Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/04/11

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Subject: [Leica] re: student discounts
From: Robert Monaghan <rmonagha@post.cis.smu.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 16:09:48 -0500 (CDT)

Camera mfgers offer discounts to students to try and get them "hooked"
into their system (an apt analogy); since only about 5,000 of the 100,000
students who are enrolled in photography majors graduate annually with a
degree in photography, the mfgers have a choice of reaching 100,000
potential buyers or the 5000 who graduated as photographers. Which market
would you choose? Bronica, Hasselblad, Mamiya, Sinar... offer student
discounts. These discounts are cheaper than sales days (by 10-20%) at USA
dealers, but more costly than direct importing from overseas (by 20%).

the bigger problem is that commercial photo courses have been dropped and
the darkrooms sold off from our local junior colleges, and our university
has closed all the open access darkrooms etc. Photography now means 
digital cameras and photoshop, output on color laserprinters or epsons. 
Leica won't get many sales from today's gadget oriented students IMHO...

RE: portfolios and buying the right tool regardless of cost - I'm 
continuing to run blind lens tests on medium format rigs, and so far no one
has reliably identified the higher cost lenses (zeiss..) against the 
budget med fmt lenses ($50-75 Kowa, nikkor..) with any statistical 
reliability. I have very few photos where I can blame the lens for problems
in the photos. So I am not impressed or convinced by statements that if 
only these poor (literally) students had blown a lot of $$ on Leicas, they
would have wonderfully better portfolios. I strongly suspect that a blind
lens test with 35mm RF/SLR lenses would show how hard it is to distinguish
identical shots taken by different lenses, the differences are so subtle...
see http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/blind.html blindtest.html blindresults.html

* Robert Monaghan POB752182 Southern Methodist University, Dallas Tx 75275  *


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Replies: Reply from "Matthew Powell" <mlpowell@directvinternet.com> (Re: [Leica] re: student discounts)