New Summicron

[jaapv]

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What I mean was that Leica said “ any R we produce will cost more than 6000 Euro and we cannot sell it at that [then] price” which means they are well aware that they need to stay close to the market if they want to get anything like a volume sales for their bread-and-butter product.

All their outrageously priced items had been articles that do not influence sales of other products.

If they were to reduce the volume of M camera sales by overpricing, the turnover in money for the camera might remain the same, but it would seriously affect lens sales, which are booming right now because of the M8 and even more the M9.

Leica needs to sell bodies to sell lenses.

 

I’ll get out of my wannabe boardroom right now

Edited May 18, 2012 by jaapv

[stunsworth]

The irony is that a 6000 euro R10 would probably have sold reasonably well - especially if it had AF.

 

People now seem to accept much higher prices than 5 years ago.

 

Lens sales are high, but it's almost impossible to get anything other than Summarits from stock - and that's with the factory working at full capacity.

Edited May 18, 2012 by stunsworth

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[01af]

Better than I thought would be possible in one minute ...

Umm—actually it was almost two minutes ... but I figured 'one minute' would sound more impressive

 

 

... but absolutely ugly still ...

That's due to the spherical aberrations in the out-of-focus areas. The bokeh of most lenses will become much nicer when stopping down the aperture by, say, one stop. Even just half a stop often makes a significant difference for the better because it helps to get all those aberrations under control.

 

That's why it's so ridiculous when people try, or compare, lenses for their bokehs in a lens review always at full aperture only. Often they don't understand what bokeh actually is in the first place; many confuse it with background blur. So—if a smooth bokeh is important for your image composition then don't use your lens at full aperture. Only very few lenses have really nice bokeh at full aperture ... and even most of these will benefit from stopping down just a bit, usually.

 

 

... and the tool has killed a lot of color that should be there.

No, it hasn't. To the contrary—I am thrilled, actually, at how good the colour defringing tool is at getting rid of the fringes and keeping the rest of the image intact. If you're missing the blueish-green hues in the blurred foliage—these were chromatic aberration fringes, too. A green fringe around a green highlight is just as wrong as a green fringe around a white highlight, even if we tend to accept the former and only reject the latter.

 

Anyway—if you want to have the fringes removed from the white highlights only and insist in keeping them elsewhere then Lightroom/Camera Raw can do exactly that, too. However it would take a bit longer to accomplish than just one or two minutes.