[Leica] A new Tri-Elmar soon ?

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2009-09-16-14:57:58 Mark Rabiner:
> f 4 I may be  my favorite f stop.
> If I was the new Mr. Chang the first thing I would do would be to come out
> with a complete line of f 4's.
> Don't forget!
> We don't have to LOOK THROUGH the darned things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  You say that over and over.

And over.  And over.

For me an f/4 lens is almost completely useless.  I'd only use it outside, 
and
I'm mostly only outside on the way from one inside venue to another.  If I 
put
a slow-ass f/4 lens on my camera, I'd have to carry a faster one with me and
remember to change to it when I got where I was going.  Which would be
annoying and add extra weight to haul around.  And that's all assuming the
travel was during daylight hours.

To pick a day recent enough that I still remember f-stops and suchlike, when 
I
wwnt to shoot here,

  http://photos.bazbarfoo.com/Events/2009-09-11-WarehouseOpening

I took two cameras: one with the optically-fantastic 28mm Summicron on it, 
and
another with the 35mm Summilux-M ASPH on it.  Of the 28 pictures which
survived my edit, only one was with the f/2.0 lens -- it was too damned slow
to give me usefully-reliable hand-held shutter speeds in the light available.
Everything else was with the Summilux wide-open at f/1.4, and even then the
shutter speeds were problematic.

I have the swell 24mm f/2.8, which would seem like a really handy thing to
have on an M8.  Practically never use it.  Too damned slow, I'd lose lots of
shots to motion blur.

F/4?  Really?  Might as well shoot with a pinhole camera.