[Leica] end of film??? consumable leicas?

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

In the fifties and sixties, piano production dropped dramatically because
many families were already equipped with good instruments and for many
others the priority was to buy a TV set. However the major companies
survived. In the nineties, sales of cheap upright pianos dropped again
facing the competition of digital pianos. However most of the best
traditional production survived. You can still buy a brand new Fazioli,
Bluethner, Steinway or Boesendorfer concert grand (if you can afford it).

I agree that the difference between a real and a digital piano is much
greater (on a user's point of view) than between two similar cameras, one
running film and the other running a CCD. However I believe it is still
impossible to extrapolate sales statistics and predict any date for the
death of film. Coarse statistics are unable to detect the existence of
niche phenomena. It has been the same with 650B-wheeled bikes, almost
disappeared from the market 10 years ago but now back into high-end
production. When a niche market appears, it is often some time after the
market has apparently dropped to near zero, because of the 2nd hand
"existing park" that may satisfy the needs during some time.

I would be more scared about the quality/durability issue. Most car
manufacturers are now - in theory - able to build cars that would last,
say two million miles. Only half a dozen companies have been actually
making such cars, but in the nineties they anticipated the market's
saturation by either using electronics to decrease the reliability
(M******s) or using a new mechanical design to increase maintenance costs
(V***o), so that replacing the car becomes more cost effective than
keeping it. This is the real risk with the future of Leica.

Having been working in the digital imaging area for 25+ years, one of the
factors which keeps me off digital cameras is the way ALL builders are
preparing their own future through _not_ implementing JPEG2000 technology
into the cameras they are currently selling. JPEG2000, a wavelet-based
compression standard, typically allows a 5 to 20 times greater compression
ratio than ordinary JPEG compression, with similar visual quality and
without the "tiling effect" that gives so much trouble when photoshopping
that many of us use memory-spilling raw (bitmap) formats.

My own feeling is that builders are waiting for digital camera market
saturation before lauching jpeg2000 as a marketing booster. Just in case
some of the cameras they are selling now would be able to survive long
enough... (Lifetime warranty is easy if life is short).

If the future "digital-M" does not include JPEG2000 or doen't have at
least the possibility of upgrading to jpeg2000, then I won't consider
spending so much money to buy outdated technology.


-- 
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 Dr Jean Louchet       COMPLEX Project     INRIA Rocquencourt
                       BP105   78153 Le Chesnay cedex, France
 Jean.Louchet<at>inria.fr  http://fractales.inria.fr/~louchet
 mobile: +33 6 7347 7707
 ------------------------------------------------------------