I thought a week-long field test of the Leica M10 was a good idea, so headed up to Assynt in the very north west of Scotland. Assynt has the singular benefit of being my favourite place in the world, so it wasn't much of a hardship. I booked a week in the lovely Stonechat cottage right on the shore of Ardmair Bay - a location I highly recommend - as my base for the week.The secret to getting hold of an M10, which are in very short supply and high demand, was to get on the pre-order list at Red Dot Cameras four weeks ahead of the official Leica announcement. This placed me 9th on the list so I picked up my M10 about 2 weeks before heading to Scotland. I feel for everyone who is on a very long and slow moving wait list, but it will be worth it.This review is one more about using the camera and the impact of the new features, than about the innumerable specs and the history of Leica models - if you're interested in that sort of thing there's a super review by David Farkas here.So what's it like then?Well unsurprisingly it's very much like the M-240 that went before it, but more lovely. I sold my M-240 (which ended up costing me just £30 over 2 years of ownership) in order to fund the M10. Excellent value for money!Let's start with some of the annoying things first:

1. The ISO dial. When up on top of a mountain in winter with an icy wind blasting you, it is hard to pop up the ISO dial to adjust it when wearing gloves. In this situation I preferred the M-240 approach of pressing the button and twiddling the rear wheel, which worked fine and was very simple to use. If you leave the ISO dial popped up, it is very easy to accidentally pop it down again.
2. The rear 4-way button is rather fiddly compared to the one on the M-240. You need to be very precise to get it to do what you want, almost using your thumbnail especially on the left side.
3. When doing a lot of self-timer shots e.g. On a tripod when not using a cable release, the fact that the camera reverts to single shot after it has been turned off and then on again is annoying. I preferred the M-240 shutter switch where you could see what you were doing, and purposefully turn the camera on to timed release. I set the shutter mode to the favourites menu but it just got increasingly annoying having to change it every time. This is a good example of replacing a manual control with a menu control is a step backwards. Note that if the camera is in standby it stays on the setting you left it - it only resets when you turn the camera off with the switch, which I did most of the time due to battery life concerns (see 5.)
4. The Visoflex electronic viewfinder eye sensor is annoyingly unreliable when the camera has EVF/rear screen switching in auto mode. When it's near dusk, it thinks your eye is up to the viewfinder all the time so won't show anything on the rear screen. When it's bright sunlight, the viewfinder thinks you're never looking at it unless you form a complete light shield around it with your hands when it will finally switch to in-viewfinder mode. This is intensely annoying. I'd prefer a button on the finder to switch modes like on the earlier version. This is a case where removing a button has made operation worse. I switched LV Target and Play Screen Target from "Auto" and onto "EVF" to fix this. So if the Visoflex is attached, at least I know what to look at. If it's not attached, the camera defaults to using the rear screen which is as I'd expect.
5. The battery isn't as long-lived as the M-240's. I never ran out of juice, but it's concerning enough to ensure that you have a spare one in your bag. And the spares are expensive at over £100! You can buy a mobile phone that talks to the world, plays games, does email etc etc for less than that. Extortionate. The most pictures I took in a day was 134, at which point the battery was down to 19%. That's with a good amount of EVF and GPS use. Without using the electronic aids I'm sure you could get a lot more, but that's usually how I do landscape photography so there you go.
6. I will rant about the lee Seven5 filters in a separate post as that's not Leica's fault. They are crap though.

So that's the bad stuff out of the way. Before we get to the good stuff, here's another picture for you.That lighthouse location above is just lovely by the way - highly recommended.So having got the bad stuff out, let's look at what's good about the M10. The answer is pretty much everything.The ISO DialI love the ISO dial despite the fact that I criticised it earlier. Being able to glance down at the ISO, shutter speed and aperture is really important to me. I can now see all the main settings without needing to turn the camera on or press any buttons. While the awkwardness of popping the dial up is annoying sometimes, it's very well implemented for 95% of use, and the camera is all the better for it.I know that other cameras have this, like the Fuji XT2 for example, which is great - the more cameras that let you see and control the key features instinctively and simply the better. The only thing "missing" from the M10 is visible exposure compensation - you have to check that on the screen or in the viewfinder, but we're all manual shooters so who uses exposure compensation anyway, right? [hides behind sofa]WiFiI have used the WiFi feature quite extensively, and find it extremely useful. It takes a little while (30 secs) for the camera to establish its hotspot, but once set up my iPhone and iPad can find it very easily and the Leica app is simple and works well. I was confused about the low res of the images I was getting on my iPad until I found the option in the app to set the file size to full res (or medium settings inbetween). Much better. The app also imports DNG files as well if that's your thing.Additionally, if you connect your camera to your home WiFi network ("Join WLAN" option) instead of setting the camera as a hotspot, and your tablet or phone is on the same network, the Leica app will find your camera and connect to it. This is rather cool I think, as it saves you having to disconnect your device from your internet-connected WiFi so you can keep browsing kittens on Facebook while linked to your camera.Size & Other ChangesMoving on from the famous ISO dial, what's next? There has been a lot of noise about the reduced thickness, or increased thinness, of the M10. I admit that when I first picked up an M240 after my M9, I thought it was rather on the chunky side. Once you've had an M240 for a while you don't notice this at all.But picking up the M10, it does feel a tad more elegant, a little slimmer, a tiny bit more fondleable. It really is very very lovely indeed. Dense, solid, beautifully built, it is simply a delightful object to own. The fact it takes great pictures (assuming you stand in front of something interesting) is a bonus. I can see why people collect them. Not me - I want to use it.I found myself using the framelines lever more than I expected. I never used it on my M9 as I only had one lens. Now I have a 24, 50 and 90 I used the lever primarily when the 50 was on and I wanted to check what things would look like with the 90, and vice versa. Obviously the 24 is outside the widest 28mm framelines anyway, but occasionally I'd use the lever when the 24 was on to see if I could fit my composition in with the 50, or whether to move, or stay where I was and crop from the 24.A quick point on the 24 Summilux. While the image is bigger than the widest 28mm framelines, this lens is still highly usable. Even with glasses on I can see outside the 28mm lines and the widest area I can see in the viewfinder approximates to the field of view of the 24 Summilux. So don't let anyone tell you that it's unusable. I do use the EVF to get totally precise framing for landscape compositions though.The three rear buttons are nice. I personally didn't have a problem with the 5 buttons on the M240 so it's neither here nor there for me. I do find the little 4-way controller very fiddly though - the M9 was fantastic in this regard. It is very small and you have to be precise even when not wearing gloves. A more obviously sculpted controller would be better.I like the favourites menu. It's good to put your most common menu items on there so you don't need to go delving into the main menu (which is very short anyway). Leica have got the whole menu system right - it's clean, short and simple - take note Sony.The camera did get rained on a fair bit. I admit to staying indoors when a 70mph rain laden storm blew through though. Nothing stopped working, but I was careful to keep the hotshoe cover on to protect all those little contacts.I can't say I've noticed a lot of difference with the revised viewfinder compared to the M-240. I did a long comparison in the shop repeatably holding my M-240 up to my eye and then the M10. To my mind, the difference is negligible and doesn't make a compelling reason to change cameras on its own. That being said, it does seem slightly easier to focus my lenses in that the difference between just-about-in-focus and actually-in-focus is a tiny bit more pronounced.Lastly, the rear screen is definitely improved. Crisper and more detailed, I like it a lot. Images & User ExperienceIt helps to have three stunning lenses. I swapped my 28 Summicron for a 24 Summilux a little while back, principally for landscape photography where I found I often needed just a little bit more width. It is my main landscape lens and a total indulgence. It's also capable of stunning portraits with that unique wide but shallow look a 24 1.4 can get. The 50 Summilux and 90 Summicron get a lot of use out in the wild as well, and needless to say all three of them are exceptional. The fine detail that they create, and the clarity and contrast, is like nothing else. None of the images from these lenses need any post-production sharpening, in fact to do so spoils them. Having those lenses plus the M10 makes for a very compact kit that fits into a teeny Billingham bag makes for an ideal travel setup. I should add here that this particular 3-lens setup has been a dream of mine for years and years, so to finally have and use it is like a dream come true.The M10 feels faster to record and play back pictures compared to the M-240. I haven't done any timed tests as I've been too busy out actually photographing interesting things, but on the whole the camera feels a lot snappier and responsive.There has also been quite a lot of chat on the forums about which Lightroom colour profile to use. With Lightroom 6.8 we got an updated Adobe standard profile for the M10 to play with, alongside the Leica M10 profile. I have to say that I prefer the Adobe one, and have set my default import to use this profile. The Leica M10 profile is rather too orange for my liking, especially for people pictures. The Adobe standard profile is more neutral and true to life (or true to my memory of the scene at least).I also found the M10 files more malleable when doing major editing in Lightroom (i.e. pushing badly underexposed sections of images). Granted I was mostly shooting at base ISO most of the time, but the flexibility to push the exposure while retaining detail and colour is very impressive.AccessoriesWhen I had to carry more gear than I could manage in my Billingham bag, like crampons, ice axe, little stove, water, food etc, I used a Peak Design Capture Pro clip. This is a quick release clip with one half that you can clamp onto a nearby strap/belt, and the other half that goes on the tripod mount of the camera. An added benefit is that the bit that goes on the camera is ARCA-compatible so it serves as a mount to go straight onto my Uniqball tripod head.I kept the strap around my neck just in case, but I didn't have to as the clip is extremely secure. I like it a lot. The only problem with it is that the grip of the tripod mount to the underside of the M10 is not good enough. The camera tends to rotate around the mount (or vice versa) despite being screwed in tight. The red grippy bit that you can just see in the pic above isn't squidgy enough to provide a good fit, so you might have the camera nicely aligned on the tripod only to find it drooping gently away from your desired composition. I bought an Artist and Artisan "Easy Slider" strap when I bought the camera. I really like this strap - it solves one of the bugbears of camera straps in that you can very quickly and simply alter its length. A nice piece of gear for sure. Lastly, I used Seal Skinz sporting gloves. These have fold-back index fingers and thumbs, and the folded bits are secured by magnets. These are very handy, especially when worn with silk glove liners (I used Arc'teryx ones) - they keep your hands very nicely warm, yet let you have good camera control when you need it. They aren't very waterproof though. Recommended.ConclusionsThe M10 is a lovely camera. If you can afford to buy one, and can couple it with good lenses, you'll be a very happy person indeed. It is truly delightful to use. Image quality is the best yet from a Leica digital. If you have a Q and a lot of money, sell it and get an M and be able to change lenses. It's a bit of a closer run thing with the SL, as you can fit M lenses on it, but my preference is the M10 over the SL as I don't need autofocus and I prefer small and light, and the SL autofocus lenses are huuuuge.As a landscaping tool, the M10 is superb. I don't want or need anything else. Light(ish) with small and amazing lenses, it gets out of the way and then performs when you need it. With the added mod-cons of WiFi and GPS with the viewfinder attached, it ticks all my boxes.I use my Leica for lots of other types of photography as well. The main thing about it is how lovely it is to use. Sure you could get more pixels in a small package from a Sony A7RII and still use Leica lenses (except wides), but have you tried to use a Sony? The user interface is absolutely terrible and the whole thing is just deeply unsatisfying to use.Despite the issues I picked out at the top of this post, Leica have really nailed it this time. I can understand why dealer wait lists are so long. The M10 is gorgeous, functionally brilliant, and so lovely you could sleep with it.For more images from this trip, click here.