Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/01/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 01:56 AM 1/23/2007, you wrote: >This reminds me of when the first electronic Rolleis came out. Same >mess. Batteries were dying, drained while the camera was allegedly >off. Circuit boards and lens motors frying unexpectedly. Yep, some >sorry mess. >Rollei never recovered from that, among other reasons. It lasted >through two model generations, the SLX and the 6006. For a while one >could find them being given away in the back pages of Popular >Photography. By then, one could count on one hand how many 'real' >dealers could be found nationwide. I understand what you are saying, but Rollei had moved beyond that by the early 1990's and owned the European pro MF market thereafter. Tell me, just how many cameras does Hasselblad make today? They never had a major battery problem, but they are gone, gone, gone, while Rollei continues. It could be argued that Rollei made a mistake by moving from the SL66 to the electronic cameras. Rollei had picked up all of that Voigtl?nder work on the electronic shutter and took it to heart. Zeiss shared this but dumped it save for the late Zeiss Ikon Contarex Electronic cameras and their final spate of large-format lenses. But Rollei soldiered on to produce some nice designs such as the SL35E and the SL3003. But it took them a while to work up a basis in electro-mechanical shutters to the fully electronic shutters in the 600x line, and, yes, they did have a lot of problems which they overcame. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!