(Cologne, Germany – September 23, 2008) Yes, just as we told you yesterday, Leica has announced a brand new digital SLR today with a staggering resolution of 37.5 megapixels. Called the Leica S2, the camera will use a medium-format-sized 30 x 45mm imaging sensor in a 35mm-sized camera body.

Though the 37.5MP sensor would put the S2 on the low-end of medium-format digital cameras from companies such as Hasselblad, Mamiya, Leaf and others, it's head and shoulders above recent DSLR offerings from Canon and Sony which have maxed out at just above 24MP. Overall, the sensor in the Leica S2 is 56% larger than so-called "full-frame" cameras from Canon, Nikon, and Sony.

The announcement of the S2 has taken many attending the photokina show in Cologne, Germany by surprise. Though in the past, major new camera releases have been kept under wraps until unveilings at shows like photokina and PMA in the United States, in recent years with the explosion of the Internet and 24 hour news cycles, camera manufacturers have tended to let information about their new models leak out to the press in the days and weeks leading up to a trade show.

Though Leica had done a good job of keeping the S2 secret until the official announcement this morning, information about the camera leaked out yesterday afternoon and appeared on several blogs. Still, not bad considering the impressive specs on this new offering from Leica, a company which some industry observers have wondered if it would survive in a post-film era. We'll add more information to this developing story as we can gather it at photokina.

Full press release is below.

Press Release

Unexpected but inevitable. The brilliant new Leica S2 digital SLR.

LEICA S2 – Remarkable new camera from Germany redefines the professional DSLR class with a custom 37.5-megapixel, 30 x 45 mm sensor built into a 35mm-sized body.

Some companies tweak the features. At Leica, we transform the concept. That’s why the introduction of the flagship Leica S2 is not merely an incremental advance. It is nothing less than a watershed event that sets an entirely new performance standard for professional digital SLRS. With a custom 37.5-megapixel, 30 x 45 mm sensor that is 56% larger than full frame, it establishes parameters of imaging excellence that are well beyond those obtainable by conventional pro-caliber DSLRs. In the Leica tradition, it utilizes the classic 3:2 aspect ratio that corresponds to the human field of vision and is widely acclaimed as the “Leica Format.”

In designing this brilliant new camera, Leica’s engineers took a close look at the best existing DSLR designs and then synergized them into a radical but practical new camera that combines the performance parameters of a medium-format digital camera with the ergonomics, form factor, and handling ease of a 35mm SLR. The result is the new Leica S2, an entirely new, finely crafted, professional tool developed in-house by Leica with hands-on input from some of the most renowned professional photographers in the world. It incorporates an advanced new dual shutter system with in-body focal-plane shutter for fast lenses, and in-lens leaf shutters for high flash sync speeds, an ultra-high-precision autofocusing system, a new series of lenses designed for the highest possible performance with the new sensor, and a Maestro image processing system that provides twice the speed of comparable medium-format backs, reduces power consumption, and provides in-camera JPEG capability. Remarkably, all of this has been incorporated into a camera that is smaller than a full-size professional 35mm SLR, and still has the unmistakable look and feel of a Leica.

Like Leica cameras of the past, we designed the new Leica S2 from the inside out, and its robust styling is a classic example of form following function. We began with a cutting-edge, large-format CCD sensor and literally configured the camera around it rather than adapting existing technologies. In this way we achieved a new level of performance without sacrificing size or convenience. Yes the S2 Leica is our latest masterpiece, an unequivocal statement to the world that showcases our technological prowess. But it is more than just a technological tour de force. It is a statement of Leica’s continuing pre-eminence in the world of imaging that goes back nearly 100 years. Perhaps that is why our top executives in Germany have compared the announcement of the Leica S2 to the debut of the first Leica, the legendary model A in 1925. That seminal camera did nothing less than redefine 35mm photography in the 20^th century and we believe that the Leica S2 may well do the same for DSLR photography in the 21^st.