Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/04/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Since Leica is a publicly-traded company, wouldn't they have to disclose such a material transaction to the business press? Len -- According to a Leica 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