Sadly I don’t have six grand burning a hole in my pocket. Even then I’m not sure a shiny new B&W-only Leica M Monochrom would be on my shopping list – certainly not ahead of a Nikon D800E and a couple of fancy lenses.

Much though I love my black and white, one of the things I love about digital photography is that you shoot in colour and can leave until afterwards the decision about how to separate the colours into black and white tones. Instead of experimenting in Lightroom or Photoshop and deciding at your leisure, you’d need to get it right in camera with a careful choice of glass filter.

Still, it’s an interesting idea, and I’m sure it produces fine pictures. Thanks to Leica’s wise use of DNG as their raw format, it’s already supported in the free copy of Lightroom that comes with the camera, as well as Silver Efex Pro.