Leica SL3-P review – is this the best camera Leica has ever made?

Leica’s latest camera, the Leica SL3-P, is a high-end full-frame mirrorless model designed for professional photographers. It employs the same body design as the firm’s existing SL3 and SL3-S models, but with different sensor. The firm says that it’s the most advanced Leica camera to date.

Leica SL3-P at a glance:

• $6,690 / £5150 body-only
• 44.9MP full-frame CMOS sensor
• ISO 50-200,000
• Up to 40 frames per second shooting
• 5.76m-dot, 0.76x viewfinder
• 3.2in, 2.3m-dot tilting touchscreen
• 8K 30p, 4K 120p, Full HD 120p video

So what’s the difference between the SL3-P and its siblings? To recap, the SL3 is a 60MP stills-oriented camera for such things as portrait and studio photography, while the SL3-S is a 24MP model with a stronger focus on video. The SL3-P sits in between the two with a 45MP sensor, and a feature set that’s designed to allow it to take on almost any task, for both photography and video.

At $6690 / £5150 body-only, though, the SL3-P is almost twice the price of the Panasonic Lumix S1R II, which shares the same sensor and offers pretty much the same capabilities. It’s also more expensive than either the Nikon Z8 or the Canon EOS R5 Mark II, both of which aim to do essentially the same thing. So what is it about the SL3-P that might persuade buyers to justify the price tag?

Features

Let’s take a look at the camera’s core feature set. That 45MP full-frame sensor is of a conventional design, with no suggestion it uses any kind of stacked architecture, as employed by many recent high-performance cameras. It provides a sensitivity range of ISO 50-200,000, although settings below ISO 100 are clearly ‘pulled’, at the cost of decreased highlight range.

Using its mechanical shutter, the SL3-P can shoot at up to 7 frames per second, which is the same as its SL3 siblings. But switch to the electronic shutter, and it’ll go as fast as 40fps, complete with continuous autofocus. Leica provides a good range of intermediate speed settings too, to match whatever activity you might be shooting.  

As for autofocus, this uses a hybrid system that combines phase detection for speed, contrast detection for accuracy, and intelligent subject recognition. The latter is capable of recognising and tracking people, animals, or cars. You have to select between them in advance of shooting, though, as unlike most recent cameras, the SL3-P can’t automatically detect the subject type itself.

In-body image stabilisation is built-in, and rated for up to 5 stops of shake reduction when shooting hand-held. Leica has also included a 176MP high-resolution multi-shot mode, with both tripod-based (pixel-shift) and hand-held (super-resolution) options included. The composite raw file is generated in-camera, with the option to record a single-shot file alongside.

One feature included in the SL3-P that isn’t available on many other cameras is Content Credentials. This allows either JPEG or raw files to be securely signed in the metadata according to standards established by the Content Authority Initiative (CAI). The provenance of the images can then be checked using free online tools, to verify their authorship and that they are genuine photos rather than AI-generated. That’s not something many enthusiasts will need, but for working photojournalists, it could be invaluable. 

Video specs are impressive, too. There’s a mind-boggling array of resolutions and frame rates on offer, including 8K at 30fps, 6K at 60fps, 4K at 120fps, and Full HD at 120fps. Open gate output is available for capturing the full sensor area at up to 8K and 24fps, allowing greater flexibility in post-processing. Files can be saved directly to an external SSD, while RAW can be output over HDMI to an external recorder. Apple ProRes is also available, for resolutions up to 5.8K.

Video shooting is treated entirely separately within the user interface, with its own settings. The camera can also be switched to a Cinema Mode that works in terms of the T-stops and shutter angles often favoured by experienced videographers, rather than F-stops and shutter speeds. Microphone and headphone sockets are provided, alongside full-size HDMI video output and USB-C for data transfer and charging.

Both Bluetooth and high-speed Wi-Fi are on board for smartphone connectivity, via the Leica Fotos app.  It’s possible to copy photos across for sharing, and to use your phone as a remote control, complete with a live view feed and the ability to change wide range of camera settings. With an iPhone, there’s also the option to use a wired connection via a USB-C cable, which is quicker to set up and allows even faster file transfers.

The Leica Fotos app also brings support for Leica Looks. These are more stylised and interesting JPEG colour profiles compared to the rather basic options that come pre-installed on the camera. You can browse through them in the app and transfer the ones you like to the camera – or indeed, just install the whole lot.

Leica SL3-P: Key features

• Tilting screen: The 3in, 2.1m-dot touchscreen tilts up and down, but there’s no additional hinge for portrait-format shooting.
• File storage: Leica has included two card slots, one for CFexpress Type B and the other for UHS-II SD. They can be used either simultaneously or sequentially, or you can record raw to CFe and JPEG to SD. The camera can also record directly to a USB-C SSD.
• Power: The BP-SCL6 battery is rated for 383 shots by CIPA standard tests, which is an improvement on the SL3 and SL3-S. It can be recharged in-camera via the USB-C port.
• Connector ports: On the left side, beneath chunky rubber covers, you’ll find USB-C, full-size HDMI, and 3.5mm stereo microphone and headphone ports. The latter two are both compatible with Leica’s RC-SCL6 cable release ($215 / £90).
• Top-plate status screen: A top-plate LCD display shows your key settings at a glance, including exposure mode, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and exposure compensation.
• L-mount: There’s a wide range of designed-for-mirrorless full-frame L-mount autofocus lenses from Leica, Panasonic, and Sigma. Some other third-party makers are starting to join in, too.

Build and handling

Leica has used exactly the same body design as before, although the SL3-P is distinguished from the SL-3 by the lack of a Leica red dot on the front. But fundamentally, the SL-3P, SL3-S and SL-3 all work in pretty much exactly the same way. For that reason, much of the following text is derived from my reviews of those cameras.

You get the same chunky body that measures 141.2 x 108.1 x 84.6mm and weighs in at about 855g. The camera feels extremely robust, including dust and splash resistance to the IP54 standard. While the handgrip isn’t as sculpted as those on its competitors, I still found it reasonably comfortable to hold.

Two large dials on the top plate are used for setting exposure settings, complemented by one embedded in the body underneath your thumb. Clicking this dial inwards also allows exposure-mode selection. A well-placed joystick on the back is used to position the AF area. Unlike on most cameras, though, you can’t quickly recentre the AF point by clicking this inwards. Instead, you have to set up a different function button – I used the one beside the viewfinder.

You can set which exposure parameter is controlled by each of the three dials separately for each exposure mode, and in whatever way you please. The two right-hand dials are nicely placed, but I find the dial on the left to be inconveniently positioned, as you have to shift your hand from underneath the lens every time you want to make an adjustment. This is particularly awkward with larger lenses. By default, this dial changes ISO, and I think it’s best left that way.

Where other pro cameras are covered with lots of buttons for direct access to different functions, the SL3 design makes do with a smaller number of unlabelled custom function buttons. The idea is that you set these up to suit your specific needs. You can also save different setups as User Profiles for different shooting situations, and give them sensible names for easy recall.

Two function buttons are placed on the front of the camera, and I find they’re reasonably easy to reach using the second and third fingers of my right hand. Meanwhile, the one beside the viewfinder requires a slight stretch of my right thumb. However, the other two are placed behind the top control dial, which means they can only be operated with a significant shift in grip. I’d make a point of assigning these to functions that you don’t need to change on a shot-by-shot basis.

While the external controls may be sparse, they’re complemented by a nicely designed touchscreen interface that gives quick access to a wide range of functions. Simply pressing an onscreen icon lets you adjust the associated setting. Alternatively, tapping the menu button once brings up a nicely designed control panel with well-spaced touch buttons.

Likewise, the menus are pared right back, with considerably fewer options compared to other high-end models. And yet, I’ve never really felt that any crucial setting was missing.

Viewfinder and screen

Leica has fitted the SL3 range with an excellent electronic viewfinder. It’s bright and detailed, with 5.76m-dot resolution and 0.76x magnification, and it gives a nice, clear view all the way into the corners. Detailed exposure information is overlaid on black bars above and below the preview image, and the entire interface rotates when you turn the camera for vertical shooting.

Likewise, the rear screen is also very good indeed, measuring 3.2in diagonally and boasting 2.3m-dot resolution. It tilts up and down, for overheard or low-angle shooting, but it’s a shame you don’t get a third hinge for portrait-format work. This limits its usefulness to in landscape-shooting only. 

Leica previews exposure, colour and white balance by default setup. There’s no depth-of-field preview, but you can assign this to a custom button – I used the lower of the two on the front of the body. Usefully, a second press of the button previews the shutter speed, which is great for visualising image blurring with long exposures.

There’s a good set of exposure and compositional aids on offer, including gridlines, a live histogram, electronic levels, focus peaking, and blinking highlights to warn of possible clipping. Helpfully, you can define four ‘Info Profiles’ with any combinations of these you require, and then cycle through them using the FN button.

Autofocus

One area where Leica has been steadily upgrading its offerings comes with autofocus, and the SL3-P promises its most sophisticated setup yet. You get on-chip phase detection that supports autofocus across almost the entire frame. Subject detection now understands cars, as well as humans and animals, and the camera can be set to home in on the most important part of the subject (either the face/eye, or the front/windscreen of a car). Unlike on the SL3 and SL3-S, subject detection is now set independently of the focus area and tracking.

I tested the SL3-P’s autofocus in a couple of ways. Firstly, by shooting portraits with various lenses, including the 50mm f/1.4 and 100mm f/2.8 macro announced at the same time as the SL3-P, and secondly for motor racing using the Leica Vario-Elmar-SL 100-400mm F5-6.3 telezoom lens. I found it performed well in terms of identifying and tracking subjects, giving a good hit-rate of in-focus shots (in fact it’s very much like the Panasonic S1R II in this respect). The biggest problem comes with working out how to configure it how you need.

On the SL3-P, Leica has changed the AF area selection menu, so it now offers three choices: field/spot, zone/multi-field, and tracking (previous SL3 models separated these out to field, spot, zone, multi-field, and tracking). In the first two, the camera will detect a subject positioned at the selected AF point, but will only attempt to follow it across a very small surrounding area. With a subject that’s moving around the frame, you’ll need either to switch to tracking AF, or select the largest available AF area from zone mode.

However, the latter is complicated by the fact that you could easily be forgiven for assuming that no such option exists. This is because Leica’s method of changing the focus area size is distinctly obtuse. You can’t apparently use the buttons or dials; instead, you have to press down on the touchscreen for a second. Then you get a choice between four AF area sizes in each of the field/spot and zone/multi-field modes – with the largest of these being the multi-field option that covers the full image area. I think it would be better if this were selectable as a separate option, as before.   

Switch to the AF tracking option, and the camera will initially pick up the subject using a target area that you can position freely within the frame. However, in this mode you’re restricted to only using a small focus point. That’s great if you know your subject will appear at a specific location, for example a certain point on a racetrack. But it can be much trickier to pick up small, erratic subjects.

Once you’ve focused and shot a burst, you’ll then find that the SL3-P is set up so it resets the target focus point to the centre of the frame, every single time. Personally, I don’t really understand why you’d ever want the camera to do this. Thankfully you can change this, so it returns to the position you originally chose instead. But I think that should be the camera’s default mode of operation.

There’s also an option to get the tracking zone to stay at whatever point in the frame the subject reached at the end of a burst, but I’m struggling to think of scenarios where this would be useful.

It’s also worth noting that the SL3-P shares the same irritation in tracking mode as the Panasonic S1II-series cameras with which it shares a lot of its technology. When subject detection is enabled, but the camera can’t detect a suitable subject, it won’t fall back on its conventional tracking mode. Instead, it will focus only at the selected point.

Performance

On the whole, the Leica SL3-P is every bit as fast and responsive as a professional camera should be. It takes a moment to wake up after you press the large power button on its left shoulder, but it will be ready to shoot by the time you’ve got the viewfinder up to your eye. It can take just a little bit longer to become fully responsive if you want to change settings using the touchscreen, but while this is long enough to be noticeable, it’s not so bad as to be really annoying.

As for the shutter sound, it’s pretty quiet, and shouldn’t unduly disturb bystanders or attract unwanted attention. Select the electronic shutter and the camera can be completely silent, but there’s a risk of image distortion due to rolling shutter effects with fast-moving subjects. The SL3-P fares much better than the SL3 in this regard, though.

One area where Leica has made headway compared to previous SL3 models lies with battery life. Based on CIPA-standard tests, the SL3-P promises 383 shots per charge, compared to 315 for the SL3-S and just 260 for the SL3. In my experience, this is highly dependent upon how you use the camera in practice – perhaps even more so than with most other cameras.

If you tend to shoot a lot of high-speed bursts, you can easily get a thousand or more shots per charge. But on the other hand, when I was mostly using single-shot drive mode, and only taking two or three shots at a time, it felt like the battery was depleting rather quickly. At any rate you’ll want to pick up a spare, and they’re not cheap, at $200 / £155 each.

Looking at continuous shooting, the SL3-P has no trouble meeting its specified 40fps maximum speed. It has a reasonable buffer, too; it’ll keep going for at least 70 when shooting raw, and more in JPEG-only or when using the slower shooting speeds via the mechanical shutter. My main concerns with the camera are, again operational.

Firstly, there’s no clear feedback in the viewfinder when you’re shooting with the electronic shutter. There’s a small counter at the bottom right of the frame that ticks down the frames remaining, but that’s all. The SL3-P is crying out for a more visible indicator in the viewfinder to show when it’s actually shooting (and perhaps more importantly, when it isn’t).

Secondly, you only get live view between frames when shooting at the slowest rate, which is just 2 frames per second. At faster speeds, the camera instead plays back the images that you’ve just shot in between frames, to help you keep track of what’s going on.

That approach works reasonably well at 20, 30 or 40fps. But at slower shooting speeds, the viewfinder is, in effect, lagging further and further behind the subject. This makes it difficult to track anything that moves quickly or erratically across the frame. It’s a real disadvantage compared to other high-speed, high-resolution cameras with stacked sensors and blackout-free viewfinders.  

I’ve found Leica’s in-body image stabilisation to be very effective, though. Using the new Summilux-SL 50mm F1.4 ASPH, I was able to shoot at shutter speeds as slow as 1 second and still get usable results. Broadly speaking, that’s on par with what I’ve got from similar high-end full-frame cameras.

One area where the SL3-P does stand out, though, lies with the usability and effectiveness of its high-resolution multi-shot modes. Unlike most of its competitors, multi-shot is both easy to access from the drive mode menu, and consistently effective in recording useful extra detail (at least with static, inanimate subjects). The fact that you get a 164MP DNG generated in-camera means that you don’t have to fit clunky proprietary software into your workflow, either.

In practice,the main operational drawback is that the camera locks up for a long time while processing – about 15 seconds in tripod mode, and twice that in hand-held mode. Personally, I’d still see it very much as a special-purpose mode for such things as still-life and static landscapes. Even so, it adds another strong to your bow. However, it’s also worth noting that the Panasonic S1RII shares the exact same technology.    

Metering is generally reliable, and it’s easy to see in the viewfinder when you may need to dial in some exposure compensation. Auto white balance works well for the most part, too.

I’m not a huge fan of Leica’s Standard JPEG colour mode, which I find a little too muted, and I preferred the punchier colours of Vivid for everyday shooting. The various Leica Looks are worth trying too, if you prefer something a bit more stylised. Meanwhile, Black & White lovers are well served by the Monochrome High Contrast setting.

Image quality

As for raw image quality, the SL3-P uses the same sensor as the Panasonic Lumix S1R II. It therefore gives pretty much the same results. This means you get a level of detail that’s on a par with its 45-50MP rivals, such as the Nikon Z8, Canon EOS R5 Mark II, or Sony Alpha A1 II.

Images are almost completely free of any visible noise at ISO 100, and continue to look very clean and detailed up to ISO 1600. Beyond this noise inevitably has an increasing impact on detail and colour, with both suffering visibly by ISO 12,500.

I’d still be happy shooting at up to ISO 25,000, and even ISO 50,000 could be just about usable with the latest AI noise reduction software, if necessary. But I think the top two settings really are best avoided, and ISO 200,000 really should be left well alone.

As for dynamic range, there’s immense scope to bring up extra shadow detail from low-ISO raw files. Indeed at ISO 100, you can adjust the tonality sliders in raw processing to your heart’s content, without ever really being bothered by noise. Files remain impressively malleable at higher ISOs, too.

Leica SL3-P: Our Verdict

I got to test the SL3-P before its official launch, and in many respects, it does what it promises. It’s super-fast and the autofocus works very well. Leica’s design approach can certainly take a bit of getting used to, especially if you’re accustomed to using more mainstream cameras from the likes of Canon, Nikon, Sony or Panasonic. But if you’re prepared to use it as Leica intends, and spend some time setting up User Profiles for the kinds of subjects you shoot, I find it works well.

With its particular balance of features, the SL3-P becomes the most versatile model within the current SL range, and therefore arguably makes the most sense to the widest audience. Studio and portrait photographer will still get the best stills image quality from the original 60MP, but the SL3-P is more capable for when faced with fast-moving subjects. It matches or surpasses the SL3-S for video, too.   

Many readers will, naturally, wonder why you’d spend so much money on a Leica when you can get cameras from the mainstream Japanese makers that do much the same thing for rather less money. To be honest, it’s probably not a camera for most enthusiasts. Rationally, cameras like the Canon EOS R5 Mark II, Nikon Z8, Panasonic Lumix S1RII and even the Sony A7R VI offer a better value proposition. In particular, for those shooting sports and action, they provide a better experience during continuous shooting.

Buying a Leica is, however, not purely a rational decision. For some photographers, the exceptional build quality and streamlined, user-friendly interface could be reason enough to buy. And for working professionals, the support for Content Credentials, and indeed the sheer cachet of turning up for a job with a Leica, could well make the SL3-P worth the outlay.   

Leica SL3-P: Full Specifications

Related reading:

• Leica SL3 review
• Panasonic Lumix S1RII review: professional performance, great price
• Leica SL3-S review – sometimes the red dot isn’t enough

Follow AP on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Irys.