[jrc]

"Pricing yourself out of the market is suicide. $6000 for a Noctilux? $3600 for a 35 Lux ASPH? Get real. Unless you are rolling in cash, these prices are not realistic for 90% of the buying public."

90 Percent? More like 98 or 99 percent. The only people who buy Leica are aficionados (and maybe fashionistas, to exhaust my Spanish vocabulary) and people who don't care about money. A solid Leica-brand single-body kit will now cost $20,000 minimum, bought new, and for that you could buy two D3s and a nice selection of Nikon pro glass, or the equivalent Canon stuff.

Even if Leica has the money to survive now, which is uncertain, it must do three things:

-Come up with a modern M. Leica must sit and think about what the camera should do, functionally. What it should *be.* Start with Leica glass, and then build an entirely new modern camera. Leica's model shouldn't be the M3, but the Ur-Leica. That is, a revolutionary camera using Leica glass. They need a small, highly functional, very reliable, modern camera with exceptional high ISO response and a fairly large sensor that will provide brilliant image quality (and in IMHO, 1.3x may be large enough.) The problem with the current M8 IMHO isn't image quality but the old-fashioned rangefinder mechanism and the general unreliability. If the current M8 had an electronic "in-focus" mechanism that actually worked, it would be a far, far better camera.

-Either kill the R system, or come up with a revolutionary design that departs from the Canon/Nikon model. Autofocus for sure. Look at Nikon -- Nikon incorporates in its FX models the DX crop. Suppose the new R was something substantially bigger than a FF -- a half step toward a MF system in a 35mm camera size, but that could use legacy glass for internally cropped shots, with a new system of autofocus lenses that would take in the full sensor. This might seem goofy, but it would offer MF and FF in a single box, and it *would* differentiate the Leica. I have little faith that Leica will do anything like this -- or anything revolutionary at all -- because it's not an innovative company, and hasn't been for half a century. If they killed the R system, they could possibly come up with some serious designs that would directly adapt their R lenses to Nikons and Canons, like the Zeiss ZF line.

-Treasure their traditionalist buyers -- but move on. Know what? The traditionalist buyers are dying out. Getting old. Retiring. Their eyes are going, and they can't focus rangefinders any more. I've known newspaper reporters who say that autofocus is the only thing that kept them going in their 50s. There are a few young traditionalists who are avid Leica fans, but how many young people have $20,000 to put into a camera system? Leica needs a useful, modern camera for modern users. Period.

JC