[Leica] Leica is buying the Epson R-D1 technology!

[richard-lists at imagecraft.com (Richard F. Man)]

According to a Lecia web forum, Leica is buying the Epson R-D1 technology! 
They claim that this will allow them to ship the digital M by the year's 
end, instead of in 2006. They have a crash team adapting their 10 Megapixel 
full frame sensor to the R-D1 body and release it as Leica R-D1 by 
Photokina. The team that was working on the original Leica Digital M will 
continue to work on R-D2, that uses the Leica M7 body instead o the 
modified Voigtlander R2. Due to this buyout, Epson will not be releasing 
the R-D1 as announced :-( Of course we will have a full frame camera 
instead of the 1.5x crop factor so this is good news indeed.

Apparently the deal only works because Epson couldn't see how they can sell 
the R-D1 into this niche market. So instead of just dropping the whole 
project, they cut their losses and struck a deal with Leica. There are some 
rumors that Epson bought out the Hermes shares of Leica (30%) at 200% 
premium to make the transaction appealing to Hermes, but there's no 
independent confirmation for now.

// richard (This email is for mailing lists. To reach me directly, please 
use richard@imagecraft.com)