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looking closely at the M8 but very concerned about all the technical issues that have been mentioned in this forum and elsewhere by knowledgeable people

will use my potential M8 for medical photography, not macro and for general photos on trips etc.

since this is the first Leica digital, do you you think that the bugs need to be worked out more thoroughly(firmware,hardware) or that this is the problem of the first model of anything and represents the early learning curve?

i am aware of the Leica mystique but I am not sure that this will be enough to carry me through what could be a rough go

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I am an early adopter pre-ordering and receiving it within the first week of availability. It did have to go to Solmes for the fix but I have not had any other issues since getting it. I have taken it on motorcyle trips , kayaking and been caught in the rain once or twice. After having used it for awhile I sold my Canon 1DMKII but did keep my 5D for longer lens work etc. I have shot 2 weddings useing both cameras and both times images from the M8 were picked as the prefered for prints. Both are great cameras but if I was forced to give up one it would be the 5D.

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As a long time rangefinder shooter and Leica shooter who had an investment in Leica lenses, I love my M8.

 

I would probably not recommend a rangefinder camera -- Leica or any other -- for medical photography. On the other hand, for a camera to take on trips as you mention it's a great choice for it's small size to excellent optical quality (as long as you have good lenses).

 

As far as the bugs go, I suppose everyone has different experiences. Mine has been a great experience so far, with very few bugs and insignificant ones at that. My shooting is limited to street shooting and travel shooting and I've found the camera ideal for me, especially as a companion to my M6 which I still use regularly.

 

The issues and bugs are talked about incessantly in these forums and you'll find plenty of information to help you decide. In my opinion, the M8 is a good digital solution for those of us who have bought into the Leica system and invested in lenses. It has it's compromises and I'm willing to work around them. It's not much work to work around them in my case.

 

If you have no prior investment in Leica lenses, and if medical photography is a big part of what you do, then you may benefit from going the SLR route. Canon's 5D is a fantastic full frame sensor camera and is actually less expensive.

 

Good luck!

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Guest tummydoc

will use my potential M8 for medical photography, not macro

 

Buy it through your practise and tell the IRS you use it for medical photography, but leave it at home. Unless you plan to wear it round your neck with your steth, someone's likely to brush it off a desk, or outright nick it.

 

since this is the first Leica digital, do you you think that the bugs need to be worked out more thoroughly(firmware,hardware)

 

Yes, absolutely. Most of the worst seem to have been already. Insist upon one with a high serial# to give yourself reasonable assurance of the latest runnning gear. Leica's serial #'s may not be sequential within a particular batch, but they are made in batches and one batch must be made before the next. A 3,102,xxx may or may not have been made before a 3,103,xxx but a 3,17x,xxx or 3,19x,xxx were definitely made subsequent to all 3,10x,xxx, but before 3,2xx,xxx and 3,3xx,xxx, regardless of the order in which these units eventually arrive at stockists.

 

or that this is the problem of the first model of anything and represents the early learning curve?

 

To an extent, however many new digital cameras have had many fewer intial problem issues than the M8, including Leica's own redoubtable DMR. One could make a point that on such an expensive piece of kit, the curve ought to have been learnt prior to its public issuance.

 

i am aware of the Leica mystique but I am not sure that this will be enough to carry me through what could be a rough go

 

I has done so for me :D I had two M8's die and yet perservered to a third.

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Hello, Greg, and welcome.

 

The M8 produces exceptional, robust files, and I completely agree that the teething problems seem to have been resolved. As Tim [Hello, Tim] pointed out, it is not particularly well suited to medical photography specifically, or macro work, generally, although for subjects photographed from 2 1/2 feet or more away, it might suit. The 90 Macro Elmar would be usable, but not as ideal as an SLR. For almost any other kind of work I can think of, it is not only usable, but the lenses [including the previous generation of Leica lenses, which are readily available used] are exceptional.

 

I have had occasion, as an early adopter, to need service [took delivery early Nov. '06, w/ one of the first batch, which needed a refit at Solms], but it was rapid, thorough and correct. I am happy with the choice, and continuing as a long-time Leica user. I've sold my SLR's.

 

Norm

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Thanks to you all for your personal experience and opinions. It appears that 3 out of 4 have

had significant technical issues with your M8's

I will reserve my final judgement for purchase after a few more weeks of reading the forum and reviews.

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My feeling is that the problems are mainly solved and shouldn't deter your purchase; the bigger question in my mind is whether you're comfortable with the whole idea of a rangefinder as compared to an SLR.

 

The SLR concept is intuitive; the rangefinder concept isn't. (On the other hand, most dSLRs offer so many menu options that they largely obviate their 'what you see is what you get' simplicity.)

 

In my case, the rangefinder didn't require any learning curve; it felt right when I picked it up, and I have seldom wanted an SLR in the past thirty to forty years. But that's not the case with everyone.

 

Others have spoken to the M's applicability to medical photography; it is definitely a less versatile camera than an SLR. But in its limited range, it is unsurpassed.

 

I bought my M8 in May, and I don't worry about its extremely early serial number. Current cameras have an updated circuit board, but if you or I own one with the old circuit board, and that camera develops problems, Leica does the same upgrade automatically at no charge (so far, at any rate).

 

--HC

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This is a forum largely for M8 "enthusiasts," of which I am not quite one. I use two bodies and like them well enough to use them, but I have used M cameras for 40 years and am just accustomed to the concept. The other side of the story is that this is by far the worst, most troublesome M camera (or any camera) I've ever used and it is full of operational compromises in comparison to film Ms and other digital cameras. I have had five bodies to get the two I now have, and one of these two has a shutter release that is so progressively tight and rough that the camera is gradually becoming unusable. The other of the two has had an intermittent viewfinder display since the day it arrived as a replacement from Leica (for camera number four). The user experience is also compromised by Leica's uncommunicativeness and unresponsiveness, at least in the U.S., about a camera that only they can service.

 

So, with this experience, I very rarely recommend the camera to someone who asks. If they just have to have an M camera and don't want to use film, they have no choice, unfortunately. That's sort of where I put myself.

 

Walt

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.... very concerned about all the technical issues that have been mentioned in this forum....... could be a rough go

 

Greg - I see you have recently joined the forum. Had you been monitoring the forum a few months ago you would know about numerous issues that were being thrashed out by members in an attempt to get the M8 to function at it's optimum. Then, the forum was alive and it was necessary to do extensive daily reading here to keep up to date. Now, the forum is wonderfully dull and boring [including my post], and that should tell you a huge amount. It tells me that forum members are spending their time working their M8s and making pictures instead of fretting over the issues which grabbed our attention a few months back but and which are mostly well resolved.

 

I bought the M8 for serious work and by far my biggest concern with it is that I might have to sell it for financial, but not technical reasons. In recent days I have made images which I could not have with an SLR without disturbing my subjects. The M8 has charm and a few warts; it isn't perfect by a long way but it is a quite extraordinary instrument in a tiny package and capable of producing high quality work in the right hands.

 

If you want to photograph digitally with a rangefinder buy the M8, there really is no point in worrying about past issues which are resolved,. Whilst you have drawn some dreadful experiences from forum members, the likelihood is those experiences are associated with early, rather than current cameras.

 

Oh yes - disregard that 'mystique' stuff; it won't make an atom of difference to your photographs.

 

.................. Chris

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Greg,

 

You'll find that most M8 owners have had no problems with their cameras, myself included. The Internet has a way of magnifying negative comments. However, it's pretty clear that the M8's initial quality could have been much better. I would disagree that Leica has been unresponsive to fix the problems -- perhaps slow, but not unresponsive.

 

As a former medical photographer, I'd have to say the M8 is one of the most unsuitable cameras I can think of for that application.

 

Larry

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I'm not much of a Leica M person but have been a user of Leica R for many years. Recently, I had a recurring issue with Tennis Elbow and this meant that my Canon 5D has been sitting at home, collecting dust.

 

I bought the M8 over the weekend while I did not see any of the issues reported like battery, etc, I was heavily disppointed with one, the issue with AWB. For the same shots, I get totally different colors, some way out! I went to the zoo and shot some monkeys behind green foilage. The colors all turned very blue and I had to spend a large amount of time correcting them in PS.

 

BTW, I use the top Canon L, Leica R and now, the ASPH lenses. Very sharp, constrasty, for the M, but lousy for color.

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Greg,

 

The M8 is totally unsuited for medical photography IMHO. The V-Lux-1 on the other hand is ideal. You get excellent images with or without the flash and it is much easier to have an assistant shoot for you than trying to explain how to focus a rangefinder. My example Photos are not appropriate for posting here but please e-mail me and I will send you some samples directly.

 

Regards,

Henry

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Larry,

 

In the interest of trying to give a fair appraisal of M8 problems, it must be pointed out that this forum (I don't know about the rest of the Internet) does not represent a random sample of owners, but a self-selected sample. We have no idea how this kind of sample is skewing results. We don't know what percentage of M8 owners post on the forum, what the differences are between those who attend to such a forum and those who don't, etc. So I'd be pretty sure that we have no basis all for the idea that this forum "magnifies negative comments" or that "most M8 owners have had no problems." As for the "early camera" idea, all five of my bodies were received new after March of this year.

 

My only hint at a statistic is from a large New York dealer who told me that the M8 failure and return rate has been beyond anything he has experienced in 30 years of selling photographic equipment. When I tried to pin him down on a figure, he finally said that he didn't know but that it was "certainly over 25%." If you figure in a probability that he doesn't hear about many failures (they go from the owner to N.J.), this sounds rather dismal to me.

 

Leica simply needs to do something about this. On the idea that they are unresponsive, we wouldn't be doing half the speculating on this forum that we are doing if they were responsive. They would acknowledge problems, describe them and explain how they are going to correct them.

 

Walt

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When you read from the net, there are always problem reported with any brands.

 

M8 is not perfect but good enough for pro level usage. Weather a RF is suitable for your application is a different story.

 

I just got the M8 and very happy with it for my gigs. I am selling all my Contax ND gears/lenses and my Canon 1D2 and keeping my 5D for my 85L II & 70-200 2.8IS.

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Walt--not to take you to task, but:

You're right, we don't know whether we are a good sample. Thus neither you nor I can make generalizations that the camera is or is not reliable based on what we do or don't see here.

 

When Sean Reid did his survey of people who had M8 camera problems (admittedly non-scientific and with self-selecting respondents), he was surprised at how low the problem rate was, under 10% as I recall--and that was with the early cameras.

 

I agree that we can't generalize that most of the problems were with the early cameras, but it is true that the forum isn't developing a new thread of issues every day. On the other hand, that might just be because we're aware of the unfixed problems--AWB, high-ISO banding in some cases etc--so we just don't bother to list them any more.

 

As for the NY dealer's report, it's anecdotal. Certainly you're right that he doesn't know of people who have simply sent their cameras to NJ. But we don't know what may have colored his remarks to you; there is no reason to assume he was untruthful, but he might have been "reading the customer" and figuring that he should paint a black case for you, or on the other hand he might have figured that since you're a Leica customer, he should paint a rosier picture, lowballing the number of defectives.

 

Some of us may be more forgiving of the camera's warts than others. My feeling is that we're pretty much informed about progress, even if not directly. What we termed "Sudden Death Syndrome" has been virtually eliminated, for example, and we know that any camera that comes in for any repair receives the "T2 update" if it hasn't had it already. But whether the glass is half full or half empty is a matter of perspective.

 

It certainly is good, though, to hear from people like you who aren't full supporters of the camera but use it nonetheless.

 

 

Greg, I repeat: If you think a rangefinder is right for your needs, my opinion is that you won't regret purchasing an M8. On the other hand, since you've posted the question here, perhaps any of the other choices mentioned is better for you. But I agree with Walt that we need to ignore the "Leica mystique." You need to look at the camera for what it is and decide whether you're ready for it. Mystique is okay for collectors, but it doesn't take a picture.

 

--HC

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that Leica cannot keep up with M lens production and has sold more M8s than they had anticipated ...they are even planning on hiking the price up a notch, which hardly sounds like the M8 has been a failure

I got my camera in January and have not had a single problem with it ...returns to dealers likely include some folks who are trying to figure out how to get the camera to autofocus

the issues with the M8 have been effectively resolved

while not a camera for all, it is exemplary at what it does

your last point about Leica not being responsive to their customers cannot go unchallenged ...given the small size of the company, I think they have done a commendable job in dealing with the camera's early issues and have been quick to respond to any problems raised here

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The M8 is not an obvious choice if you need macro capability especially with a flash preferably the ring type.

But why not make use of the Leica trial especially with a 75 f 2 which focuses really quite close and is exceptionally sharp. You may well find this meets most of your needs.

Final advice: don't rush your decision and start saving up you will end up with both systems when finances allow.

Let us know and post your results Alain

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