The Leica look is real (and Hasselblad). You may not need it. But I do.

There really is something to the way Leica and Hasselblad gear renders color, sharpness, and clarity. I've spent the last few years cycling through gear and reading the standard line that gear doesn't matter. After a long and frustrating journey, I disagree.

I'm not a brand romantic. I shoot documentary work that's sometimes used in newspapers, so I can't lean on heavy processing. I've owned Leica, Hasselblad, Sony, Canon, and Ricoh, and studied samples from far more combinations than I've owned (Flickr and Glass). And honestly, I don't like Leica as a company. Nearly every piece of Leica equipment I've owned has failed or broken, often requiring expensive and time-consuming repairs. I have actively looked for alternatives. This isn't me wanting a red dot.

What makes this frustrating: I'd rather shoot the Japanese cameras. A current Sony body has better autofocus, better stabilization, and a flip-out screen, and costs less than a years-old Leica SL2. Choosing the rendering I want means paying more for less capability.

What I’ve realized is that the subtle ways my gear renders images is one of the ways my work stands out from that of other photographers.

I've tried to get Sony images to look like Leica and Hasselblad images. I've spent hours in Lightroom, bought presets, and built my own. I often can't get the look I want. If I manage to get close, the next frame, shot under different light, needs a completely different treatment. For in-the-moment shooting across mixed light, it's unworkable.

Post-processing also can't touch how a lens renders sharpness. I find Japanese lenses too sharp for my taste. There's just something special about the sharpness and clarity of the European lenses. I've also noticed that they offer better the focus falloff, the transition from sharp to out of focus, even though it's a subtle effect.

Sometimes I look at a well-composed frame from my Sony A7RV with G-Master glass and think it looks gross. I know the same scene on my Hasselblad X2D would have looked the way I wanted.

Even though Leica and Hasselblad cameras likely all use Sony sensors, how the camera processes the image matters too. A video by Dave Herring shooting the same lens on Leica and Sony bodies illustrates this well: https://youtu.be/9RPnE1bHfrg?t=647

To be clear, I don't think everyone needs Leica or Hasselblad. If you color grade your images, you may not need the subtle color rendition these brands offer. For example, to someone who shoots weddings and washes a golden glow over every image, the difference in color rendition from the European brands likely won't matter much.

But if you can't or don't want to do a lot of post-processing, and you want the qualities these cameras and lenses offer, I haven't found a way to post-process my way to the look I want.

My question: for those of you who don't do a lot of post-processing and shoot in a range of lighting situations, how did you handle this? Did you suck it up and go with the expensive European brands? Or did you find a way to make peace with a Japanese brand?