Over the weekend, I went to do a test shoot with the X Vario at a dealer. The camera was as wonderful to hold and use as I'd remembered, feeling solid and fitting in the hand very well. The shutter was as quiet as any leaf shutter camera I've used, and focusing was a bit slower than the EM-5 but not much. No horrible aperture chatter, which was another plus. The implementation of zoom and manual focus ring with hard stops was excellent for a focus by wire system, too. And even the EVF wasn't as bad as I'd thought, certainly larger and clearer than the EVF in the Panasonic GH3.
A few downsides became apparent. Because the body is so small, the protruding lens made it feel a little unbalanced over time; I always use the grip on my EM-5, and the GH3 already has a large grip, so if I bought the XV, that would be the immediate solution. The day was lightly overcast, and the camera kept defaulting to 1/60 shutter speed which resulted in a fair bit of motion blur, particularly in people. Manually setting shutter speed would perhaps be more appropriate, so these issues were ones I could work with.
As I walked back to the car, I had my EM-5 with battery grip attached, and the Panasonic 14/2.5 and Olympus 45/1.8 with me. I shot a huge range of things that day, and reflected that I was getting image quality that was perhaps close to the XV, with a few bonuses. I could build up or break down the camera to whatever size I wanted; I could swap out a myriad of lenses from tiny sharp primes to excellent telephoto zooms; and the best thing was I didn't have to spend more money to get it!
When I got the XV files home and put them through their paces in Lightroom, they were excellent. But not 'superb'. For that kind of money, I'd want a darn good image to fly from the sensor. They are better than the EM-5 and GH3 in terms of overall colour and 'density', but they lacked the more subtle gradations of colour that I was hoping for. I was hoping for something better than my GXR aps-c files, too, but that was not the case. I feel that the GXR files have more subtle colour gradations.
In the course of learning how the XV files react to Lightroom, I discovered some new tweaks that I applied to files from my EM-5 and GH3. I was stunned at how much better I could make them look! They still don't have a fully rich aps-c or full frame quality, but they are better than I had been getting before.
So the X Vario stays at the shop for someone else to buy it, and I have a deeper appreciation of my current gear. Money that would have gone to the X Vario can be saved or apportioned to other things, like food and petrol, hahaha.
If Leica makes a very much upgraded X Vario 2, however, I'll be back in the shop with my SD card.
