A New Q

After buying it on release and for my graduation, I had and loved my Fuji X100 for 10 years. It was the perfect camera for me for many years.

Then, in 2021, I was entering a new chapter of my life and the X100 was slowing me down. I tried out (renting through Lensrentals) its newer sibling but was annoyed with the cluttered interface. I also rented a Leica Q and Q2. At the time, the Q was already outdated but I was annoyed with the button layout of its contemporary, the Q2. I found a high-quality used Q-P version and bit the high-price bullet.

I have loved the Q very much and taken it a great many places. It’s been to the top of the rockies and to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and multiple continents. But it wasn’t state-of-the-art when I first bought it and it’s only gotten longer in the tooth. I love the size of the stills, but the video output is very weak (small size, bad focus, poor audio) and the in-camera JPEG creation is very bad. I have always shot RAW-only with it and then output JPEGs in my laptop. I don’t even do coloring or filters - it’s just that the camera’s JPEGs were always so under-saturated and had no settings to tweak that output.

With the arrival of our first kid, I immediately wanted to take more and higher-quality video and to more easily access+share the photos I get from my camera. The old Q is bad at both those things, so I started looking for a replacement.

I talked about it with Perplexity off and on for a couple days. I considered the Sony RX1RIII (incredibly compact but lacking the tactile controls I love so very much), the Fujifilm GFX100RF (really tempting to move up to a medium-format sensor (Noah Kalina’s work has been inspiring me), but I think I would miss the low-light performance and I would get annoyed dealing with such huge files), the Fujifilm X-E5 (the lack of manual controls and need to manage interchangeable lenses would annoy me), and of course the Fujifilm X100VI. The X100VI is the obvious choice to return to that original compact digital rangefinder, but I had rented it back in October and A) I didn’t find it that much more compact than the Q body and B) I got annoyed with the fly-by-wire manual focusing and C) I surprisingly no longer loved the optical viewfinder.

Leica released the Q3 in the years since I bought the Q, and updated most aspects of the Q2. So, I rented the Leica Q3 through Lensrentals for a week test its new controls and output.

After a day, I knew the Q3 was the upgrade I would love. They solved all my control-layout problems from the Q2 in this Q3 body. The ISO control under-thumb is perfect and the video output is lovely (Van Neistat has been using it quite a lot in recent videos). The film simulations and in-camera JPEG output tweaks should mean I can use JPEGs straight-outta-camera again!

I got an initial quote from Adorama on a trade-in of my Q for the Q3. I packaged up the old Q and sent it on its way, swathed in pink wrapping paper. A couple days later, a sales rep from Adorama called me and told me I had underestimated the wear on my Q (sigh, not surprising) but that he could get me a discount on an opened-box Q3. I bit the bullet and the Q3 should arrive next week.

I’m looking forward to faster-downloads, bigger prints, and beautiful videos.