns.

Static Classes

Most static classes in Java are actually pretty easy to represent as a module. While you don’t have the benefit of the static fields present in Java classes, a module with a little refactoring to accept parameters works nearly as well in all cases. This is one of the simpler porting scenarios between the two languages. While they look very different, they are actually very similar.

Interfaces

Java Interfaces are a lot like Rust Traits. I know that Rust Traits are not the same as a Java Interface, and I know that Rust structs are not the same as Java Classes, but it doesn’t matter. A Trait and an Interface are similar enough that one can refactor somewhat easily.

Function Overloading

Rust does not have function overloading. Whenever it is used in the original Java it is necessary to refactor the Rust solution in some way. Most of the time, I have found that having additional functions with a cascade calling starting with least complex and moving to most complex, handling default values between them, is the simplest. Often, I think the result is more readable, having a function named “doTask” which might accept one, two, or four variables and behave differently depending on what is passed seems less readable than having three functions with names which make it explicit what they do and what they expect.

Abstract Classes

These turn out to be particularly difficult to deal with since they can contain data and methods that works on that data. Rust doesn’t really have a concept like an uninstantiatable struct with implementations that can be re-used. It’s possible you could get around this by using custom Derive macros, but I don’t think that added complexity will usually be worth it. In rxing, I ended up turning all Abstract classes into traits and then having getter/setters for the data that the abstract class expected to have. It was a compromise, but it worked.

Inheritance

Inheritance does not exist in rust, and so is a very complicated issue when porting. When porting rxing, I could have possibly found a crate to make it simpler, but I thought that would likely end up being a long term maintainability issue, and adding another dependency wasn’t my favorite option. A good example of where this was a real mess was in the one dimensional module (oned). In the original java there is a neat class hierarchy working from an abstract one dimensional reader all the way down to specific implementations. Sometimes this was one step, sometimes multiple (an example: GenericOneDReader -> GenericUPCEANReader -> UPCReader -> UPCEReader). That was not neatly do-able in rust, so in that case I ended up using a custom Derive macro to handle generating the boilerplate code that would have been part of the class hierarchy.

In Conclusion

Porting Java to Rust is not a simple process. Rust is not an object oriented language, but that doesn’t mean that many concepts aren’t useful to understand. Where the process becomes complicated is when the source library relies heavily on OO features such as Inheritance or Abstract Classes. These concepts simply do not translate to Rust, and require a rethinking of how they are implemented, handled, and addressed. Doing this at the beginning of a project is wise, though not fool proof. As I mentioned above, there is no single solution to fixing any of these problems, and in different situations different methods might be more useful. It’s important to keep in mind that readability and code quality are linked, and so picking the best solution often means picking the most understandable solution. We hear, often, that we shouldn’t prematurely optimize code, and this is yet another situation where that is true.

One of the most surprising things to me about the project is that many people who use it actually don’t use it in rust. The majority of help requests that I have received involve using the wasm bindings on the web.

Since the initial launch there have been several releases to add new features (Micro QR support, improved QR code detection and decoding, improved maxicode detection) and fix bugs as they are found.

In a later post I’m going to talk more about the process of porting Java to Rust, and some of the pitfalls that I encountered along the way.

Here is the reddit post where I announced the project.

TLDR: The Links

• rxing (GH / crates.io): barcode scanning and generation library
• rxing-cli (GH / crates.io): a cli interface to rxing, allowing for generation and detection, it has a lot of features, which can be explored using rxing-cli help
• rxing-wasm (GH / npm): wasm bindings for rxing which allow for a subset of functions on the web.

What is the library:

rxing is a port of the popular Java library ZXing (the name ZXing = Zebra Crossing, so rxing = crustacean crossing). rxing supports reading 16 different barcode formats, and writing 13 formats. Both 2d (QR code, Aztec, Datamatrix, Maxicode, PDF417) and 1d (coda, code 39, code 93, code 128, itf, ean 8/13, upc e/a, rss 14/expanded) are supported.

Motivation:

rxing started as a personal project. I wanted the ability to read shipping labels programmatically, and the only multi-format barcode library available in rust was a wrapper for a c++ library which hadn’t been touched in over a decade. ZXing has been ported to many different languages, including C++, javascript, Dart, and Go. Barcode libraries aren’t always glamorous, but they serve an important purpose. Having an all rust option seemed like a good use of time.

Process:

The entire library was ported by hand. I initially attempted to use some Java -> Rust conversion programs (hoping that I could just clean up the results), but those proved to be more work than simply rewriting everything. I set about porting the library manually, and spent about 8 months on the primary work of porting it.

Status:

The library is “complete” in the sense that it implements everything from the ZXing origin and includes some enhancements ported from the C++ port as well. The entire test suite has also been ported from Java.

In-progress work:

• The original library did not include maxicode detection (it only worked if the image supplied was a perfectly centered, non-skewed, non-rotated maxicode). I have implemented rudimentary detection and rotation correction, but there is still a lot of work to be done on that.
• Maxicode generation is also in my plans.
• The “rustification” of the Java code is still in progress as well, some structures and layouts simply don’t make sense in rust.
• RSS 14 and RSS Expanded code generation is also planned.
• There are a few features which aren’t fully supported, such as “reader resets” which still need to be built out, but weren’t present in ZXing, so that went beyond the scope of the initial port.

Am I looking for PRs:

Yes, if you have improvements, enhancements, or bug fixes I’m happy to review. Tests are required for any new work.

License

Like ZXing, rxing is licensed under Apache 2.0.

The M240 is an old camera now (in 2023) but so are pretty much all my cameras. It’s still exactly as good of a camera as it was when I got it, though. It’s dynamic range wasn’t very good even for the era (my 5d3 easily out performs it), but when paired with a wide lens and a willingness to work in post, I’ve been happy with the camera even working after dark.

It’s impossible to talk about the M240 (and the M9 and M8 before it) without mentioning that the body is slightly thicker than the M6 / M10 / M11. It’s only a few millimeters, but in the hand it’s surprisingly noticeable. It makes the camera just that little bit more awkward to hold. I’ve always thought the M series cameras were a little weird to hold anyway, though, so it’s only a tiny ding against it.

Before I got the Ricoh GRiiix the M240 was my primary travel camera. I don’t like traveling with too many cameras or lenses, so the 35mm Summilux FLE basically lives on the camera. I find 35mm and 40mm to be about the sweet spot for general travel use for me. Generally wide enough that you can get what you want in most environments, but long enough that you aren’t wondering where the subjects vanished to in the frame.

Well, maybe that’s a little bit of a lie. We all travel with an extra lens these days: the amazing little camera every cellphone now includes. Prior to using a cellphone camera extensively I had never had much real experience with 28mm or wider lenses, and at first I was entirely lost with how to use the focal length. That has changed now, after years of using it daily to capture the detritus of life. I no longer struggle to use wide lenses, something which seriously pushed me to consider moving to a 28mm on the M240, and getting the GRiii instead of the iiix variant. In the end, though, I will always have my phone, and so I will always have a wide lens if I need it.

There are a few gripes with the camera. The biggest of them is the startup time from sleep. The M240 offers a power saving mode where, after a programmable period of time, it will go to sleep. This is perfect if you are walking around for a day and don’t want to worry if the camera is off when you aren’t using it. In theory, the startup from this mode is supposed to be almost instantaneous. In fact, that’s what I expected from my experience with the 5d3, which can sleep for weeks and wake up with a half press, always ready to take a shot by the time you are.

The M240 is not so nimble. I believe the time is closer to three seconds from shutter half press to camera ready. That’s long enough that you have to account for it. Many people say, “oh, just remember to half press the shutter as you raise the camera.” That might work if the camera were light enough to be carried in ones hand at all times. Maybe it is for some people, but this is a crossbody camera for me. In theory it all should work, in practice I have a lot of photographs of the moment after the one I wanted.

The M240 is not weather sealed. That hasn’t stopped me from using it in light drizzle, but there are plenty of situations where I would leave it at home rather than risk it in a rainstorm. Do some people use them in wet conditions? Yes, but I’m not one of them. This is a gripe I have the the Ricoh, as well.

That’s it for complaints, though. The camera is a delight to use for anyone who grew up with film. It meters and exposes much as a fat M6 loaded with slide film. Since I really like shooting slide film (should I change that to liked since I do not want to pay for film much anymore? For the first time in many trips I returned from Japan this year without a single new roll of film). I do have to note, though, that the auto white balance is terrible. Not “charmingly off” or “quirky” just bad. Expect to have to color correct in post, and if you want to use JPGs plan to set the white balance manually.

For anyone thinking about trying an M240, I say go for it. It’s an old camera though, so go into it knowing that the dynamic range, shadow recovery, and general behavior of the camera is not going to feel modern. If you can get over those things, it’s a fun one to use.

My one warning here, though, is that it’s a Leica and people love to pay too much. Don’t overpay for this camera hoping is magical. It’s not, it’s just an old camera with some nice user interface thoughtfulness. Buy a lens instead, probably!

I hadn’t seriously used a point and shoot camera since 2007, and the technology had changed a lot since then. The addition of IBIS and a full APS-C sensor in a camera that isn’t meaningfully larger than the Canon point and shoot I used back in 2007 is a game-changer. The image quality is exactly what I was hoping for, with full RAW support and well considered lens and sensor matching.

A lot of people buy this camera with the intention of using it for JPEG shooting. They like the detailed recipes you can input, or use the default ones which are included. That simply isn’t how I use cameras anymore, and there was no way I was going to miss out on the fantastic shadow recovery and exposure latitude afforded with this sensor. Fortunately for me, Lightroom now includes many of the most popular built-in recipes as profiles. I processed many of the images here using those profiles (mostly Positive Film).

I really like the results. The above shot shot really exemplifies how sharp the lens looks with minimal editing and f/8.

I was initially worried that I would be put off by not having an optical viewfinder. Previous to picking up the Ricoh, my main travel camera was the Leica M240, which has a very nice optical rangefinder. I shouldn’t have worried so much, since my other primary photographic tool has been a phone. The shooting experience is better than a phone, but a lot of things feel as if they “just work” with it. Tapping on the screen sets the focus point for the upcoming half-press of the shutter button, for instance. I did, a few times, catch myself trying to tap-and-drag to set exposure as I do on the iPhone, but I got over that pretty fast.

While I didn’t have any trouble with the autofocus when used in well lit conditions, it does struggle in low light. Sometimes a lot. I don’t think it ever prevented me from getting a shot, but it was something I did find myself fighting the camera on. One weird quibble I have with the default focus mode is that it seems to prioritize objects in the near distance, even if the center of the frame is on something farther. I would understand this if it were trying to focus on people, but the number of times the default focus point was a random shrub was fairly high. It seems to especially pick things in the bottom third of the sensor, when held in landscape orientation.

Highlight-priority metering is a feature I hadn’t experienced on any of my cameras before. Admittedly that is because I mostly use manual cameras and the positively ancient 5Diii. It wasn’t always the best choice, but once I mapped the function button on the back to let me switch to it quickly I found that there were a lot of instances where it got exactly what I wanted. Highlight priority metering and the great shadow recovery of the camera really work well together.

The mode dial on the top behaves as you would expect. The camera remembers each mode’s settings and returns to them if you switch away and then back. So, for instance, I could set aperture priority mode to f/8 and whenever I wanted a wide depth of field I could swap from the surprisingly fine Program mode to Aperture Priority and it was ready to go, exactly as I expected.

One of the things people talk about with this camera is the snap-focus mode. I spent some time learning how it worked, and found that I didn’t really have the range finding ability that might have made it useful. I’m not a zone-focuser on my Leica and I apparently am not on the Ricoh either. That said, once I learned that at f/9 and a focus distance of 3.5m the camera was hyperlocal, I found myself using it a lot more. I might not be able to judge when something is 3.5m away, but I can tell when I want everything from “about that other curb” to infinity in focus. In those situations you don’t even have to wait for the camera to focus, just press the shutter all the way and keep walking.

The low light performance is pretty good. And if you don’t mind some noise you can really push the camera a long way.

I had a lot of fun with this camera. Partially because I never had to think about it too much. It was easier to use than my phone. I skipped the cross-body strap I usually favor for cameras and used only a wrist strap with the GR. It was perfect. The camera tucked into the palm of my hand. It only takes about half a second to power on and be ready to shoot. I could keep the camera in my hand, powered down, and the moment I saw something I wanted to photograph I could hit the power and know it would be ready before I finished raising my arm.

Do I think the larger sensor on the M240 is occasionally better? Probably! But I mostly don’t care, they are different tools for different situations. That said, I’d love it if Leica made a 40mm digital Minilux. If anyone at Leica ever reads this, please make it, you have one sale pretty much set.

There are some flaws with the GRiiix, but there are flaws with every camera I’ve ever used. I don’t mind them so much, given how the camera wants to be used. It’s a snapshot camera, and I’m a snapshot photographer at heart.