Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/03/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric, Judging from the recent hints of the company's CEO in Leica Fotografie, it seems that he is looking for partners to co-develop a Leica AF SLR. It would be an extremely heavy financial and industrial effort for Leica to walk that path alone. If the sales of the R line keep falling at the rate of the last few months, I would not be surprised to see a resurrection of a 'Minolta' type deal, in order to keep the red dot, and (I hope) the R mount, on outsourced systems. The ROM would make sense in order to insure feature compatibility between current lenses and a future, simplified, electronified, AF mount, on fields like iris management. This would enable to market 2 lines of lenses: 1 line of Solms manufactured lenses based on the current concession-free architecture and an outsourced line of mechanically simplified AF lenses manufactured according to Leica stipulations (by Minolta, Kyocera, Sigma, or whoever else) that would only work with the future AF bodies. Alan On lundi 29 mars 1999 15:18, Eric Welch [SMTP:ewelch@ponyexpress.net] wrote: > At 01:58 PM 3/29/99 +0200, you wrote: > >yesterday I went to a small foto fair and talked a bit to the guy at > >the Leica stand. When I asked him about autofocus lenses, he told me > >that this is against their philosophy. He said that the mechanical > >precision for AF lenses can't be as high as for MF lenses. I should go > > More like they haven't yet solved the problem of having high precision > mechanisms that move easy enough to be fast enough to compete with other AF > systems and not wear the batteries out too fast. It isn't AF that's against > their philosophy, it's the compromises most other camera makes have made. > > Eric Welch > St. Joseph, MO > http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch > > Prejudiced people are all alike. >