Mr. Puts' thoughts

["Charles E. Love, Jr." <cel14@cornell.edu>]

This is a response to both Mr. Puts and some of the other posters.  

I think that Mr. Puts' basic orientation is correct.  Collectors and
collector-users are an interesting market segment, but a small one.  Leica
must serve photographers primarily (though if they can put blue leather on
something and sell it for $10000, more power to them; it's R&D money).  So I
do agree that the LHSA members are not a good main reference group when
Leica chooses what products to manufacture--too locked in the past.  I got
the Viewfinder for a while, but after a time articles on the various types
of Imarects got old--since I found my primary interest is photography not
collecting or user-collecting.

As for the proper uses of the M, it's important to remember that Leica used
to think of the M as a complete system camera--but of course SLR's hadn't
come on the scene.  Hence they produced kludges like the various closeup
attachments and the Viso--efforts to broaden the use of the system by
overcoming inherent problems in rangefinder design.  These things work, but
not nearly as well as an SLR, and that's why they aren't made any more.  A
parallel--Mamiya's efforts to sell closeup attachments for the Mamiya 6 and
7; they work too, but sales are small.

So today the M does occupy a very restricted market segment.  SLR's do long
lenses, macro work, and extreme wide angles better--it's irrational to think
otherwise. (Indeed, for example, although it's a very good lens, even the
135 f4 is, objectively speaking, hard to use on an M--as several of us have
said, you can't see much of what you are photographing.)  The M is a
competitor with the following virtues (in addition to optical excellence):
small size, quiet, quick accurate focusing in low light, and excellent with
shorter lenses.  These things do, as Mr. Puts says, make them better for
quick shooting with people than SLR's, especially the current crop of huge,
loud autofocusers.  This is how Leica itself describes the usefulness of the
M's in their own marketing--they no longer promote it as a complete system
camera, and they are right to do this.  They are also excellent travel
cameras if weight matters and the limited selection of lenses is not a
problem (e.g., you don't want to do landscapes with a 300).  But when Leica
looks at the future of this camera, it must look at what it actually can do
well.

In my opinion, Leica has unnecessarily restricted its market still further
by refusing to update the M.  There is no excuse today for refusing to build
an autoexposure camera, and aperture-preferred could be done without
changing the lenses at all.  There is no excuse for not having a modern
metering system, with a choice of at least spot and averaging metering and
an exposure hold capability.  There is no excuse for not redoing the
viewfinder so that people with glasses don't have to buy auxiliary
viewfinders for the 28 and in some cases the 35, and so that we don't have
to put up with distracting multiple framelines.  Indeed, there's no excuse
for not solving the problem of small framelines with moderate telephotos.
There's no excuse for continuing the difficult, slow and error-prone film
loading system (yes, I know, it can be dealt with, and I do, but anyone
who's loaded a Leica R knows how much easier and quicker  it is).  All these
changes would make the Leica M do what it does best, better.

I can hear the flamers loading up, accusing me of arguing for a
point-and-shoot M.  Not at all.  All of the changes mentioned in the
previous paragraph have nothing to do with point-and-shoots (some of them
were implemented in the Minolta CLE, a camera some LUGers have been known to
like).  In fact, I think the Contax G's are designed in a way that makes
them incompatible with the chief mission of 35 mm. rangefinders, because
they have the delays imposed by P&S autofocus and noisy, obtrusive winding
and rewinding.  Their problems come from being too much like
point-and-shoots.  (The Contax is, however, a good travel camera, has lenses
competitive with Leica's best, and costs a whole lot less.)

I'm not saying that people cannot use M's whatever way they want.  Baby
pictures are fine!  I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with
enjoying M's as beautifully made fine machines that are a pleasure to use--I
certainly do.  I'm just agreeing with Mr. Puts that for the M to survive, it
must sell primarily to photographers, and that their interests have to come
at the top of Leica's list.  An implication of that is that photographers
will be interested in the M only when it can do something better than other
cameras--hence Leica's current narrowing of market focus for it.

Charlie
Charles E. Love, Jr.
CEL14@CORNELL.EDU