Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/07/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:22 PM 7/28/96 -0700, you wrote: > >Leica doesn't lie? Right Eric, and there really is a Easter Bunny. Most of the time it >amounts to corporate bungling, but the net effect is the same. What about their >repair service...that's been the subject of recent discussions here. What about the >cameras labled R3 MOT which were not? Leica backed down in a lawsuit and starting I've had years of experience with Leica service, and been very happy with it. Seems to me this is pretty much standard across the board. All of the horror stories I hear from my professional collegues about Nikon's NPS and Canon's CPS cause me to think that problems like you mention are industry-wide, and not unique to Leica. Some people will gripe if you hang 'em with a new rope. Let's have some documentation here. What gives you the idea they are not motor driven? I owned an R3, and I've played with many R3mots. Never saw a signle Mot that wasn't motor (winder) driven. You have evidence this is true? Picking at nits here. When the R4mot came out, (which I think is your mistaken situation here, it was the R4 and not the R3, and it wasn't a law suit, but customer confusion) it had electronics, built by a British company who knew their chips were defective and failed to tell Leica. Did you know for several years, Leica ripped the guts out of the old cameras and replaced them free of charge? I missed the deadline by two years with an old used R4mot I bought once. It's sittng on my shelf now, a pretty decent paper weight. I am hard on cameras. The R4 line isn't up to professional use like the R7 and R6 are, but they were decent camera. >What about the design flawed R4 which was >advertised as the best 35 SLR? The early ones can give trouble at any time and cannot I have yet to ever see Leica make claims for their cameras that aren't true. For you, and most people, maybe they aren't the best in the world, but it's hardly illegal for a manufacturer to experss their opinon theirs is the best. That's not a lie, it's opinion. And what other manufacturer will EVER tell you that a lens has vignetting wide open when shooting evenly lit subjects like walls, or sky? None, but Leica and maybe Contax, at least Blake Ziegler will. And who will tell you that when you shoot near minimun distances that performance isn't top notch and you need to stop down to middle apertures, other than Leica that is? Leica may have a very high opinion of their equipment, but they are very honest about the limitations of it, too. >their first priority is making a buck. They can make mistakes and attempt to cover them >up just like any other company. You offer no evidence of cover up I find compelling. I'm sure it's probably true, though, that they are reluctant to fix cameras that seem to be working, or the customer would be complaining. If you don't ask, they might not do it, but I know several people who had the replacement done and they didn't even ask for it. >> Well Eric, perhaps you don't understand that a shortening of effective RF baselength >doesn't always lead to a perceptible difference in focusing accuracy. Take for Well, I understand very clearly, you were the one who is surprised, here. >accurate, but that the difference in accuracy would show up in a real world test over a >lens range as short as 28 mm and 40 mm. You never described your real-world test. How did you test the accuracy. By repeatability? On film? But I see your point. If the baseline difference isn't that much, and there is a major difference in focusing accuracy, maybe it's mechanical, rather than optical based on the baseline? >> >By the way, the Minolta lenses for the CLE are multi-coated. >> >> Most lenses from that era are. > >Right Erich, most of them except the Leica M. The point is that the CLE lenses are >multi-coated, while the CL lenses are not. The other point is that Minolta did not Leica pioneered many multicoating techniques (Carl Zeiss did it first). Or are you referring the Leica's practice of not multicoating every single lens element. In that case, Leica's technique is clearly superior, because it matches the coating to the lens, not slavishly coating every lens element the same way. Multicoating can have a negative effect if done that way. Nikon does it Leica's style, and Chuck Westfall at Canon tells me they do it too. So multicoating is highly overrated if not done properly, which means some elements have one layer, or none. =================== Eric Welch Grants Pass (OR) Daily Courier NPPA Region 11 JIB chair "I think not," said Descartes, and disappeared.