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New M240 photos


Bazwell

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I always thought the early announcement was to stop people jumping ship to cameras like the Nikon D800e. ...................

 

In that case its exactly backfired on this occasion!

 

(He would have been happy not to buy anything yet had his interest not be excited by the announcement, but then he got fed up with waiting and jumped ship.)

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Next week, the M will have been announced for four months, with no official release date in sight.

 

I am hoping that Leica have a very large shelf of bodies, just waiting for a final firmware install, prior to shipping. If not, their camera making teams will have been sitting there making not very much since August

 

Goodness only knows what their cashflow has been like this last quarter

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Perhaps this is their way of managing the complaints of "true" leica users by culling the pre-orders of the "bandwagon" users. that would have the effect of reducing the frustrations of the potentially most outspoken forum users once they do start shipping, no? :D

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Goodness only knows what their cashflow has been like this last quarter

 

I think they and their dealers are feeling the pinch; given the he M-E is also not exactly flying off the shelves ( and already needs incentives such as money off lenses bought at the same time or M-240 trade in futures )

 

Now, if they were to knock £1000 off the Monochrom, which might be selling in larger volumes than expected ( i.e. development costs covered by now ), I might be tempted to help them with their cashflow gap.

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Sorry, but the CV of this guy cuts no ice with me. Being a Professor of some engineering department somewhere doesn't make you especially qualified to evaluate products like this. Heads of Department are, in my experience, more concerned with promoting their activities, securing funding and the rest, not with actually doing detailed work.

 

I agree. With all due respect, the word "photographer" is conspicuously missing from that long and distinguished CV. Sure, anyone can use a camera. But for a rigorous test, put it in the hands of expert photographers (I do NOT mean reviewers and bloggers). Expert photographers have spent many thousands of hours doing photography and refining their sense of what a camera should do and how a photograph should look. Put it in the hands of photographers who have difficult and demanding professional assignments, where problems with color and other glitches are not tolerated. Some of them work in a Darwinian photographic world, where cameras are routinely replaced when another is better suited to the task. Many of them shoot about 100X more than the typical casual user, and spend about 100X more time on editing, refining and studying pictures — year after year after year. There is no substitute for deep photographic experience. As I've mentioned before, Polaroid retained Ansel Adams to test its advanced black & white products; he had decades of experience in commercial and landscape photography.

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I'm not sure the occasion merits the discussion of the personal qualifications of the bearer of the news. For all you know he may rival HCB, or not. Photographers, and amateurs like me may be too good at working around problems to be decent beta testers. Taking marketing photographs is not part of the job.

Edited by jaapv
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I think they and their dealers are feeling the pinch; given the he M-E is also not exactly flying off the shelves ( and already needs incentives such as money off lenses bought at the same time or M-240 trade in futures )

 

Now, if they were to knock £1000 off the Monochrom, which might be selling in larger volumes than expected ( i.e. development costs covered by now ), I might be tempted to help them with their cashflow gap.

 

Serves Leica right, for caving into the mainstream - with CMOS, movie mode, and LV. Should have done Leica M10, 36MP w/ improved CCD, higher-res LCD, better QC, and faster processor. :cool:

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I'm not sure the occasion merits the discussion of the personal merits of the bearer of the news. For all you know he may rival HCB, or not. Photographers, and amateurs like me may be too good at working around problems to be decent beta testers.

 

A rival of HCB would be pretty well known in the photography world. Photographers who are so experienced that they are good at working around problems also have the judgment to recognize problems in the first place. I don't see how deep photographic experience can present any kind of handicap or deficit in testing a camera. Rather, I see it as a prerequisite.

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I'm not sure the occasion merits the discussion of the personal qualifications of the bearer of the news. For all you know he may rival HCB, or not. Photographers, and amateurs like me may be too good at working around problems to be decent beta testers. Taking marketing photographs is not part of the job.

 

His personal qualifications merits aside, (I have nothing for or against the person), the photographs posted are apparently holiday snaps.

 

If he has the potential to rival HCB, why not post something remotely photographically revealing?

 

If he doesn't, why post snapshots?

 

I'm with the camp that says get an M into some photographer's hands, please--and as soon as possible. And then release them from Leica (with RAW files, please).

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Don`t like the photos! All I can say is fixed lens and you can not move around or have much control over composition.

 

As for colors, Leica adjusts the colors in firmware even for raw and we have no control over it except to fix it in post or do a custom WB with WhiBal Card . The M8`s are the same, but worse even with UV/IR filter, and the S2 is like the M8. My M9 has better colors than the M8, but I have do WhiBal for sun and it is set in one profile slot in each camera. I then get neutral colors like the Nikons.

 

BTW, Thorsten Overgaard does the same with WhiBal.

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Don`t like the photos! All I can say is fixed lens and you can not move around or have much control over composition.

 

As for colors, Leica adjusts the colors in firmware even for raw and we have no control over it except to fix it in post or do a custom WB with WhiBal Card . The M8`s are the same, but worse even with UV/IR filter, and the S2 is like the M8. My M9 has better colors than the M8, but I have do WhiBal for sun and it is set in one profile slot in each camera. I then get neutral colors like the Nikons.

 

BTW, Thorsten Overgaard does the same with WhiBal.

 

In my experience, a whibal isn't going to always help the problem with the Nikon, because getting neutral grays on the Nikon means that then, in many lights, the skin colour is IMO terrible :) I'm not sure why except it's some coded assumption somewhere in their image processor. I fixed it finally with multiple C1 profiles for the D3 / D4, but I shouldn't have had to, and it was truly frustrating to have wonderful cameras in almost every regard but that one :)

 

The M8, S2, M9 and DMR on the other hand, properly managed, are all much, much easier to get great colour with IMO (they have their own flaws--all of them--against Nikons too). But again, it probably depends on what you're shooting and how; since I care mostly about how people appear (and not, say, trees) everyone's MMV :)

Edited by Jamie Roberts
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[quote name=Jamie Roberts;2283531

 

I'm with the camp that says get an M into some photographer's hands' date=' please--and as soon as possible. And then release them from Leica (with RAW files, please).[/quote]

 

I agree, especially about RAW files. I would be very happy to see what raw files look like. The jpgs are not very relevant if you are going to develop on your own.

 

I'm happy to volunteer to be a guinea pig or beta tester or what have you. but I would only do so if I was NOT under any obligation to publish on the Internet and was neither expected to or allowed to do so. Then you could shoot away, trying lots of different things to thrash out the camera without worrying what something else thought. In that sense the idea of a NDA also helps the beta tester.

 

It is therefore puzzling to me why Dr. Rohde would even want to publish his snaps other than implicitly to brag that he actually had an M in his hands.

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I fully appreciate that English is not the Dr.'s first language but "nature" makes no sense - does he mean "mature" or "natural" ? If the latter the meaning is still open to further scrying over.

 

Damn it! Now you have me at it and I'm not even that interested in the thing!

 

Regards,

 

Bill

 

Sent from another Galaxy

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