My justification comes from the Schopf interview. If you subscribe to LFI, I recommend reading it. (I got a free subscription with my M9 in case you are wondering what I\'m doing with a Leica fan magazine). The interview is quite interesting and shows that Leica today is far from the Leica of the Leica fan folklore. He states among other things that M novices are responsible for the lens shortage.
Yes, but he doesn\'t say that these M novices are all (previous) DSLR owners. I have issues of LFI as old as 2/1956 (no I am not that old), and buy it every month. I have read the interview (in German, however).
Leica like other traditional companies (like Zeiss) have shown themselves more than willing to sell out the brand to meet even temporary market demands. This is nothing new. How many special editions of the M6 were there? 20? 30? Not to mention their cooperation with Panasonic where they slap on their brand on simple point and shoot cameras.
Well, dressing the M-whatever in fancy leather is quite different than changing its functionality to cater to a subsection of its customers, however large that subsection may be. The special editions is a Leica tradition and dates back many years (decades).
Zeiss has in a sense sold out on a far larger scale than Leica. They don\'t even make the vast majority of their own DSLR/M lenses any more, and even let companies like Nokia use the Zeiss brand. I consider this going too far, to be honest, although that doesn\'t stop me from enjoying my ZF/ZF.2 lenses.
I\'m not so sure about that. Precisely because the M9 is so expensive, people blow their budget on the camera and can\'t afford the higher end lenses.
I would think that this is a very small section of the Leica M9 owners, but I suppose we can\'t know. Keep in mind that as expensive a camera as the M9 is, it is very cheap by general hobbyist standards. Have you ever priced out even a cheap car?
Finally, AFIK more or less all of the S2 lenses are Summarits, so I doubt they are going to vanish any time soon.
Okay, now you are splitting hairs I meant the M Summarits. Summarit simply means f/2.5 at this point, so wherever such an aperture makes sense, there will be one. I mean Summarit M lenses, in the sense of a secondary or even tertiary line of lenses with price as the primary motivational factor (compared to normal M lenses) in the design, and a slightly lower mechanical standard. f/2.5 is quite an accomplishment in medium format.
Possible. I don\'t know. We can only speculate what will happen in 3-5 years which is probably when we can expect an M10. I\'m hoping that by then we\'ll have more compact FF cameras to choose from by then. I also hope that Leica, Hasselblad, Pentax et al will realize that a medium format camera of 30+ megapixels is completely pointless without live view.
I am guessing that you are right in that there will be more FF cameras to choose from in 3+ years. I am less sure about the rest. Both Leica and MF companies have quite a different way of thinking, and this may last as long as they survive.
I meant the M Summarits. Summarit simply means f/2.5 at this point, so wherever such an aperture makes sense, there will be one. I mean Summarit M lenses, in the sense of a secondary or even tertiary line of lenses with price as the primary motivational factor (compared to normal M lenses) in the design, and a slightly lower mechanical standard. f/2.5 is quite an accomplishment in medium format.