Next step of Leica?

A few months ago I had a meeting with people from Leica. I was shown a mock up of a camera. It was genuinely intriguing. They are thinking long and hard about the way forward. It's not all doom and gloom. Having said that, they came up with one proposal that was so weird it bordered on the imbecilic.

In the "old days" Canon and Nikon readily matched or beat most Leica optics. They abandoned rangefinders because both professionals and amateurs wanted SLRs, and, not being dummies, they wanted hinged backs.

Nikon D300, D700, various current and upcoming Canons, several Sonys, and Pentax K20D all beat R9 in most respects, full frame or not.

Leica is doomed because their pricing structure is such that people can not afford them.

M8 with with various sorts of problems and poor reliability? Sure it is nice, but I thought 2000 @ for my M6`s was too much. $5000 is insane.

I have given up hope of seeing a R digi that I can afford. I`ll not spend $10000 on a product from a company on shakey financial footing.

All they have to do is make a reliable R digi body with a full frame sensor that takes my R lenses. This can not be to hard, can it? What is so hard about a digi cam? It does not have to be better than Nikon, just as good as.

In the mean time, I am collecting Nikon glass and am well on my way to a substantial system.

Leica is doomed because their pricing structure is such that people can not afford them.

Exactly. Give us a body in the $2500.00 range, make it at least as reliable as and entry level Nikon or Canon dslr, and you'll have a good platform that will have people spending money for your excellent lenses.

The Leica problem is arrogance. Just go to Solms and meet the managers, they still think they're worth a premium over all other camera manufacturers because of the fine craftsmanship involved in their cameras.

Yes, they do make fine instruments, for years that did mean a qualitative difference, but now, in the digital age they have to realise that they need more than a nice solidly made body. The body also needs to be reliable in the field and not crap out regularly.

They need to give potential buyers something that gives them the most from their excellent lenses. This means they need to develop a FF sensor that extracts as much detail and other fine qualities as possible from those lenses. The body has to be true to the M philosphy of ergonomic simplicity, quick handling, small size and quiet. Yet it also has to meet modern expectations such as high, noise free ISO levels, which can also be directly changed on the body.

Ploughing through a menu to change the ISO is just not acceptable. They were told this on all forums way before the M8 came out, but ignored the advice, thinking they knew best. Arrogant disaster.

They also need to find a way to get a much larger, better screen on the back, with a well thought out live view and flexible histogram display. They might even think about articulating the live view screeen.

Reliabilty issues must also be fixed if anyone is going to have any confidence in their products again. So they need to cooperate with people who know far more about sensors and electronics than they do and they need to listen to them - especially when it comes to quality control.

Make one more mistake whether it's over design or reliability and Leica may well become a nostalgic memory.

How many people do you think would buy a Leica DRF if it didn't look and feel just like an M3? If it didn't use every LTM or M lens ever made? Leica can't innovate unless it can get out of the M3 box.

I think then lens mount is the only thing they HAVE to keep. If they made something at the right quality and price point, they could get away from the exact M form factor if they wanted to. It's a risk though.

I agree with Josh - they've done it before, after all. How about an affordable M-mount 'CL-D' made by/with a suitable Japanese partner? As long as their only M offering is 3x the price of a Nikon D300, the potential market is always going to be small. It's not as if the cost can be amortised over several decades any more - camera technology has advanced enormously quickly over the last five years, and there's no sign of it slowing down (you can hardly give away a D100 today). And the other traditional entry point to the Leica system, the secondhand market that made a decent M6 as affordable as a new F100 a few years back, doesn't really help with the M8 - there's no bottom rung of the ladder within the reach of many potential users (and future customers for the new gear).

The real problem is that Leica has to rely on someone else for the sensor.

The sensors improve at such a rapid pace, that it's silly to expect your camera body (essentially the sensor) to have a meanful lifetime of greater than 4-5 years. If you look at industry wide pixel counts since 1999, the "average" pixel count of digital sensors has doubled every 4-5 years.

Further, when you look at the industry leaders (such as Canon), their flagship products have sensors pixel counts double the industry average.

For example, in 2002, the "average" camera sensor was 5 mp, the top of the line Canon was 11 mp, in 2007, the average camera sensor was 10 mp, the top of the line Canon was 21 mp.

I have a feeling leica will evolve into a optics only company, providing lenses for the "disposable" camera/sensors that Panasonic makes. Perhaps that has happened alread?

...i wonder how the Leica revenue breaks down. It would not surprise me to find out they make more money from selling lenses to panasonic, than from M8 sales.