Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/03/05

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Subject: Vs: [Leica] Was Leica CL a Rollei 35 clone?
From: "Raimo Korhonen" <raimo.m.korhonen@uusikaupunki.fi>
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 22:28:17 +0100

The Rollei 35 was the camera that launched the concept "compact camera" and e.g. effectively killed the half-frame format. After the little Rollei all cameras started shrinking, just look at the Canonets before and after it. Leitz was not particularly fast to follow the trend - but the decision not to accept Waaske?s design was a big mistake - in retrospect - and based on the well-known Not-Invented-Here principle.  
All the best!
Raimo
Personal photography homepage at http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~raikorho

- -----Alkuperainen viesti-----
Lahettaja: Holger Merlitz <merlitz@int.fzk.de>
Vastaanottaja: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Paiva: 05. maaliskuuta 2002 18:31
Aihe: [Leica] Was Leica CL a Rollei 35 clone?


<snip>
>With 400+ Mark this was not a cheap camera, but meant to
>be a precision instrument, certainly within the potential
>scope of Leica's business strategy and the Leica marketing
>division must have observed the success of Rollei's little
>camera with great interest and, maybe, some jealousy, too.
>Somewhere in the early seventies, when Rollei already built
>hundreds of thousands R35 per year, they must have decided
>to try a move and introduce (with Minolta) a device which
>looked close enough but with additional features like
>rangefinder and TTL to make it a better choice for the
>customer than the ascetic Rollei. As we know, it was a
>limited success, but with 65000 cameras in 3 years the CL
>was still considerably better selling than the M. Probably,
>they were a little too late, since customers either turned
>towards the SLR market or cheaper electronic point and shoot
>cameras to satisfy their high tech needs. If Leica had
>introduced the same camera in the 60's things had certainly
>developed better for the CL.
>
>Finally, one may ask why Rollei could not follow up the
>line and build their own improved R35 versions. From 1967
>until recent days the R35 has hardly changed. In fact
>they were trapped by the tiny dimension of their camera:
>There was no space left for much improvement. There exists
>a prototype with rangefinder, designed in Braunschweig,
>but the engineers in Singapore, where the R35 was produced
>since 1971, found it technically too difficult for a mass
>production. Therefore one may come to the somewhat ironic
>conclusion that Leica had the potential to build the
>perfect mini-rangefinder, but were unable to get it on
>the market, whereas Rollei had a camera which was made
>in huge numbers but were unable to turn it into a real
>rangefinder ....
>
>Holger Merlitz,
>Karlsruhe
>


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