Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/05/11

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Solm's Lack of Quality
From: "Bud Cook" <budcook@ibm.net>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 09:26:59 -0500

Alf,
We were originally speaking of ALL of the quality problems coming
out of Solms.  Someone took the thing out of context and we went off on a
tangent.  (changing context is an old trick to win an argument)

My position is that products coming out of Solms have a high incidence of
problems.  It's not that these are engineering problems, these are
manufacturing problems and they've not occurred like this in my 40+ year
history with Leitz/Leica.

I can't understand how M6's can be shipped with rangefinders out of whack.
I can't understand how lenses could be shipped with debris floating around
inside.  I can't understand how $2K lenses have mounts that won't focus
correctly.  The list goes on and on.

Someone had an argument that you shouldn't expect any better quality from
BMW's than from VW's and implied that that was what the warranty was
for.  That's a ridiculous argument.  Why the hell should someone pay three
times as much for the BMW for equal quality?  That's exactly the mentality
that Detroit wants American car buyers to have.

Now I'm not a *PRO* so (according to some who imply it) I may not know
anything about photography but I sure know about product quality and what
one should expect when you buy a lens that costs about as much as an entire
SL/2 system cost in the 70's.

Bud Cook

- -----Original Message-----
From: Alfred Breull <puma@hannover.sgh-net.de>

snip

. Besides, we were speaking
>of 2 dead lenses, slipping thru quality control, again, not of
>broken M3s.
>
>Alf
>