Leica M8 - is the lens mount THAT expensive?

Tony Polson wrote:
"William Graham" wrote:

Well, my motorcycling days are about over......I don't have a very long
inseam, and I always had a problem with the Beemers.....Their seats were a
tad too high for me. But they were far and away the finest cycles made.....I
put 85,000 miles on that K-100 and never had it quit on me even once.....I
have never had that kind of reliability with any 4 wheeled vehicle I have
ever owned.


That's my experience too - my only problems with BMW were all as a
result of traffic accidents. :-(


If Leicas are that reliable, then that alone would justify their
high price, especially if you made your living with a camera.


That's normally true of Leicas, but I must admit I have had some
problems with one of my M7 bodies. However, it has all been fixed
promptly and free of charge under the "Passport" warranty, which is 5
years in the UK. I believe it also covers accidental damage.

So was that the LED unreadable display condition I heard about, or
something different? Electronic or mechanical?

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio
http://www.allgstudio.com

Bart van der Wolf wrote:

"Gordon Moat" wrote in message
news:iWWRg.1449$b23.863@dukeread07...
SNIP

Or a Ducati, Porsche, Swiss watch, Canon L lens, et al. Plenty of
other choices out there in many products. So why do you imagine anyone
buys things that are not mass market items?


For a variety of reasons, ranging from status symbol to proven quality.
Canon L glass is not necessarily for status, because some of them are
relatively affordable, yet high quality performers, such as this 'EF
200mm f/2.8 L' full frame shot:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/temp/3879.jpg
or these crops:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/temp/3759_02.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/temp/3741.jpg


Hello Bart,

Yes, the Canon L lenses are less status symbols, though I know a few
photographers who present them in such regard. The main think about why
I threw those into that short listing is that the volume of L lenses
sold is much less than the volume of more common Canon lenses. You can
find a similar situation at Nikon.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio
http://www.allgstudio.com

"Gordon Moat" wrote in message
news:iWWRg.1449$b23.863@dukeread07...
SNIP

Or a Ducati, Porsche, Swiss watch, Canon L lens, et al. Plenty of other
choices out there in many products. So why do you imagine anyone buys
things that are not mass market items?

Sometimes it's just to get something that's made right in a sea of
junk......For example, I looked far and wide for a cassette deck that used
three motors, (like all the decent reel to reels did around 40 years
ago).....I finally found one made by Sony about 20 years ago....The RX 606
ES. I snapped it up for about $400 as I remember, and it has been performing
flawlessly for the last 20 years or more, just as I expected it would.......

Gordon Moat wrote:

I would be surprised to see Leica medium format lenses,
or Leica large format lenses.

Some development of Leica medium format lenses was done for the
aborted deal with Hasselblad. I don't know how far it went, but Leica
were extremely aggrieved when the deal didn't get done, so I guess
that a significant amount of money had been spent.

There was a major falling out between Leica and Hasselblad when the
X-Pan was announced, and an even more major falling our between Carl
Zeiss and Hasselblad when the H-1 was announced. I have a feeling
that the X-Pan introduction came at about the same time as the end of
the Leica medium format lens project and there may have been a
connection between the two.

Gordon Moat wrote:

Tony Polson wrote:
"William Graham" wrote:

Well, my motorcycling days are about over......I don't have a very long
inseam, and I always had a problem with the Beemers.....Their seats were a
tad too high for me. But they were far and away the finest cycles made.....I
put 85,000 miles on that K-100 and never had it quit on me even once.....I
have never had that kind of reliability with any 4 wheeled vehicle I have
ever owned.


That's my experience too - my only problems with BMW were all as a
result of traffic accidents. :-(


If Leicas are that reliable, then that alone would justify their
high price, especially if you made your living with a camera.


That's normally true of Leicas, but I must admit I have had some
problems with one of my M7 bodies. However, it has all been fixed
promptly and free of charge under the "Passport" warranty, which is 5
years in the UK. I believe it also covers accidental damage.

So was that the LED unreadable display condition I heard about, or
something different? Electronic or mechanical?


Two LED segments stopped working, plus there was the very common
problem with the DX code reader, which would not reliably read the
code. A new LED display and a new optical (rather than electronic) DX
reader cured the problems.

To be fair to Leica, the camera never stopped working. The lost LED
segments were merely an irritation, and the DX problem was easily
overcome by manually selecting the film speed. The operation of the
camera was not affected in any way.

This was an early M7. I also have a later M7 which has performed
faultlessly. Both were purchased used.

In article .com,
"UC" wrote:

nathantw wrote:
Apparently there's a new Leica M8 that was just announced.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...leica.cameras/

What the heck? Why in the world would a rangefinder camera cost as much
Nikon's flagship digital SLR and almost as much as Canon's top of the
line camera? The only thing I can think of is that it must be the lens
mount. It's almost like Leica took the price of their regular M7 and
added on top of that instead of starting from scratch. Granted their
cameras are probably hand made (not always equating to better) and
you're basically paying for one worker's monthly salary when you buy a
camera, but damn, $5647US is a LOT of money for a rangefinder. Then
again, to put things in perspective a Patek Phillipe men's watch STARTS
at $12000, but a Leica isn't made of gold.

If you don't already know, you're so ****ing stupid that you should be
put out of your misery.

Go **** your autofocus Ni****.

Looks like our dear friend UC and his fook filled vocab is back...

Obviously his meds have run out.

Tony Polson wrote:

A village somewhere is missing its idiot.

I'm sure you'll return to it as soon as you can find it.

Tony Polson wrote:

No group of people is more arrogant than the profoundly ignorant.

You've embodied that point enough that you should remain arrogantly silent.

In article ,
Paul Rubin wrote:
In car terms, a Leica is like a vintage British roadster while a
current Nikon SLR is like a new computerized Toyota Prius. The Prius
gets much better gas mileage, is more reliable, can go just as fast,
and can take you anywhere the roadster can take you, but it's nowhere
near as interesting to drive. As a pure utilitarian transportation
device, the roadster is ridiculous. But that's not why people buy
them.

Last weekend, I spend most of the time looking through a 300/2.8.

I sort of doubt that any range finder is going to provide anything close
to that experience.


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

On 2006-10-03 19:21:57 -0400, (Philip Homburg) said:

In article ,
Paul Rubin wrote:
In car terms, a Leica is like a vintage British roadster while a
current Nikon SLR is like a new computerized Toyota Prius. The Prius
gets much better gas mileage, is more reliable, can go just as fast,
and can take you anywhere the roadster can take you, but it's nowhere
near as interesting to drive. As a pure utilitarian transportation
device, the roadster is ridiculous. But that's not why people buy
them.

Last weekend, I spend most of the time looking through a 300/2.8.

I sort of doubt that any range finder is going to provide anything close
to that experience.

On the other hand you could look through the Hubble Telescope and
that's more of an experience than your 300 f/2.8, though I must admit a
300 f/2.8 has a lot of style to it. Nevertheless, photography is not
all about telephotos, and the rangefinders have never been about more
than moderate telephotos. They have their own appeal.
--
Michael | "He's dead, Jim."