Leica / Zeiss: Who is better?

[pgk]

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my view of Leica as of late is one where the marketing section seems to run things. one silly release after another while busy rubbing shoulders with the social and economical elite bolstered by Leica aficionados buying completely silly digital cameras like X and T for 5-10x the price of comparable cameras. news-flash, it doesn't matter if the quality is second to none or that the body made of exposed aluminium, no digital device have a lifetime of more than a few years.

And the alternative? If this is what it takes to keep Leica going and stay in business so that they still produce cameras and lenses that I can use (I wish I were one of the social and economic elite at times, but there again....) then so be it. Would you prefer them to be true to some esoteric notion of 'professional and sincere' (whatever that is - and FWIW the vast majority of ALL cameras are sold to amateurs who you could just as easily argue don't absolutely need them? Its a complex world without pseudo-morality shoved in to  .

[rodluvan]

 

Regarding the size, by the way, the Otus is the most prominent example of achieving excellence by ignoring some design decisions. But if you prefer to compare M-mount lenses, just compare a Summilux 35 with the ZM 35/1.4.

the zeiss is decidedly larger (and optically better and, I assume, half the price). now, wasn't that a more apt comparison?

[rodluvan]

if one supposedly pay a premium for that handmade German feel, why do I keep reading about these things;

 

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/246386-50-apo-loose-anyone-sent-lens-to-leica/

 

besides that; wasn't large parts of the first batch of APO's recalled for optical (coating?) reasons? 

 

this should hardly even happen once considering the price point, imo

[bernie.lcf]

if one supposedly pay a premium for that handmade German feel, why do I keep reading about these things;

 

 

Common misconception about handmade

 

"Handmade" theoretically allows for tighter tolerance or perfection as it is assembled by a human being who can spend more time to get this 100% right. Handmade does not mean that nothing happens or that there are no defects, because at the end of the day they produce batches of > 10.000 items and things may slip or things may happen between final assembly and packaging.

 

Handmade, however, does mean that you can ship your item back to Leica and they'll make it perfect. I mean: perfect within the possibilities - not just ok or ok enough or within specified tolerance levels or whatever else you hear from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony etc.

 

Mass produced items follow a formula that (to keep it very simply) decides how many defects and how much out of spec you can make items while still keeping profitability. The sad truth is: only some 5% of all buyers (of some Canon/Nikon/Olympus/Sony lens) will ever find out that a lens is decentered. Only maybe 0,5% will bother your service department with it because everybody else will return the item and then it gets sold to somebody who does not care.

What you do is: balance the cost for fixing those 0,5% vs. making it right the first time.

 

This is mass production. Like it or not. It allows for much lower prices and higher quantity (here, we are not talking batches of 10.000 but batches of 1 million and more)

[Exodies]

if one supposedly pay a premium for that handmade German feel, why do I keep reading about these things;

 

Because you are addicted to schadenfreude?

[Cuthbert]

Bernie, I just want to say as a mechanical engineer that what you are saying is completely crazy! Quality is given by control of the process, and control of the process is just given by large numbers, the idea that in mass production 5% of the products on the market is out of spec is so insane, just think about a 5% of the production of a car that don't meet the safety standards.

[bernie.lcf]

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just think about a 5% of the production of a car that don't meet the safety standards.

 

If you are mechanical engineer, you should know that this is not about 5% of a production of cars not meeting the safety standards. There is a lot more to a product than the criteria whether or not the airbag will ignite.

[Cuthbert]

Yes I'm a mechanical engineer, I work in automotive and I can say you are talking trash: if we accepted that 5% of our our production doesn't meet the safety standards I and my colleagues would be criminals guilty of premeditated homicide. Who told you this BS? What are you doing in your real life? Have you ever heard of six sigma? Or Kaizen? Do you know if we spot a part out of tolerance we ship it back to the supplier who by contract is obliged to replaced it at no charge for us?

[bernie.lcf]

Cuthbert, I suggest you stick to the discussion and refrain from emotional comments.

 

In fact, you already explained it yourself. If a part is out of tolerance, you will ship it back. In other words, there is a tolerance for the part. To keep things extremely simple for the sake of this forum, you will for example accept a variance of 2mm for the leather seat cover at a temperature of 20 degrees. If it is 2,5mm, you will ship it back. If it is anything between -1,9 and + 1,9, you will keep it and build it into the car.

 

Canon states an autofocus tolerance for their AF SLR/DSLR cameras of "within depth of field". In other words, the equipment is acceptable if if the perfect plane of focus is within the depth of field.

 

Can it be done more accurately? Yes, because for example for pro equipment with high precision AF they state a tolerance of 1/3 the depth of field.

If you ship back your camera + lens because you can see that the perfect plane of focus is a couple of mm away (by using the infamous line of screws type setup), Canon may return it to you unmodified because whatever you see with your little screws is still within their tolerance. A lot of people will never find out or bother, some 5% (a totally random number for the sake of argument) will give you a hard time about it and cost you money at customer service. If the cost of customer service is lower than what it would take to implement a tighter tolerance (e.g. 1/3 depth of field for everything), then I guarantee that the majority of companies will not bother to do so.

 

Maybe you are getting hung up by the word "spec" and upon rereading my original posting: fair enough, perhaps the word spec is not the right word and should be replaced by "perfection". Canon's spec might just say that their AF can (in certain circumstances) be anything between 10cm and 1m plusminus from the actual distance. In that sense, all the equipment leaving factory is "within spec". Whether that spec is enough for your own purpose is a personal matter. Since, however, enough photographers I have met in the last 20 years had their equipment fine tuned (after applying some pressure to customer service), I'd say that perhaps Canon's "spec" are merely good enough for the majority, but there are still some folks who want to shoot that lens at f1.4 and achieve focus accuracy within mm rather than cm.

 

 

 

coming back to the original Zeiss vs. Leica discussion, my point is: Zeiss has outsourced their production (with a single digit number of exceptions) to Cosina. Based on our experience with Voigtländer lenses, we know that sample variation of Voigtländer lenses is higher than Leica. Whether this impacts Zeiss or not, I cannot say. It's been a while since I bought a new Zeiss lens, but I have just recently gone through a few copies of the Nokton 1.5.

[pgk]

..... coming back to the original Zeiss vs. Leica discussion, my point is: Zeiss has outsourced their production .....

I don't think either company is 'better' than the other. I do think that its interesting that the two companies have taken very different approaches. Zeiss have shown that (photographic) equipment can have its production outsourced and still retain the optical 'quality' they require, whilst Leica have shown that they can still produce both cameras and lenses in a European context and sell them. Both produce excellent products. 'Better' is a word all too often misused IMO.

[yeeper]

 

Zeiss have production facilities in Germany. the entire Otus family and (as mentioned above) the 2.8/15 is manufactured there

nothing is 'handmade' in either Leica nor Zeiss.

 

 

I was just in Wetzlar watching the little old ladies at Leica hand-painting the anti-reflective coating to lens elements.  That looks like hand-made to me...

[rodluvan]

I was just in Wetzlar watching the little old ladies at Leica hand-painting the anti-reflective coating to lens elements.  That looks like hand-made to me...

 

 

that's unbelievably quaint 

 

applying something that I assume must be perfectly spread out to the nanometre by hand

 

some super ladies 

[Peter Branch]

I was just in Wetzlar watching the little old ladies at Leica hand-painting the anti-reflective coating to lens elements.  That looks like hand-made to me...

 

One must assume that what they were doing is painting the edges of the lens elements with a black, light absorbing, "Paint".

[Cuthbert]

Cuthbert, I suggest you stick to the discussion and refrain from emotional comments.

 

In fact, you already explained it yourself. If a part is out of tolerance, you will ship it back. In other words, there is a tolerance for the part. To keep things extremely simple for the sake of this forum, you will for example accept a variance of 2mm for the leather seat cover at a temperature of 20 degrees. If it is 2,5mm, you will ship it back. If it is anything between -1,9 and + 1,9, you will keep it and build it into the car.

 

 

Emotional comments? Yes I get quite "emotional" when I read a lot of misleading BS on the net.

 

You have no clue of what you are talking about: you confuse the concept of "tolerance" with "defective" and "out of spec", I chopped your post because from an engineering point of you what you wrote is PAINFUL to read, basically speaking an insult to mathematics, science, physics and common sense.

 

The problem is that people like you credit themselves as "experts" on the board and start to spread absurd rumours that people with little familiarity of the topics may think they are knowledgeable and rational but they aren't, it's all a mess.

 

Please refrain to talk about things you don't have a clue about, it's better for everybody.

 

 

I was just in Wetzlar watching the little old ladies at Leica hand-painting the anti-reflective coating to lens elements.  That looks like hand-made to me...

 

 

Guys you have to define what is "handmade" for you. Today "handmade" is just a advertisement, for instance, if you work in Ferrari you will find a lot of women stitching the leather upholstery of the cars but nobody would say Ferraris are handmade. If you work in Ford a lot of the work in the assembly of engines is made by workmen but this doesn't mean they are handmade too.

 

Like "tight tolerances" "handmade" doesn't mean "quality product", usually it means the opposite, a quality product is an AK47 built with loose tolerance that works in difficult weather conditions where a sophisticated design with many moving parts a tight tolerances like a Luger P08 would surely fail after a substantial amount of shots and therefore powder fouling.

 

...but for some unknown reason in the Leicaverse people are convinced that handfitting, more parts, shimming etc...is "quality building".

[jdlaing]

Bernie, I just want to say as a mechanical engineer that what you are saying is completely crazy! Quality is given by control of the process, and control of the process is just given by large numbers, the idea that in mass production 5% of the products on the market is out of spec is so insane, just think about a 5% of the production of a car that don't meet the safety standards.

What do the safety factors of a car have to do with a camera or lens?

[Cuthbert]

What do the safety factors of a car have to do with a camera or lens?

 

I wasn't the guy who said 5% of the cars produced today don't meet the international safety STANDARDS, that are NOT safety factors.

 

You guys are still mixing up things, more and more! Now another engineering term has been throw in the middle of this pointless discussion!

 

Having said that I assume you were talking about tolerances, I can assure that if Canon or Nikon or Leica or Zeiss were building 5% of their production out of specs people will notice it and these companies would be out of business since long, long time ago. Optics is one of the engineering fields were tolerances are expressed in microns, not in hundredths or decimals of millimetres.

[bernie.lcf]

I wasn't the guy who said 5% of the cars produced today don't meet the international safety STANDARDS, that are NOT safety factors.

 

 

Nobody said that. This is what you made up in your mind by misreading the posting. 

 

You are way out of line with your messages and I am putting you on my personal ignore list because there is no other way to stop your rampage for the sake of this thread, this forum and yourself. 

 

Your postings violate all basic rules of human interaction and I don't know why you consider it necessary to behave this way.

[jaapv]

that's unbelievably quaint 

 

applying something that I assume must be perfectly spread out to the nanometre by hand

 

some super ladies 

It is indeed a fact that the black antireflective paint on lenses is applied by hand by a group of elderly ladies.

[pgk]

...but for some unknown reason in the Leicaverse people are convinced that handfitting, more parts, shimming etc...is "quality building".

I suggest that you do a search of the web to see how most top end cameras and their more expensive lenses are built - it involves considerable 'hand assembly' by trained technicians - there is a vieo showing a Canon 500mm being built which makes the point. The vast majority of the  'Leicaverse' is well aware that what you are talking about is 'craftsman' built - this went long ago from Leicas (I remember talking to a repairer who explained that such manufacturer had almost certainly become uneconomic by the M and is certainly not carried out today).

 

Oh yes and regarding people discussing things they don't understand, well how are they ever going to find out whether they are right if they don't discuss them?

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[jaapv]

Emotional comments? Yes I get quite "emotional" when I read a lot of misleading BS on the net.

 

You have no clue of what you are talking about: you confuse the concept of "tolerance" with "defective" and "out of spec", I chopped your post because from an engineering point of you what you wrote is PAINFUL to read, basically speaking an insult to mathematics, science, physics and common sense.

 

The problem is that people like you credit themselves as "experts" on the board and start to spread absurd rumours that people with little familiarity of the topics may think they are knowledgeable and rational but they aren't, it's all a mess.

 

Please refrain to talk about things you don't have a clue about, it's better for everybody.

 

 

 

 

Guys you have to define what is "handmade" for you. Today "handmade" is just a advertisement, for instance, if you work in Ferrari you will find a lot of women stitching the leather upholstery of the cars but nobody would say Ferraris are handmade. If you work in Ford a lot of the work in the assembly of engines is made by workmen but this doesn't mean they are handmade too.

 

Like "tight tolerances" "handmade" doesn't mean "quality product", usually it means the opposite, a quality product is an AK47 built with loose tolerance that works in difficult weather conditions where a sophisticated design with many moving parts a tight tolerances like a Luger P08 would surely fail after a substantial amount of shots and therefore powder fouling.

 

...but for some unknown reason in the Leicaverse people are convinced that handfitting, more parts, shimming etc...is "quality building".

Please explain why the coffee from an Elektra Semiautomatica -hand made in Italy -and that means screwed, soldered   etc. - is clearly superior.

 

 

Re Ferrari:

 

http://www.ferrarilife.com/forums/ferrari-discussion/12600-making-ferrari-hand-made.html