carstenw
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 p.114 #5 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
denoir wrote:
Carsten: Very good points. The thing is that with the release of the M9 there has been something of a Leica craze and they have not been able to scale up the production. The times have changed as well. In the 60's it was perhaps OK to wait 6 months to get a lens but it is definitely extreme by modern standards. People are used to getting their stuff within 24 hours of pressing a button in a web shop. The Leica repair times are also an anomaly as is the quality control.
My point here is that people put up with it. Generalizing a bit, but people who can afford the Leica gear at current prices would probably be willing to pay even more to get a modern level service from the company (steady supply of gear, fast service, increased quality control etc). The reasonable thing when releasing a new lens would be to do like Canon or Nikon do - add 30% to the base price and decrease it over a period of time until the supply can meet the demand at base price where you have a solid profit margin and happy customers. There will always be early adopters who are willing to pay a premium price to be first to have some gear. It seems strange of Leica not to take advantage of that but instead we have six months or more waiting for popular lenses like the 50 Lux ASPH....Show more →
You have to look at Leica history and the way the company operates to start to get an idea how they think. Part of thinking for the long haul is that the people you employ have deep training, and will spend their entire career in the company. Letting people go in this kind of company is deeply shameful, and once they are gone, you may never be able to get them back, even if the economy should swing around. The kind of technical training required to work at your peak in a company with such a deep manual labour tradition is non-trivial, and ramping back up for the success of the M8 (yes, it was very successful for them!) and M9 and the new lenses has been really painful, after some dry years where they laid some deeply skilled people off.
The flipside of this is that once you have hired them, they are a continual drain on the budget, even when there is less work to do. Part of the planning for the cycle of a camera like the M9 is that in the beginning there will be high demand, this will level off within a couple of years, and then there will be a longer period of significantly lower, yet steady, demand. Quality has a lasting attraction, and Leica still steadily sells a couple of film cameras, pretty unique among the high-end manufacturers, apart from a couple of boutique products like the new Fuji or Voigtländer 6x7 folders. Anyway, if you hire too many people, they will drain your budget and put pressure on getting the next product out there.
As an aside, Leica is primarily an optical company, so in some sense, the cameras are expendible, always a means to an end: selling the lenses. The cameras would not be nearly as famous or desirable if you could not buy the Leica M lenses for them. When you think about how Leica plans and releases products, always think of the lenses first, and how the bodies sell lenses.
Something I have not seen mentioned here is Leica's optical standards. Their primary competition is Zeiss at the moment. Actually, let me re-phrase that: their primary competition is the used Leica lens market, and then Zeiss. When comparing the current Leica lenses, and leaving out considerations of attractive aberrations (I know, this is what Zeiss is all about, but bear with me...), Leica walks all over their competition. Their lenses are smaller, have flatter fields, are sharper in the corners, and have less spherical and chromatic aberrations, and faster max apertures, all at the same time, almost uniformly across their entire lineup. Quite astounding, really. Thankfully for Zeiss, they have a couple of tricks up their own sleeves, but it is not hard to see that they pay dearly for the choices they make in size and CA, and to a lesser extent flatness of field and corner performance. They have some gorgeous depth of field transitions and the higher contrast and punchier colours have many fans, but still.
Leica partly does this by setting really high internal standards, and having some of the best lens designers ever to live, but also by working with finer tolerances than the competition. I recall seeing some numbers where the Leica tolerances were not just twice as thin, but in some cases much tighter than that, than the competition. The slips in QA become more understandable when you consider this fact. Leica also invests heavily in optical advances, and between Zeiss and Leica a large fraction of the best and most interesting glasses were invented. It is a real shame that the Leica glass laboratory shut down. One rare glass used in the Noctilux is meant to take months to cool down from the molten state. Any errors and it is useless. Now this glass is sourced from Zeiss, if I am not mistaken (or is it Schott?), and a recent dramatic price hike in the price of the Noctilux was directly traceable to a significant hike in the price of this glass type. One wonders if there were some competitive price politics involved?
Anyway, this sounds a lot like fanboy talk, and I don't mean it to come across that way. I just think that there is a lot to admire about Leica, even if their lenses' rendering isn't to your taste. The more I find out, the more I am astonished, and the more I want to learn. They are really a special company, the kind which helped many jews to escape to Switzerland during WWII, at the cost of the daughter of Leitz spending some time in jail, and being interrogated by the SS, right down to today, where they still keep their production in Germany and Portugal, in the face of stiff price competition from Zeiss, who has offshored production of almost all their ZM/ZF/ZE glass to Japan, as well as other companies. Quite remarkable in a day and age where everything seems to be made in China, even Apple products.
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