freaklikeme
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I have my mono-converted rII for six years (will be seven in October) and am still madly in love with it. Mine was converted by Monochrome Imaging and, because I love film-era (RF and MF SLR) lenses, I went with the bare-sensored, full-spectrum mod to give me the best response from them. I had concerns about the longevity of the sensor in that arrangement, but I feel those have been answered now, and I love the full-spectrum arrangement. I picked up a cheap 550-750nm filter and it's proven to be a great tool to adjust contrast and the overall look of the image. The downside to that is, if I want I want to shoot just the visible spectrum, I have to put an UV/IR filter in front of the lens. Good filters, like B&W 486 or Hoya, have no transmission or resolution loss, and with the cheaper filters you take your chances. That covers everything down to 24mm. Wider than that, you have to switch to a hot mirror filter (I prefer multicoated BG-40) which can be both expensive and difficult to source depending on the size. Consequently, I have quite a few Minoltas where the filters fronting them cost more than the lenses themselves.
Of course, you don't have to do either bare sensor or full-spectrum, and, if you want to use e-mount lenses, you'll want to get some replacement coverglass so you won't negatively impact their performance. If IR doesn't interest you, then you'll also want a replacement hot filter in the mix.
Caveats regardless of conversion type:
White balance control is gone. You have a daylight balanced sensor, and that does matter if you want to keep blacks black and whites white under all lighting conditions.
You can realize about a stop advantage in transmission, assuming you're not using a front color-correcting filter. They typically lower transmission by a stop or two, so you're either breaking even or losing a stop. Still, there are plenty of times you can shoot filterless (daylight, with a stobe, and night shooting under mixed lighting conditions) with minor contrast adjustments to get it looking good. And you can shoot filterless all the time and just get really good with manipulating your tone curve and applying masks for more subtle effects.
Even using filters, not everything's going to be perfect, but they do a lot to help me minimize my time in post, and that's my goal. Mono or color, I put it the work to get everything as right as I can in camera.
AF is limited to CDAF, since you're scraping the PDAF sensors off with the CFA.
Your service options will be more limited should anything go wrong with the camera. Precision, for example, last I checked, won't deal with a camera with a modded sensor because they can't replace it themselves if they damage it. So you either need to get good at self-repair or find a shop that will work with you on anything like a dead shutter or a malfunctioning power supply. I haven't run into any problems with the rII, so, if and when I do, I'm just going to say it served me well and let it become shelf decoration while I get an rIV converted.
Upsides:
You get more resolution out of it than you do the same camera/lens/setting/subject with a CFA, and that's independent of filters, so long as you're using a high quality filter.
Noise and CA present entirely different in mono shots than they do in converted shots. Your files will look consistently cleaner, regardless of ISO and lens.
Despite what they tell you, there's no adjustment a converter can make to a color shot that you can't make to a mono shot using different methods.
It's hella fun.
So, if that all works for you, it should be a good fit. It has been for me.
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