[Leica] RE: Leica - Kyocera

[jean.louchet at inria.fr (Jean Louchet)]

Hi,

> Felix,
> Thank you for the information.
> The future is now looking even darker for quality photographic products.

... i would say, for quality everything. Survival of niche quality 
production is becoming harder - a question of market. A niche is small, 
when it gets too small it's not a niche any more. 

 Bikes are another example, Alex Singer, probably the Leica of bicycles,
has dropped production to near zero and suffers difficulties in getting
the right components (like axle-flexion friendly Maxicar wheel hubs and
many others) - fortunately some Japanese makers like Hirose are keeping
the tradition. This is what may happen with Cosina.
 Same thing with cars, even the Swedes have fallen into the (wealthy)  
gadgetized consumer market and abandoned their niche of high quality
obsolete-style self-maintainable products. No Cosina saviour there.
 Same with hiking rucksacks, the same capacity weighs twice as much as in
the Seventies, because of "scientifically designed comfort" gadgets whose
justification is the extra weight of the rucksack...
 The same might well happen soon with violin makers and has already
happened with good food, with real love, with education. It's new, it?s
shiny, it's sexy, magazines say it's good (for them). All drug addicts
have been told "it's good" by somebody. Education is the only antidote.

 I think the "is Leica 10 years late?" question is a wrong discussion. I
spent this week in Scandinavia shooting historical musical instruments in
museums:  M6, Nokton1.5/50, Skopar4/21 and a F3 with 2.8/55 macro for
technical detail views. All Superia 1600. Most colleagues needed their
flash with their P&S (film or digital) - forbidden in museums. I agree my
hardware is obsolete but modernity is not interesting in itself. The goal
is to make the right pictures, not only to have fun with the buzzz buzzz
and Christmas-tree LED things and get lost in submenus, memory cards and
dead batteries. Are fine grain 1600 ASA film or high aperture aspherical
lenses obsolete?

 The real question is, will there remain enough customers to keep Leica
alive in the mean/long term? Electronics and chemistry are two
fast-evolving technologies (read: digital and film), both have progressed
very fast in the last few years, digital a bit faster. Digital is nothing
but a very promising alternative to film. As a lugger pointed out
recently, shifting to RF is in general the last step of a long evolution
(I began with a Swinger, then Icarex, PenF, NikonF, NikonEMs, NikonFG,
MinoltaCLE, M2 and M6 - and recently the F3 because a real good SLR is
better in some cases). Learning how a picture is created in a camera is
something natural with a manual (or moderately auto) SLR, and this
experience of framing, depth of field, exposure etc. is in my view a
prerequisite to using a RF camera. My daughters began with (all manual)  
Beirettes, then Retinette, Voigtlander VitoCS (RF), ZenitE, now
Spotmatic... this is the "royal road" but what about the vast majority
only knowing photo through P&S ? My own experience of teaching basics of
projective geometry and photometry for computer vision in universities
shows that the proportion of French students in Science who know e.g. what
is an aperture and the difference between focusing and zooming, fell from
15%-20% in the 80s to around 1% now. In the past, I have "converted"
several people (including children) to _manual_ photography, often through
giving them a good cheap old camera (Vitos, Retinettes, Semflexes or
Lubitels are excellent), most of them have become competent SLR users and
several Leica/CV users among the older ones.

to summarise:
 old royal road: cheap film camera, all manual -> film SLR -> film RF
 new royal road: cheap digital, all manual -> digital SLR -> digital RF
 ...the problem is to find "cheap digital all manual" cameras! The issue
is pedagogy, not technology. Maybe Cosina or even better, the Kiev or
StPeterburg factories would do a greaaaat job making a cheap beginner's
3MPixel LTM agricultural box with the good old Zorki/Fed finder?

Sorry for the length Thanx for not quoting too much in case of reply 
:-)
 Jean
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