Leica S2 37.5MP uber camera gets price and release date

Al Warmington on the one camera to rule them all

Leica has put the finishing touches on its new S-System camera, the Leica S2, and announced the full retail price and release date. We won’t beat about the bush – this camera costs a cool £15,995.

If that figure just made you spray hot tea all over your computer screen in abject horror, then unfortunately you’re just not in the kind of photographic league Leica is aiming for. You might want to brace yourself for this one too: those 16,000 bones won’t even get you a lens. That’s just the price of the body.

Leica explains that it doesn’t want to “just bundle an entry-level lens with the S2”, but would rather give consumers the choice of spending another few grand on their preferred lens. The cheapest, the SUMMARIT-S 1:2.5/70 ASPH, starts at £3,096. Suffice to say this is not the camera for taking holiday snaps.

And if you’re feeling really flush you can spend £19,092 on the Leica S2-P with sapphire glass monitor and ‘platinum service’ support. We assume that means that if your camera inexplicably breaks down, Leica will instantly dispatch a new one to you. On the back of a rare eagle.

So, why all the expense? Well, these are the specs: the Leica S2 has a 30mm x 45mm sensor which is 56% larger than you’ll find in other lowly DSLRs and provides staggeringly large, 37.5 megapixel images.

Naturally, with such a large sensor, there’s a noticeable impact on the speed at which images can be processed (not to mention how many photos you can fit on a standard memory card). In fact critics have been, well, critical of the 1.5FPS shooting speed, especially in light of the price, although Leica has been quick to point out that “Speed was a primary concern”.

In fact it gets away with it because the Leica S2 is class above other cameras.“We believe we will have the fastest autofocus in the medium format category, the fastest frame rate, and the fastest image processing,” said Christian Erhardt, Leica’s VP of Marketing.

So if you’ve got a few grand tucked away and a house or two to remortgage and want to print a baby photo the size of a barn door, the Leica S2 might be up your street. It’s going to be available in October.

Link: Leica (via DPReview)