Leica SL3-P review: excellent design but you have to really want a Leica

The Leica SL3-P is a high-speed, high-resolution L-mount full-frame camera built around a 44MP BSI CMOS sensor. It’s the latest in the company’s SL range and perhaps the most polished and all-round capable camera in the series so far.

Key specifications

• 44MP BSI CMOS full-frame sensor with phase detection
• up to 40fps shooting with AF in 12-bit mode. Up to 15fps in 14-bit.
• Subject recognition AF
• 8K open-gate video up to 24p (7.2K open-gate up to 30p)
• Full-width 8K (UHD or ∼DCI) up to 30p
• Full-width 4K up to 30p, 4K/60 and 4K/120 with increasing crops
• Content Credentials image certification
• Battery rated to 383 shots per charge
• IP54-rated all-metal construction

The Leica SL3-P will be available immediately at a recommended price of $6695 excluding tax in the USA, or €5990, including sales tax.

Index:

• What is it?

• How it compares

• Body and handling

• In use

• Video

• Autofocus

• Initial impressions

• Image quality
• Conclusion
• Specifications
• Leica press release

What is it?

Thus far, Leica has produced high-resolution SL models and high-speed SL-S versions. The SL-P appears to be something of an attempt to merge the two lines, offering both high speed and high resolution.

The result is something akin to Sony’s recent a7R VI or, perhaps more pertinently, the Panasonic S1RII: not an out-and-out sports camera but more a studio and landscape camera that’s happy to venture further afield. That Panasonic comparison is unavoidable as the 44MP, 40fps headline spec is shared between both cameras, as are their processors, even if the branding of them differs.

However, our experience of the SL3-P and the S1RII reminded us of how different you can make two cameras, even if you start with many of the same components and have similar destinations in mind.

Leica talks a good game about building cameras that last, and that’s immediately apparent in the feel and heft of the SL3-P. But what’s really striking is how few control points the Leica seems to have. That minimalism, honing the camera down to its core functions and little more extends to the menus and interface, meaning it gives a very different experience to the Panasonic. Or, indeed, any other mainstream camera.

How it compares

Although it offers both high speed and high resolution, the SL3-P doesn’t match the do-everything levels of capability of the Nikon Z8 and Canon EOS R5 II, with their stacked CMOS sensors. Instead it’s closer in ethos to the Sony a7R VI or, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Panasonic S1RII, essentially delivering a studio and landscape camera that isn’t scared of a little action, rather than a camera you might pick for sports work.

We’ve also compared it here to the SL3, which offers higher resolution but less speed, if absolute image quality is more important to you than the added speed.

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that the SL3-P’s specs are a very close match for those of the S1RII. The differences between the two cameras aren’t something readily captured in a specs table.

The original SL3 offers a slight boost in resolution capture but at the cost of a lot of the new camera’s flexibility. Sony’s a7R VI offers both though: higher resolution and competitively fast shooting with excellent autofocus and slightly wider dynamic range. It’s hard to imagine how two user interfaces and user experiences could be more different, for two cameras ultimately trying to do the same thing, though.

Body and handing

The SL3-P uses the same body as the existing SL3 models: a solid, angular block of a thing with a few large control points and a substantial grip to wrap your hand around. The Leica branding across the viewfinder hump is so beautifully proportioned that it’s easy to assume that this series (and, perhaps, a series of film cameras before it), have always looked this way. So it was a shock to see the original SL in the company’s archives and see how far the design has evolved.

There are two buttons on the front of the camera, two on the top and one on the back, none of which have marked functions. Instead they can be re-programmed with a long press. In addition there are three marked buttons on the back of the camera: Play, Fn and Menu.

Then there are the three large command dials: one towards the front of the top plate, one protruding from the rear of the right shoulder and a third on the top left of the camera (which I kept forgetting about, as it’s such an unorthodox place to find one).

Beyond this there’s a small rubber joystick on the back of the camera, and that’s about it. Relatively few control points and still fewer dedicated ones. No switches for focus mode or AF area, not even the seemingly obligatory stills/movie switch: that’s controlled by swiping left or right on the rear screen.

We’ll touch more on the user interface in the ‘In use’ section of the review, but Leica is continuing to refine the rather elegant and focused interface it introduced in the SL3. For instance, in this latest camera, the company has re-worked the way you select a video mode: letting you select the parameters that are most important to you: frame rate, resolution, codec, etc, then filtering down the available list from a seemingly unmanageable 193 down to the handful that fit your requirements. It sounds obvious once you’ve seen it done, but it’s cleaner and simpler than most cameras we use.

Viewfinder and screen

The SL3-P has the same viewfinder as the other SL3 models: a 5.76M dot OLED panel (1600 x 1200px) with 0.76x magnification and a 21mm eyepoint. A large circular rubber cushion makes the camera comfortable to use if you wear glasses and there’s a -4 to +2 diopter adjuster set behind that cushion.

The rear screen is a 2.33M dot (1080 x 720px) panel mounted on a tilt up/down mechanism.

Ports

The SL3-P has the same port arrangement as its sister models, with 3.5mm headphone and mic sockets and a full-sized HDMI socket under a large, rubber flap on the left flank of the camera. Below these is a USB-C socket that can be used for data transfer (10Gbps), tethering (including to an iPhone) or charging.

Battery

The camera uses the same BP-SCL6 battery as its siblings: a 15.8Wh unit that powers the camera to a rating of 383 shots per charge, when tested to the CIPA protocol. As always, this tends to significantly under-represent the actual number of shots you can expect to get, but a rating of nearly 400 shots per charge is the sort of number that should means an enthusiast photographer rarely has to worry about topping-up on a day’s shooting. It’s only intensive shooting such a weddings, or anything involving a mixture of video and stills that are likely to call for you to have a spare to hand.

In use

One of the Leica’s most compelling aspects isn’t something you can see from product photos or interpret from the spec sheets: the user interface.

The SL3-P uses the latest iteration of the back-to-basics interface Leica has been refining over the past few years.

At its heart, it’s designed around putting the key photographic parameters at your fingertips and minimizing the extent of, and need for, menu options. For instance, holding down a customizable button or long-pressing any of the on-screen icons brings up a list of other functions you can assign to it. In fact one of the few options present in the main menu is one to filter-down which options are presented to you, when you long-press a control point to customize its function.

The result is an interface very focused on the fundamental settings of photography. It affords you the luxury of just ignoring what’s going on in the interface, much of the time, and just letting you concentrate on the settings assigned to the two big dials, and what you’re seeing in your viewfinder.

This minimalist approach extends to the body and its control points, too, with a smattering of custom buttons, a joystick and three large, solid-feeling command dials being your points of contact. It’s remarkable how few dedicated control points there are and while, for my shooting, I found myself sometimes wishing for an AF mode selector, with a little work it’s very likely that you can set the camera up in a way you find very quick and easy to work with.

Because it’s such a different way of working, the interface takes a little bit of getting used to, though. It rewards you for taking the time to adjust to its design philosophy. One aspect of which is learning to save your setup as a user profile, or risk discovering that selecting the default profile erases any customization you’ve started applying.

It’s also worth recognizing what is and isn’t included in these profiles. Exposure mode is, but specific exposure settings aren’t, so my attempt to build a profile for freezing the action and another one, with a slower shutter speed, for panning ended up being unsuccessful. Likewise, it’s worth carefully planning your profiles before saving them: I thought it would be handy to define a custom button to switch between profiles. Which was great until I pressed the button and switched to a profile with different custom buttons settings, so couldn’t get back.

Overall it works very well, though, giving a very photo-focused shooting experience where, for all the cleverness that modern cameras have brought, you end up remembering that the only things that really matter are shutter speed, aperture value, composition and where you’re going to focus.

Video

Despite us saying that the SL3-P has a very photo-focused interface, it’s probably better to say that it’s a very exposure-focused. Swipe left on the camera’s settings panel and you get a similar but now video-centric display, with yellow, rather than red accents.

The SL3 offers an incredible range of video modes: 157 in total. These range from 8K open-gate capture, that uses the full extent of the sensor, via 8K in either 1.89:1 or 16:9 aspect ratios and on to 4K capture, again with a choice of aspect ratios. But the camera also offers a selection of other resolutions for each of these capture regions, letting you strike a balance between resolution capture and speed.

Like Panasonic’s S1RII, the SL3-P doesn’t quite have enough pixels to capture DCI 8K (8192 x 4320px) footage so instead outputs 8132 x 4288px footage. UHD 8K is no problem, though, so you can also select the more conventional 7680 x 4320 resolution, if you prefer.

As you’d expect of a modern camera, you get the choice of 10-bit Log or HLG, or 8-bit if you don’t plan to color grade, and you’re targeting SDR displays.

Video options:

As with the Panasonic S1RII, the SL3-P has a Dynamic Range Expansion mode in video, which reads each exposure in both low conversion gain mode for maximum highlight capture and in high conversion gain mode, for cleaner shadows, and combines the two, to boost DR.

This is available in any resolution mode but only at frame rates up to 30p. In each case it increases the readout rate by around 33%. So, for instance, the UHD 8K/24 mode increases from 23.9ms to 31.9ms.

The SL3-P’s video options are, as you might expect, very similar to those of the Panasonic S1RII. It lacks the ProRes RAW option of that camera (though the 1.3x crop on the Panasonic’s Raw mode means it’s not the camera’s best feature). It also misses out on the waveform display option that the S1RII offers. Realistically, given its lower cost and the inclusion of a fan and more flexible rear screen, the S1RII is a better stills/video camera than the Leica. But, looked at the other way: as a primarily stills-focused camera, the SL3-P has a very broad set of very competent video features.

Autofocus

The Leica’s autofocus behavior is as innovative and unconventional as the rest of the UI.

The camera has three AF area modes, but offers more than three AF areas. The first is called “Spot / Field,” the second is called “Multi-Field / Zone” and the last is called Tracking.

The clue is in the forward slashes. Spot / Field lets you select a single AF point of various sizes, while Multi-Field / Zone lets you choose between an adjustable AF zone and all-area AF, where the camera selects a subject from anywhere within the frame. Once you’ve chosen an AF zone mode, you can adjust it by pressing the AF area on your rear screen or long-pressing anywhere on the live preview. This then lets you use the rear dial to adjust the focus area size.

Like Panasonic’s recent cameras, the camera will track recognized subjects when you have subject recognition turned on, but won’t track non-recognized subjects at all. So you’ll need to turn subject recognition on and off depending on what you’re trying to photograph. We’d definitely recommend configuring a button to do this.

By default, the camera’s Tracking AF mode gives you a small rectangle that resets to the center of the frame at the end of each burst. However, while you can’t change the size of the initial target, you can configure the tracking target to revert to wherever you last triggered it. So, for instance, if you want to track a car down through a series of curves, across your frame, then have the camera jump back to where the next car is likely to arrive, you can.

Autofocus performance

We were pretty impressed with the SL3-P’s autofocus performance. It doesn’t quite match the best of its peers in terms of apparent infallibility, but its subject detection is good and highly tenacious. Close examination showed that, while the camera is very quick to focus on fast-moving subjects and usually very effective at following them within the frame, it’s not always perfect at driving the focus to exactly the correct distance. We used a selection of primes and zooms with the SL3-P and got an excellent hit rate but motorsports felt like they were at the very limits of what the SL3-P can do.

Like the Panasonics, subject recognition is a separate mode from general tracking AF, so you’ll need to toggle in and out of a subject recognition mode if you want the camera to give its best performance for recognized subject types but still be willing to focus track the rest of the time. Interestingly, we didn’t encounter the failure to find focus that we saw very occasionally with the S1RII (though not the S1II, post firmware update).

It’s all a significant step forward for the SL series and helps contribute towards the sense that the SL3-P can handle pretty much anything. It’s only when compared with the very best (often pro-sports tested) systems that it falls a fraction short.

Initial impressions

The Leica SL3-P is the fastest-shooting camera Leica has ever made and should, in principle, be the only SL model they need to persist with. It offers an awful lot of what the SL3 offers, in terms of resolution, and it outperforms the more speed-focused SL3-S.

The subject recognition AF performs impressively well: finding subjects very quickly and following them well (especially when it’s a subject the camera has been trained to recognize). Just as the user interface as a whole takes some getting used to, it’s worth digging around in the menus and familiarizing yourself with the SL3-P’s AF logic before you go out shooting. Without an instruction manual it wasn’t obvious that Leica had grouped its AF area modes, or how to switch between them, nor that you can override the camera’s default behaviour when it comes to AF tracking.

Some issues you can’t overcome, though. The sensor is fast, but it’s not as quick as the best stacked CMOS sensors. So the camera will start showing a slideshow of the images you’ve just shot, when you’re shooting at its fastest rates, making it very difficult to keep pace with the action. Similarly, we were advised to shoot Raw-only and to disengage Content Credentials, to get the best performance.

And, even with that done, the camera’s approximately 20ms (1/50 sec) readout rates in 12-bit mode mean that rolling shutter will be apparent if you’re trying to follow really fast action.

In this respect it’s a lot like the Sony a7R VI we recently reviewed: very fast for a high-res studio/landscape camera, meaning it’ll handle itself very confidently in a much broader range of circumstances than that. It’s not quite the high-res, high-speed all-rounder that Canon’s EOS R5 II and Nikon Z8 are, but it’ll still be more than enough camera for a very broad range of photographers, taking a very broad range of photos.

The challenge, as ever with Leica, is the price. It’s a beautifully built object, constructed in Portugal and Germany, that wears the Leica name and is likely to sell in relatively small numbers, when compared to the volumes of the large Japanese manufacturers. As such, the price is high.

For that money you get the fruits of some very clever design work, in a body that feels like it’s designed to last decades. However, parts availability and the continued march of technology (we can already see that sensors and AF will continue to get faster), will make it difficult to match the sense of longevity that a Leica film camera gave you. So, as always, part of the calculus comes down to: how important are those five letters to you?

Image quality

Studio test scene

Our test scene is designed to simulate a variety of textures, colors, and detail types you’ll encounter in the real world. It also has two illumination modes, full even light and low directional light, to see the effect of different lighting conditions.

As you might expect, there’s no meaningful difference between the Leica and the Panasonic in terms of detail capture (the very slight difference shows how good the comparison tool is at highlighting the smallest of differences in focus), or for that matter, the Nikon Z8. However, the 66MP Sony a7R VI clearly captures finer detail than its rivals.

A quick check in JPEG mode shows that the default color rendering of the SL3-P is distinct from that of the Panasonic, though, with differences appearing in the blues and caucasian skintone patch, in particular.

Beyond this, there aren’t any real surprises: noise performance is solid in Raw, very closely matching the performance of its peers. JPEG noise reduction looks similar to that of the Panasonic, with what appears to be more sharpening added, by default, to pull out detail. The Auto white balance also looks to be working harder to neutralize the tungsten light used for our low-light mode.

Conclusion

The SL3-P is an inherently difficult camera to review. Leica’s luxury pricing always makes its cameras hard to assess, because the concept of value has a personal component. This is made more pertinent when there are direct, like-for-like rivals at lower prices, and still more stark when some of these less-expensive rivals share significant amounts of their hardware and capabilities.

The SL3-P’s works rather differently from any other camera in its class, despite that commonality with other cameras. Its large, prominent finger and thumb command dials and comparatively small number of other control points, along with the large, relatively uncluttered viewfinder make clear that this is a camera centered on the most fundamental aspects of photography: exposure and composition. Everything beyond that is secondary.

It takes a while to get used to the SL3-P’s way of working, but once you have, and have set up user profiles for your different types of shooting, it’s really quite elegant. It means the SL3-P doesn’t have every possible bell or whistle that its rivals do, but it is refreshingly good at letting you just get on with your photography. And it’s a very capable camera: it delivers a good amount of resolution and dynamic range while also delivering Leica’s best-yet autofocus.

Unexpectedly, for a camera so focused on photography, the SL3-P has a strong video feature set. Swipe on the screen and you find a camera with 10-bit and ProRes 422 capabilities, a false color display for setting exposure and the ability to upload LUTs, either to give a corrected preview or to bake into your footage. It’s hard to tell how many SL3-P buyers will make use of the video capabilities, but those who do are unlikely to be disappointed, except, perhaps, by the battery life.

Ultimately, though, there’s no getting away from the SL3-P’s price. Those five large, bold letters along the front of its viewfinder hump mean it’s priced unlike anything else on the market. Leica is an exclusive, luxury-priced brand: you either buy into its history, its mythos and its pricing model or you don’t. As the line of cameras with the most direct mainstream competitors, comparison is unavoidable, and it’s implausible, almost to the point of impossibility, that the SL3-P could be objectively so much better than its peers as to justify the price difference on rational grounds. No SL camera could ever be good enough to win over those people that don’t buy into the Leica brand.

Which is a shame as, aside from price, it’s one of my favorite cameras in its class. It’s supremely solid feeling, does a wide range of things very well and feels like a camera designed and developed by people who’ve prioritized photography over technology. But most of us aren’t in the position to ignore the price. And, because our rewards include a consideration of value, we can’t sensibly give it an award. Some people are going to love this camera: probably the best SL camera yet, but we can’t ignore the fact that you can buy a more technically capable camera for half the price.

Scoring

Scoring is relative only to the other cameras in the same category. Click here to learn about what these numbers mean.

Compared to its peers

The Sony a7R VI is the rationalist’s choice, compared with the Leica. It has a similar stress on resolution while still offering very decent speed and video capabilities, but it does so while offering more resolution and slightly better dynamic range. It also has a higher resolution viewfinder and significantly longer battery life, it also uses the best-supported modern lens mount. However, we find it hard to imagine anyone who’s used both concluding that the Sony is better designed or nicer to use.

On paper, particularly in light of the L² technology sharing agreement, the Panasonic Lumix S1RII and SL3-P seem to be extremely similar cameras. In practice, it’s remarkable how different they are to use. The S1R II is covered in buttons and switches and its menus are full of options, whereas the SL3-P is much more pared-back. The Leica is also a fair bit larger and more substantial in the hand. Other than lens mount, using the Panasonic is much more like using a Sony or Canon than like using the Leica. And that user interface philosophy is one of the main distinctive things the SL3-P offers, compared to its rivals. The S1R II isn’t a half-price Leica and the SL3-P isn’t a modified S1R II.

If you’re really into sports photography or video production, the Nikon Z8 or Canon EOS R5 II are probably better choices. Both have stacked CMOS sensors that read out much faster than the Leica’s, meaning less rolling shutter impact in both stills and video shooting. Both also offer Raw video capability and, at the professional end of the market, an extensive pro support network. Both cameras offer a good degree of backward compatibility with their extensive SLR-era lens mounts but also exist in manufacturer-restricted but increasingly extensive lens ranges.

In many respects, the Leica SL3 is the SL3-P’s only direct peer, because it’s the only one that also buys you a Leica. The SL3 has the higher image quality, with a fraction more resolution and dynamic range, but without the video or autofocus performance of the faster SL3-P. The SL3 is perhaps the better choice if you’re primarily a landscape, studio or portrait photographer, but the SL3-P gives you greater flexibility if your shooting is more ad hoc and less prescribed.

Sample gallery

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