Leica M 240 sensor issue/flaw

[LocalHero1953]

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1 minute ago, martinot said:

Never had any freezes or lockups on my M-E 240. I wonder if it perhaps have been fixed in newer firmware? 

Or if it is the increased buffer size (2GB) that helps?

It was an early common flaw, fixed in firmware.

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[ianman]

On 5/22/2021 at 6:53 PM, jaapv said:

That is the strongest argument you have produced so far.

You have chosen not to understand them. Discussions with fanboys are just not possible. I'm out.

[martinot]

On 5/22/2021 at 11:20 AM, ianman said:

I don’t understand why you would buy four expensive cameras if you think they are a PITA to work with. Not being critical but I really don’t understand the behaviour.

Good point. Nothing wrong with different opinions, but that makes me curious as well.

[andybarton]

On 5/22/2021 at 6:51 PM, jaapv said:

Not odd, it is a 21st century technology grafted onto a mid-20th centuryn platform, developed from the 1920ies. It would be strange if there were no compromises and technological mismatches.

The 20C bit is the rangefinder, the mount and the camera body form factor.

Leica should have been able to build the electronic guts within the form factor to work properly. If they couldn’t, perhaps they shouldn’t have done it and worked on a SL-type camera that could accept legacy M lenses instead.

If the compromises they have had to make are too many to get 99% reliability, it might have been better not to bother.

 

[jaapv]

Not only that, Andy, that is the easy part. The worst problem is that it must accommodate lenses from 1920 onward that were designed in a time that nobody had an idea of the limitations and demands of a digital sensor, using a mount that is too narrow. It would have been much simpler for Leica to forget about retrocompatibility of lenses and make a  digital rangefinder with a new lens mount and its own lenses. But I don't think that would have been the camera any of us would have bought.

[andybarton]

It would.

[Gobert]

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On 5/22/2021 at 7:22 PM, LocalHero1953 said:

Oddly it's just the digital Ms that have had the systematic faults, not the SL, T/TL, CL or Q.

• M8: IR contamination
• M9: sensor corrosion
• M240: freezing/lockup
• M10: the great strap lug outrage

Not a body issue, but S lenses have had AF failures as well. 

M10 -  great strap lug outrage: please explain. Never heard about. Are you one of those deep fake adepts?

[jaapv]

Not being able to use any of the vintage stable of lenses? I think the company would not exist any more. It would have gone bankrupt in 2007. Or rather, the state of bankruptcy it was in back then would have been confirmed in court.

[jaapv]

8 minutes ago, Gobert said:

M10 -  great strap lug outrage: please explain. Never heard about. Are you one of those deep fake adepts?

A series of 14 (IIRC) cameras lost their strap lugs because somebody forgot to to apply Locktite during production.
I think Paul forgot to add a smiley.

[LocalHero1953]

2 hours ago, jaapv said:

A series of 14 (IIRC) cameras lost their strap lugs because somebody forgot to to apply Locktite during production.
I think Paul forgot to add a smiley.

Correct, on both counts!

Was it really just 14? It seemed to occupy the LUF for weeks.

Edited May 24, 2021 by LocalHero1953

[jaapv]

Not sure about the number - This seems to have stuck in my memory.

[Adam Bonn]

didn't the strap lug thing happen on the 240 too?

[Adam Bonn]

I got my M9p already with the new sensor.

A global recall would have been tricky for Leica

Many cameras won't have been with their original owners, so no way of Leica contacting them

The original sensor supplier stopped making sensors and sold the sensor business in 2011, and who has any idea if the new owners had any liability for the past mistakes

Leica might have faced financial problems had they funded everyone'ss sensor replacement at the same time.

Customer service would have suffered if the entire service department was busy on sensor replacement. Those occasional new Ms with rangefinder misalignment? Imagine if that was an 18month turn around because sorry we're flat out replacing perfectly good sensors that that haven't gone bad but probably will one day

Ultimately this is how the world works...

One time I bought a new car, within a few days of it being registered to me I got a letter saying it had a recall for a critical defect and that I had to take it in straightway.. That wasn't just timing, they were waiting to see who bought the cars as it's cheaper to do things on demand than en masse

2+ decades ago I had a credit card, about tens year ago they confessed to hidden PPI charges and that customers should contact them. Which I did! And low and behold I was entitled to zero!

About 4 years later I got a letter from them that amounted too ok we're proper busted now by the government, here's a cheque

Big companies are not your mate. They're a business. If there's a way to not do it at all/wait for unbearable pressure to act/do it cheaply they'll always take that route.

 

[jdlaing]

1 hour ago, Adam Bonn said:

I got my M9p already with the new sensor.

A global recall would have been tricky for Leica

Many cameras won't have been with their original owners, so no way of Leica contacting them

The original sensor supplier stopped making sensors and sold the sensor business in 2011, and who has any idea if the new owners had any liability for the past mistakes

Leica might have faced financial problems had they funded everyone'ss sensor replacement at the same time.

Customer service would have suffered if the entire service department was busy on sensor replacement. Those occasional new Ms with rangefinder misalignment? Imagine if that was an 18month turn around because sorry we're flat out replacing perfectly good sensors that that haven't gone bad but probably will one day

Ultimately this is how the world works...

One time I bought a new car, within a few days of it being registered to me I got a letter saying it had a recall for a critical defect and that I had to take it in straightway.. That wasn't just timing, they were waiting to see who bought the cars as it's cheaper to do things on demand than en masse

2+ decades ago I had a credit card, about tens year ago they confessed to hidden PPI charges and that customers should contact them. Which I did! And low and behold I was entitled to zero!

About 4 years later I got a letter from them that amounted too ok we're proper busted now by the government, here's a cheque

Big companies are not your mate. They're a business. If there's a way to not do it at all/wait for unbearable pressure to act/do it cheaply they'll always take that route.

 

I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here and say of all the manufacturers Leica backs their goods the best of all. In my opinion they went the extra mile and went above and beyond the warranty with that repair. Their warranty is twice or more what everybody else offers. The other benefit is the camera and lens itself is warranted and it doesn’t make any difference how many owners it’s had. They fix it within the warranty period and sometimes beyond. Try and get another camera manufacturer to do that.

[Adam Bonn]

41 minutes ago, jdlaing said:

I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here and say of all the manufacturers Leica backs their goods the best of all. In my opinion they went the extra mile and went above and beyond the warranty with that repair. Their warranty is twice or more what everybody else offers. The other benefit is the camera and lens itself is warranted and it doesn’t make any difference how many owners it’s had. They fix it within the warranty period and sometimes beyond. Try and get another camera manufacturer to do that.

100%

I only buy secondhand Leica (money saving) and I get a 1 year warranty on that, that's (in the Uk at least) the same as fuji offered on new stuff

There was never any serious way that Leica were going to replace everyone's M9 sensor at the same time (for the reasons I list above), and IIRC (...) the issue wasn't widespread until after many folks had already owned their camera past the warranty.

Leica could so easily have said, tough shit or even you pay the labour, but for a chunk of time it was all done FOC

My M9p was new in 2012, bought by me in Nov 2017 and had the sensor done in Oct 2017.

That's 5 years later.

Can't complain too much.

Sure it sucked for some being without their camera or battling to get Leica to admit there was a fault, there's no denying that, and those folks will always be less happy with Leica's handling of it all.

But as a helicopter view, Leica went above and beyond.

On an unrelated matter aren't a bunch of folks suing Sony over one of their innumerable A7 variants and a shutter problem... I sorta saw the news but didn't take it in.

 

[martinot]

33 minutes ago, Adam Bonn said:

On an unrelated matter aren't a bunch of folks suing Sony over one of their innumerable A7 variants and a shutter problem... I sorta saw the news but didn't take it in.

 

https://petapixel.com/2021/03/27/sony-sued-class-action-lawsuit-says-a7-iii-shutter-is-bricking-cameras/

[tom.w.bn]

There are > 100k images on flickr and instagram taken with the M240. That is hard to achieve with an unusable camera.

 

 

[jaapv]

13 hours ago, Adam Bonn said:

Customer service would have suffered if the entire service department was busy on sensor replacement. Those occasional new Ms with rangefinder misalignment? Imagine if that was an 18month turn around because sorry we're flat out replacing perfectly good sensors that that haven't gone bad but probably will one day

That is putting it mildly. Leica CS would have been out of business for one or two years, production of other cameras would have been crippled, and the waiting time for replacement of sensors that were corroded would have run into many months.
And nobody except Leica knows what percentage of sensors were actually corroded, so the financial wastage may well have been unacceptable.

 

On 5/22/2021 at 6:32 PM, jaapv said:

If Leica had done a total recall they would have had to refurbish within a year or so. Assuming that they would have been able to detach twenty competent technicians to do the job-it would be nearly impossible and  disruptive to do so for a company the size of Leica - to reach the numbers required , these technicians would have to replace ten to fifteen sensors an hour.

 

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Look here: Leica M

[ianman]

13 hours ago, jdlaing said:

all the manufacturers Leica backs their goods the best of all.

Interesting. Have you bought products from all manufacturers? They may well be the best of all the manufacturers with which you have had issues but it's a bold statement and absolutely impossible to affirm that they are "the best of all".

Moog are a US company not dissimilar to Leica in many ways, albeit much smaller. A few years ago they discovered that the main analog board in some of their synths had an issue. They sent out emails to every registered user apologizing and explaining why, what and how. Of course some users had sold their instruments and some probably had never registered them. That is not the fault of the company. The point is, they did they best to warn their users of an issue that had been identified. Yes, it's obvious the repairs cost them a pretty penny, but they know that a reputation takes decades to build to seconds to destroy.

Moog wrote me an email and my synth had a new board within weeks... with Leica I had to fight for 4 years. See the small difference here?

People () need to get it into their heads that although many of us (me included) had sensors replaced FOC, many more did not, through no fault of their own. The camera had an inherent flaw in one of it's major components from the moment it was designed, it really is totally irrevelant when the actual body was built, the flaw was built-in to all of them... that is above and beyond what any warranty should cover.

As for a full recall, nobody suggested that every user should send their camera back at the same time. It beggars belief how some unimaginative people take everything at face value.  Are we all going to get vaccinations the same day? It's utterly ridiculous to even think that was ever suggested.

I like to be open and fair and will say that for each and every other issue (and there haven't been many), service from Leica has been as good as that from Moog. Perfect.

Edited May 25, 2021 by ianman
Definition of fanboy: An extreme fan or follower of a particular medium or concept, whether it be sports, television, film directors, video games (the most common usage), etc.

[martinot]

10 minutes ago, ianman said:

Moog are a US company not dissimilar to Leica in many ways, albeit much smaller. A few years ago they discovered that the main analog board in some of their synths had an issue. They sent out emails to every registered user apologizing and explaining why, what and how. Of course some users had sold their instruments and some probably had never registered them. That is not the fault of the company. The point is, they did they best to warn their users of an issue that had been identified. Yes, it's obvious the repairs cost them a pretty penny, but they know that a reputation takes decades to build to seconds to destroy.

Moog wrote me an email and my synth had a new board within weeks... with Leica I had to fight for 4 years. See the small difference here?

I like that way Moog handled their faulty products and their customers. Very professionell.