dead M8 !?

[wlaidlaw]

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thanks for the 16mb card - just received. but no luck. thanks for sending it. i emailed leica, they said to send the camera in.......

 

Tracy,

 

Well at least post to India is more reliable than to Germany. My "not working properly" new Minox DSC sent back to Minox in Germany on the same day has gone missing /not arrived yet. With a bit of luck it is lost forever and I can claim on the postal insurance, rather than getting the useless thing back, I suspect very little, if any, better.

 

Sorry to hear that your M8 has to go back to base.

 

Hint - try and get a turn around time from Leica and ask them to make sure that the customs form is very clearly marked in English "consignee's used camera being returned after repair". I think you will find that a main Indian post office has a special customs form for items being returned for repair. You may need to "lubricate" the process of getting the correct form from the clerk. Make sure that you keep a copy of this form.

 

All this may or may not help but at least it gives you ammunition when you have your argument over the customs fee they will try and charge you on the returning camera. My experience in India when dealing with bureaucracy is that you have to play them at their game and do it better. Demand the form to make a formal complaint, insist on seeing a superior officer, make yourself a real nuisance, threaten them with going to get the police because you think corruption is taking place, say you are going to make a formal complaint about the office and the person via your consulate.

 

If they are not careful, corruption is going to kill the Indian dream. I shut my office there in 1999 in total frustration and because I was not prepared to sanction large bribes to keep hold of the business, which made the office only marginally profitable. We told the banks for whom we were doing their bond and other specialist insurance, that if they wanted to keep buying this from us, they would have to deal through their London branches.

 

Wilson

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[carstenw]

Well, no fairy-tale ending after all. Today, while testing the ISO performance compared to a Sony A900, I managed to get a single shot off, and now I get a message saying Drive Blocked/Shutter Fault. I don't see any problem with the shutter, but something doesn't work. Back it goes.

 

In the end Leica offered me to bump me up in the Upgrade queue, since the shutter was dead anyway. I got the camera back today, still with a black dot, but with Vulcanite. I like it more than I thought I would, but I still have my M6-like CameraLeather,com leatherette in case I miss it. I got the old price, since I was in the store this Christmas asking for a reservation for the update.

 

Here is the shocking part: they also sent back a cost estimate for the fix, and it was for €2000! I have no idea if they were intending me to pay this amount, but it sounds like it. In other words, even though the shutter is known to have faults, and even though there has been some sudden-deaths after the introduction of the delayed wind, they still treated it simply as a broken camera out of warranty. At least, that is what it seems like. I am quite shocked by this, to be honest. My dealer would have likely gone to bat for me, but still. I don't know if I would have paid it, to be honest.

 

On the other hand, it is possible that the train to consider a free repair was simply never set in motion since I opted for the early upgrade. I am hoping that this was the case.

[marknorton]

Carsten, isn't that the standard cost of the full upgrade? How do you like the new shutter?

[carstenw]

The Kostenvoranschlag was for a shutter replacment, I am pretty sure. I am not sure why it came in so high. I thought that someone else had paid €600 for a shutter replacement. Anyway, I have too little information here; I guess I will wonder what that was all about for the rest of my life.

 

I love the new shutter. Oddly, it sounds exactly the same to me, but only half as loud, or even quieter, and without the reverberations and vibrations of the old one. The new motor is smaller and weaker, I guess. I wonder if I will see a positive benefit in battery life? I think the new numbers on the shutter speed dial are in a thinner font... I am not sure though. The vulcanite is nicer than I thought, and I will keep it for a while. I lose some street cred by not having my own solution there, but let's see. The scroll wheel has also been lubricated and runs smoother, if still a little tight. They left my self-adjusted shutter release alone, thank God. That was on request, heh. They may even have tweaked it a little, somehow it feels smoother. Maybe they disassembled it and lubed it too.

 

The new glass looks like new glass. I guess it will unspectularly refuse to be scratched in low-key fashion for the rest of its life. The framelines are much tighter, really tight in fact. At close distances, I am not under the impression that there is *any* extra space left in the frame. Exactly what I wanted. I can add a little extra myself if I want to be safe.

 

Weird, just holding the camera in my hands I realize that I have missed it, in spite of my interesting work done with the Contax 645 (some results here: Photo Blog). I think that Leica M and medium format is a match made in heaven.