[Leica] Interesting Leica news

[Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>]

You know how Leica M cameras are renowned for being quiet?  Well, I read an
interesting tid-bit in the news section of the German part of Leica's site
today.  My German isn't the world's strongest (it's been a while since I
studied it in high-school), but I'll do my best to convey the essense of
their message.

It turns out that the key to the quietness of the Leica M shutter is not
just the level of the sound, but also it's frequency distribution.  With
the recent popularity in rangefinder cameras (offerings from
Cosina/Voigtländer and Konica just to mention two), Leica has apparently
decided it needs to take steps to preserve that which is uniquely Leica
about their cameras (in addition to the level of craftsmanship).  If I
understand correctly, they've used some pretty sophisticated audio analysis
software to exactly pinpoint what it is about the Leica shutter sound that
makes it so unique (there are some German technical terms there that I'm
not even going to attempt to translate).

The most interesting part about all this is that they've applied for a
copyright on the sound.  Apparently German law doesn't allow anything but
hardcopy applications, so the solution was to sample 101 different M
shutters, do some kind of sophisticated calculating of the "Eigenklang"
(which I think is some kind of signature sound) and then print the
resulting audio file out as numbers.  Yep, all 4711 pages of it.

I wonder what the postage on a copy of the application would amount
to... ;-)

(See the whole thing at http://www.leica-camera.de/news)

M.

- --                               | You can lead a horse to water, but
Martin Howard                    | you can't get him to use floats when
email : mvhoward@mac.com         | playing in the baby-pool.
  web : http://mvhoward.i.am/    +--------------------------------------