For photographers, the digital revolution began in earnest in the early years of the 21st century. This disruption resulted in cameras transitioning from optical and mechanical devices used to expose film to light, to imaging computers that convert light into electrical charges, which are then processed into digital information.
Digital makes photography so much easier. Digital post-production was a game changer, since good software could suddenly fix a lot of issues and anomalies far more cheaply, and in many cases better, than hardware could manage. The emphasis in digital was on resolution--- as if resolution is going to provide the content of the picture.
With the digital revolution the use of Leica's film rangefinders was reduced to an even smaller segment of the market than it had been during the SLR film days, and this resulted in Leica facing the oblivion of bankruptcy. It looked as if the rangefinder experience ---the camera was small and light, its shutter was quieter, it was easy to focus in low light, and it attracted far less attention from people on the street--could well belong to photographic history.
That rangefinder finder experience shapes how I look at modern digital cameras. I am looking for one that inherits, and builds on, the rangefinder legacy-- rather the SLR tradition. The rangefinder legacy -small, unobtrusive, well-designed, modern in concept, affordable, and offering a high quality user experience--- wasn't really being made, and so there isn't a new and modern way to pursue rangefinder photography in the digital era. Leica's digital rangefinders were not affordable.
It is the mirrorless camera designs that offer the most similarities to rangefinder photography from the film era and the traditional Leica aesthetic: quick glimpses of lived life. The traditional Leica aesthetic: quick glimpses of lived life were due to their smaller, more discreet camera bodies with quieter shutters and interchangeable lenses as these facilitated a more spontaneous, less obtrusive approach to making photographs.
Highlighting how the rangefinder offers a more spontaneous, less obtrusive approach to making photographs undercuts the assumption that photographic depiction is independent of the intentions of the photographer in the respect that counts, the generation of the image itself. The snapshot is assumed to be an automatically recorded image and this assumption ignores the degree of authorial control exercised by many photographic artists.