Digital M Series to come...

[chiswick_john]

"The camera itself is less changed than the R9 is from the R8" - this is not the point at all - it's the initial cost of the original 1Ds that was the major investment Canon could afford to make. Leica will have to design the M digital from the ground up and may even find existing M lenses won't work very well with a digital sensor. How many People are going to buy a new set of M digital lenses for this new camera?

[svante.johansson]

Andrew,

 

There are two downloadable "cuts from the original file" <a href="http://www.leica-camera.com/produkte/rsystem/digitalmodul/downloads/index_e.html"> HERE </a>. I am not sure what they really are, but it might be what you are looking for.

[ben z]

Leica has already spent the money developing the DMR, that's a done deal. From here on all they have to do is upgrade the chip and firmware/software. If they can do that as a service upgrade rather than expecting us to buy a whole new back, they will put Canon to shame, because thay charge us for an entire camera--the _same_ camera, functionally--just to get the more-meg chip. So that is _exactly_ the point.

 

As to the digital-M, Epson already has one that works with at least the majority of M lenses. Zeiss (or whoever they are really)already has sound bites out there that they will have one too. Perhaps there will be a few Leica lenses whose performance will suffer with a digital sensor and most likely they will need to come up with one or two new lenses just to compensate for the loss of coverage due to a smaller-than-full-frame sensor, but it is virtually impossibe they will need a full set of dedicated lenses.

 

Leica is not doing the digital end of things in-house, so their R&D is a fraction of what Canon's is. Kodak and Imacon (or whoever may supply that part of the puzzle _if_ Imacon stops being a subcontractor)have the funds for the R&D which they amortize over numerous other applications using the same or modified technology. And as to the physical "ground up" design of the digital M, with CAD technololgy that Leica already has, the expense of such a design is no longer the labor-intensive series of trial-and-error prototypes that it once was. I agree that Leica does not have the financial means to be an innovator on the cutting edge of digital technology, but they don't need to. They demonstrated with the DMR that they can partner up and come up with what they need, and I haven't heard a concrete argument yet why they wouldn't be able to do so for the M series too.