Unusual Comparison: Leica M6 with Summicron 50mm f/2 v5 vs. Nikon Z6 with Nikon 50mm f/1.8S
A bit of an odd comparison maybe, but i did this more for myself than anything cause i just thought it would be fun. I also wanted to see how different they would look and maybe to recreate a film look later, but we’ll see.
The Nikon Z6 with the Nikon 50mm f/1.8S was shot in the regular monochrome black and white profile. Everything was metered with the Nikon and both cameras were shot back to back as fast as i could as to minimize changing light.
The Leica with the Summicron-M 50mm f/2 v5 was loaded with Kentmere 100, shot at 100 and developed in Fomadon LQN. Negatives were “scanned” or rather digitized on a Phase One iXQ with the 100mp back and the Schneider Kreuznach RS 72mm. Converted with Negative Lab Pro 2.4 ( i dont have 3 ).
In the edit i just matched the exposure from the Nikon to the negatives as best i could and cranked contrast to also match the film shots ( +10 to +100 depending on the image, when there are huge differences in highlights and shadows Negative Lab Pro matches contrast a little and i just went with it instead of syncing settings between the scans.
Left side is always the Nikon, right sight is always the Leica, but i guess thats obvious with the film border. Ive also made a few crops to compare sharpness etc.
Observations: The Nikon bokeh is ever so slightly smoother. Both lenses are very sharp, obviously the grainy 100 iso film looses in absolute detail, but i think it held up quite good. That would probably be a little more sad if i would have taken the Z8 with me. I also think both lenses have a very similar look to them, kind of a modern, clean look. I also noticed that there really wasnt a huge difference in the Nikon monochrome picture style to the film look. Just add +40 to +80 contrast or something like that and youre basically there. Only on a few images can you really see a difference in spectral sensitivity where some color gets rendered brighter or darker on film vs. digital. I also felt like the Summicron had a little bit of field curvature on some images where it rendered edges in the bokeh sharper, but that could also just be because of the rangefinder and me not perfectly setting the focus.
Also, if anyone is interested in that, to pretty much exactly match the grain pattern in Lightroom, the settings were Grain 25, Size 10, Roughness 100.
Anyways, enjoy this weird comparison i guess!
