Re: [Leica] RE: ditching the R (WAS: Elmarit 90 R/Reflections)

[Patrick Giagnocavo <pgiagnoc@qi.com>]

Pascal wrote:
> 
> On 02-12-1998 20:30 B. D. Colen wrote:
> 
> >And - please, no flames - I'd ditch the R and put the real effort in the
> >rangefinder end as I think there's just too much entrenched competition from
> >N and C for the R to ever be more than what amounts to a novelty item - I
> >know, I know, it's the best manual SLR in the world! :-) I don't doubt that,
> >Ted, Eric, etc....I'm just offering MHO about the economic and marketing
> >realities that face Leica with a year to go to the Millenium.


> To go for full AF while keeping the R lenses' built quality would, of
> course, imply new R lenses. Leica realizes this may put off existing
> customers that have already invested into R lenses but feels this is the
> only way to move forward (at least, that is what I heard in Solms).

Interesting thoughts both of you.  Two thoughts:

1.  Assume that Leica drops the R line and focuses on M.  There is
nothing stopping them adding more features to M.  One thing that
just occurred to me would be that since parallax error is a big
problem with RF's they could think up something that would minimize
or get rid of this totally, perhaps they could silver the front of
the shutter and put a little fiber optic bundle beside the TTL
metering cell and then route this to something in the finder, or
something like that.  Anyways I am sure that the problem is not one
of vision but one of execution.  Working in the software industry as
I do you sometimes have to remind yourself that you need to worry
about tooling, assembly, support, and other physical factors rather
than "link in this library after doing a recompile". :-)

2.  Assume that Leica goes AF for R series.  Contax has already
solved this problem with the AX camera, where you put the shutter
and pentaprism on a rigid assembly then slide it back and forth on
rails to literally move the film plane in order to focus the lens. 
No mechanical changes are needed, and if you want macro in manual
focus you can move a lever and get 10mm extension (like an extension
tube) automagically.

Blue sky, I guess...

./patrick