Epson R-d1: A User's Report
At present, Epson’s R-D1 and the improved version of it, the R-D1S, are the only digital rangefinder camera on the market.
I’ve been using the R-D1 since December, 2004 and am so impressed with it that I will now make an audacious statement.
The R-D1 is the best digital camera in existence for making photographs in the tradition of small camera photography that began in the late 1920s with the introduction of the Leica camera and which was spear-headed by the Leica work of Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier Bresson. It might well be the only digital camera at present that is good enough to develop this tradition according to digital photography’s specific visual nature.
Therefore, I think it merits serious and thorough attention precisely at this time when readers interested in digital rangefinders are awaiting the release of the digital Leica and some are wondering how they will finance it.
What I have to say is from the perspective of an artist photographer who began photographing with a Leica IIIc in 1964 and has used M2s, M3s and M4s almost exclusively until the release of the R-D1. These are the cameras that supported my photojournalism with New York Magazine, Look, etc. in the 60s and produced the work that earned me two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and led to my prints being exhibited and/or collected by museums across the country.
It’s a report, then, on how the R-D1 has behaved in my hands and how it has helped me pursue my artistic vision. It is necessarily, then, somewhat subjective. Also, it’s a working photographer’s report so some nomenclature might not be standard. I learn how to do things before I learn what the functions that do them are called.
For an objective, professional review please see the R-D1 articles on Sean Reid’s online newsletter, Reid Reviews (
www.reidreviews.com) -- not because Sean is my friend but because he has given the R-D1 more attention than has any other serious professional camera reviewer.
MONOCHROME MODE I photograph in black and white. The Epson “monochrome” mode lets me see the pictures in black and white on the LCD. And the JPEGS created by Epson PhotoRaw software lets me edit in black and white before turning to Photo Shop.
IMAGE QUALITY I use the same lenses as with my M-series Leicas: Leitz 90mm f/2.8 Tele-Elmarit; Leitz 50mm f/2.0 Summicron; Leitz 35mm f/2.0 Summicron and a Canon screw mount f/2.8 28mm lens with an M-mount adapter. I also bought a Canon screw mount f/2.8 35mm lens, also with an adapter.
With all lenses the image quality is at least as good as anything I’ve achieved with the Leica Ms and Tri-X. With these five lenses the R-D1 sensor gives pictures having the same combination of sharpness and subtlety as has distinguished Leica photographs from the beginning--that combination of precise drawing and a sketch-like softness that gives Leica photography its immediacy and intimacy.
The gray tones I’m getting, delicate yet solidly there, and the gradations between them are superb; “elusive,” one photographer calls them.
If anything, the R-D1 is enabling me to get closer to the tones, forms and compositions that I’ve long been envisioning and striving to articulate than has any other camera I’ve used.
This vision seeks a kind of flatness that dangerously approaches a condition of much too little contrast yet stops just this side of it, with those precise but elusive gradations between tones.
Nonetheless, the tonal range of my R-D1 RAW files is such that a contrasty treatment of the same images, leading to pictures with an entirely different ambience and emotional content, seems equally obtainable.
WITH AUXILIARY OPTICAL FINDERS The R-D1s viewfinder frame lines accommodate only 28mm, 35mm and 50mm lenses. But with a Leitz 135mm auxiliary optical viewfinder mounted on the accessory hot shoe, and a lot of practice, I can frame quite accurately with the 90mm lens. Other photographers have achieved similar results with auxiliary optical finders for short focal length lenses whose fields of vision are not indicated by the R-D1 frame lines.
AUTOMATIC EXPOSURE When I select aperture priority, the exposures I’m getting so far are so accurate and even that very little Photo Shop operation is needed to complete the image. And recently, two RAW files were so well exposed that no Photo Shop operations were needed.
RANGEFINDER/VIEWFINDER SYSTEM So far I’ve experienced the same accuracy with the R-D1’s rangefinder as with Leica M rangefinders. The same is true of the parallax correction for the 28mm, 35mm, and 50mm lenses. The brightness is superb except in very low light.
It is the fact that the R-D1 is a rangefinder/viewfinder camera that makes it the excellent instrument – and perhaps the only serious digital one -- for serious small camera work.
With a rangefinder/viewfinder, one looks directly at one’s subject, as though through a window. And things seen through the R-D1’s 1:1 viewfinder are the same size as when seen by the unaided eye. Therefore, when the camera goes to the eye, it sustains the photographer’s concentration on, or his/her connection with his/her subject as he/she saw it when it moved him/her to photograph it.
The R-D1 sustains our engagement with the world, with life.
But the moment we put an SLR up to our eye we stop looking at our subject and begin to look at a picture projected by a lens, then a mirror, then a prism, onto the SLR’s ground glass. Our engagement with life is replaced by an engagement with an image.
As I said in the text to my pictures on Epson Europe’s website Gallery, “Ultimately, the subject is life. If one can’t experience life visually through the viewfinder as one experiences it with the unaided eye, one isn’t photographing life, one is photographing an idea.”
Furthermore, the R-D1 viewfinder shows more than is inside the frame. One sees around the frame. In an SLR one sees only what is in the picture. With the R-D1 one sees what one is including in the picture and what one is excluding from it.
Therefore, composition with a rangefinder/viewfinder camera with a viewfinder as excellent as the R-D1s is enormously quick and flexible and has extaordinarily wide scope.
It is, in effect, like drawing itself, looking at the world and putting what shapes one wants onto the paper, where one wants them.
By comparison, composing with an SLR is like being handed a drawing and then making changes in it, but always having to look at the world through its rectangle.
COCKING THE SHUTTER Retaining this feature of film cameras in a 21st century digital camera was a stroke of genius on Epson’s part. This simple and highly familiar operation –for most photographers, like second nature—is part of what makes the R-D1 a true instrument. Thanks to this simple action, the R-D1 is, like the paint brush to the painter, an extension of the photographer’s hand, eye and artistic vision.
Because we have to cock the shutter before each exposure, we tell the R-D1 when it’s ready to shoot.
For that’s the crucial thing: for the camera to become part of, to be absorbed into the photographer’s rhythm and pace of moving through and relating to the world, not for the photographer to become an extension of the camera’s mechanism, which has no relation to the world.
IN THE HAND The R-D1 fits snugly into the hand. It feels heavy at first but within a couple weeks of carrying it every day the heaviness goes away and it obeys every action of arm, wrist and fingers fluidly. It swings up to the eye naturally. All operations of the right hand– focusing, cocking the shutter, changing shutter speed – are fluid. One can change shutter speed without looking away from the viewfinder, even in the dark.
True, it is a camera, but with the R-D1 “camera” is only a sub-category of the larger category, “instrument”.
With respect to the great tradition of 35mm photography, in my opinion the R-D1 is the closest thing we have to the Stradivarious of digital cameras.
OTHER ADVANTAGES The R-D1 is giving excellent results with Cossina Voigtlander and Zeiss lenses.
A DRAWBACK The R-D1 isn’t weather sealed; care is needed to protect it from sudden temperature changes, especially going from cold to warm, lest humidity condense on and damage the circuitry.
THE R-D1S
A few weeks ago Epson announced a new version of the R-D1 – the R-D1S. At present, Epson has no plans to release it in the US. But R-D1 owners can download the new firmware. The basic facts of the improvements as reported by Sean Reid, are listed below. For full details, see the “Epson R-D1 Long Term” article at
www.reidreviews.com, as well as for drawbacks reported by long-term R-D1 users.
1. “The camera always releases the shutter at the first press.”
2. “The camera can be set to simultaneously record a RAW and a low-resolution JPEG file for each exposure”.
3. “The RAW buffer is…improved from two frames to three…
4. The reviewing system has been improved.
5. “There is now a hot pixel correction feature available via the menu.”