dholl wrote: Lee Saxon wrote:
Leica will have their Red. It\'ll probably be full frame mirrorless, and it\'ll probably be soon.
Nice soundbite, but Leica and Sony aren\'t the same animal. Sony\'s top-end video cameras aren\'t niche, they\'re industry-standard (meaning there\'s a big market). They got done by Red because Red identified an active market, dominated by overpriced Sonys, and muscled in to the industry by offering better-priced alternatives.
There\'s no industry in Leica\'s world (not even journalistic any more)...it\'s just niche, and luxury at that. It\'s too big a risk for a Canikon, Sony or Panalympus (who would never disappoint the masses by not offering AF and video), or even a Ricoh or Sigma (who are valiantly invested in their own ideas) to try and muscle in on their act .
It would need a company not invested in a system to come out the blue and offer a manual-focus full-frame digital rangefinder - maybe Epson finally making an R-D2 and offering it either as fixed prime, or with Canikon mount. It would need to be very good, aggressively-priced, expertly-marketed and fortunately-timed for it to make a meaningful dent in Leica\'s rather modest sales (modest numbers when compared with what the mainstream brands ship).
Who would take that risk? Maybe Zeiss with an Ikon-Digital? That would be a contender. But otherwise, the manual-focus digital rangefinder market is not active enough for anyone else to bother.
I don\'t think you understood my point. What Red did wasn\'t offer up another me-too 1080p cine camera. What they did was say, \"We think that\'s obsolete, here\'s something better.\"
That\'s what I\'m talking about happening to Leica. Of course no one is going to release another manual focus digital rangefinder. There\'s barely a big enough market for that to sustain one company, forget about two.
What\'s going to take Leica M down is not an imitator but an innovation that makes it obsolete. A full frame mirrorless camera with DSLR-caliber build and ergonomics and a flange depth shallow enough to mount M lenses, and also has AF and whatever other bells and whistles the broader market wants so that it can sell in enough volume to be very affordable, makes the M obsolete.
That\'s not catastrophic news for Leica, by the way. They were always playing \"me too\" catch-up in digital imaging. It ain\'t their thing. Let them drop it and focus entirely (well, almost entirely. There will still be a handful buying M7\'s) on the increased RF lens demand that a widely-sold FF mirrorless from Sony or whoever would create. They\'d do fine that way. Maybe better.
Mar 08, 2013 at 10:33 AM
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