Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/03/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]"A brandnew broken Leica is still a broken Leica. Period, as Eric says" No discussion on this point. But this fact, unfortunate as it is, does not prove in any way what we are (the minority) try to convey. ANY product, handbuilt, crafted in small series or machine produced and Quality Controlled to an extremely small tolerance figure can and will occasionaly fail (Murphy's law will see to that). This failure does prove nothing. As has been stated before: only statistical analysis can give a basis for meaningfull conclusions. But we were not talking about individual production failures and slippages of QC. The assertion was: older Leicas (M3 and M4) are generally the best built of all leica M series. Well, that is a different assertion from the one in the beginning: any product can fail, but for a product to be generally more failure prone, we need statistical series and we do not have them. Do we know how many M3 or M4 cameras left the factory in the 50s and 60s with their owners returning them to the dealer with complaints? Could it be that expectations of many Leica buyers about the mythical Leica quality are too high? After all we are talking about a semi-mass produced industrial product, assembled and checked by humans according to very tight tolerances, but still prone to errors. Ten thousand M's are produced and some more R's. If the failure rate is 25 cameras we are talking about a fraction of a percent. If we set our norm that high that every Leica that leaves the factory should be without any defect, we are fooling ourselves. Not even NASA can accomplish this. We should not close our eyes for defects and if the number and magnitude of the defects and failures are becoming so numerous that a certain nervousness should befall us, we can take action. To be realistic: any Leica distributor (and in the same vein any distributor of whatever industrial product) has a factory provided budget for handling guarantee claims. Would this be necessary if we could produce to flawless perfection? Leica's reputation of durability, stamina and longevity has been earned in the long years of being the photographer's workhorse (as was the Jeep in days long gone). It is inherent and inbuilt quality, not production glitches that determine reputations. Erwin