Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/11/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]CEO Alfred Schopf visited Australia recently and provided an interview to Paul Burrows, editor of 'Camera' magazine here. It's a very good local publication and I thoroughly recommend this article (and the magazine) in their Nov/Dec 2013 issue to anyone who can obtain it. You can get it as a digital edition apparently at www.zinio.com/camera I think that I can quote small portions of particular interest here without transgression. Perhaps the complete interview will become available? All direct transcriptions from parts of answers by CEO: ..."to be honest, I'm not 100 percent sure where the D-SLR market is going to be in the future. The mirrorless cameras are coming on and on and on and I'm not entirely convinced that in ten years time we will have a D-SLR market" When asked will there ever be a Leica compact system camera: "We will have one, definitely. And it will, of course, be quite different to M system. We want to have autofocus with such a system and we may well have an APSC size sensor rather than a bigger one......." Getting back to Leica's plans for a CSC, Alfred states: "It will be a German built camera, however I'm not sure we can make all of the lenses made in Germany because we are talking about a different price range to M system so I could imagine that we do some fixed focal length lenses in Germany and maybe with the zooms we will co-operate with a partner" He stresses that Leica won't be building on Panasonic's Micro Four Thirds format. On film cameras, Alfred Schopf said: "We are now the world's biggest manufacturer of film cameras on the planet- because we are the only one, more or less. As long as we get orders we will continue. At the moment we get between 600 and 700 orders per year............" Cheers Geoff http://www.pbase.com/hoppyman