[Leica] The Bessa-R, and thoughts about economies of scale.

[George Hartzell <hartzell@cs.berkeley.edu>]

I got a chance to hold a Bessa-R last weekend at a Photo Fair down in
San Jose.  I'm really glad that Steven Gandy was there with it, made
the trip down from Oakland worth while.

It's a neat body.  Light, bright, and everything Steven recently said
it was.  Very exciting!

It got me thinking though about economies of scale though.  I'm mostly
interested in it for a friend who was considering an M6 as a small,
light, quiet wide angle vehicle for mountaineering/boating
photography.  It's not that light and the price made it unobtainable.
The Bessa-R will be a neat alternative.

Yeah.  $750 (while it's a hard to import novelty), $650 later.  That's 
an inexpensive body?

I can get a Nikon N90s body for that.  I know.  No one here *wants* an
N90s, but that's not the point.  Nikon, by making gazillions of 'em,
can make an autofocus body with sophisticated metering, motor drive,
the ability to memorize shooting data and download to a computer it
later, high speed shutter, double latched back, great dust/moisture
sealing, read the film speed from the cartridge, etc, etc, etc....
Bessa, breaking into a new market and making a relative handful of
bodies, gets the same thing for a lightweight (flimsy?) body with/out
nearly the same degree of finish.

The Bessa-R body really felt like it was just a bit better built than
the Nikon FM-10 (which is also produced by Cosina, so....), which is
about $225 w/ a cheesy zoom lens.

It'll be fun to see what'll happen if/when someone (Nikon, Cosina,
...)  decides to build an RF body with the finish of a high end
Nikon/Canon body (maybe not F5, but certainly not FM-10) and can
build/sell enough of 'em to make it cost effective.

Wow.  Did I just re-awaken the M7 topic?

g.