I’m getting to the end of this series of posts. I have a few more small things to say and then I’ll sum up.
Freeze ups
There have been complaints about M240 freeze-ups, some of which can only be resolved by removing the battery. I’ve not seen these. I have observed a repeatable freeze-up, and here’s how to trigger it. Take a rapid series of pictures and turn off the camera before the buffer empties. Turn it back on again before the red light on the back of the camera stops blinking. The camera will not allow you to make an exposure until the buffer is empty. Why? Beats me.
Accessing the right front controls.
On the front of the camera, to the right of the lens as you hold the camera as if you were going to take a picture, there are two controls: the lens release and the focus magnifier button. The RRS grip, and, I presume, the rare and elusive Leica grips, make accessing the focus magnifier a bit awkward. It’s no problem with M-mount lenses, because twisting the focusing ring also can activate the magnifier, but it would be with other lenses mounted via an adapter. Actually, I found the focus magnifier button hard to find before I put on the RRS grip.
As someone used to finding the lens release button on the left side of the camera (although I’ve used Leicas for many years, they’ve never been my primary cameras), unobscured by a grip, the RRS grip has slowed my lens changing down a bit. I hope I’ll get used to it.
You lefties will love the Leica focus magnifying and lens release setup if you can find a left-hand grip. Good luck with the left-hand shutter release.
Aperture information in the EXIF field
The M240, like all the other M cameras, has no way to directly sense the aperture to which the lens is set. It does have a light sensor on the front of the camera, and it compares the light to the captured data and guesses the aperture setting. It’s wrong more than half the time, sometimes wildly so. Having said that, I’m reporting in the captions to the pictures in this set of posts what the camera said in the EXIF data, since I don’t remember or write down my settings. I will say that I never actually stopped the 90mm down to f/16.
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