michael_londarenko

Vlad,

 

As far as "Western leaders" are concerned it's irrelevant. Each country's people (and their leaders) are responsible for their country's freedom and direction. Once people lose the will to fight for their freedom they become conquered people. That's what happened with most of Eastern Europe during and after World War II.

 

Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the only two countries in the Eastern block that even attempted some sort of uprising against the Soviets. No other Eastern European country attempted that and if you recall partisans had much success fighting Nazis, but apparently there was no will to fight the commies. As far as Romania goes, they had their own version of Stalin - Chaushesku. That makes it a bit hard, since totalitarian regimes are unfortunately very effective at suppressing their own people.

 

Incidentally most of Western Europe today is leaning towards dictator-appeasement ideas again. More than half of Europe is pretty much Socialist today. Italy has an actual Communist government!

 

The biggest threat to freedom of people in any given country doesn't come from some leaders of another country. It usually comes from within their own government - like government-driven "disarmament" schemes were they confiscate weapons from law-abiding citizens masquerading it as a "crime fighting" plan. Crime never goes down since obviously criminals never give up guns (that they have illegally to begin with), but it makes it so much easier for any given government to shove anything down the throat of their citizenry. And all that with smiles, posing for cameras and patting on the back of all involved...

 

Imagine how tables would have turned on Soviets if every single person in Eastern Europe had a gun! Heck, even Nazi Germany would not have been possible if not for the "gun control" laws of the Weimar Republic!

 

Heck, why go that far. Let's look at Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans authorities apparently saw it fit to disarm grandmas with old colt revolvers while armed gangs were roaming the streets with AR-15s!

 

Once the people lose the will to fight they become conquered people.

I think there is a good reason for Leica to develop few lenses for Four Thirds system since it's a more or less agreed-upon standard of several manufacturers. Even there they shouldn't try to run full-speed-ahead into this, it's a very small and very new market. Three Leica lenses in that segment is probably going to be all that the market will bear.

 

Developing new lenses for any other format right now makes no sense whatsoever. If sensor size currently used in M8 will change in next generation by growing by one millimeter on X-axis and will shorten by half millimeter on Y-axis it would mean Leica spent time and millions of Euros in R&D to develop lenses for one year-model of a camera that is now as obsolete as yesterday night's ticket to a movie theater.

 

This would be equivalent of designing and marketing special size tires for special size rims on one particular year-model of Lamborghini Murcielago and then doing it again next year. Bad idea to say the least.

 

What makes more sense in my opinion is either one of the two options:

 

1. Jointly develop new standard sensor type/size for HIGH-END digital

cameras with interchangeable lenses (be it based on SLR concept or rangefinder concept or combination of both) and THEN develop new lenses for it.

 

2. Jointly work on creating sensor type/size that would offer best possible combination of sensitivity, resolving power, color accuracy and overall image quality with EXISTING M-lenses for 35mm film Leicas.

 

Of this I think second approach makes much more sense - not a whole lot of people will immediately flock to new type of digital camera regardless of how revolutionary and good it is. Part of reason why Canon DSLRs are so popular is precisely because they allow you to use existing Canon lenses.

 

If Leica comes out with new generation digital M that works best with existing lenses then they immediately appeal to existing user base that just maybe wants digital M camera (I don't want one, don't see a need for one, but if it's $3K I might think about it).

 

If they instead create a whole new line of lenses specifically designed for new digital format they will dig themselves into a hole, since not too many people would want to do that, especially with sizeable used M-mount lens market.

 

So, I think short-term (10-15 years) the second approach makes much more sense. Within that 10 year period it should become obvious if first option begins to make sense.

Bruce,

 

It's not Leica ripoff. Somebody sold you Soviet-made Zorki made to look remotely like a Leica. Naturally you got only yourself to blame - caveat emptor. Counterfeit business, liars and corruption are the reason Eastern Europe doesn't have living standards of Western Europe. Economy can flourish only when things go smooth without undue bureaucratic hardships, bribes to officials, extreme taxation and when a word of a merchant can be trusted and money of a buyer is real.

 

Next time if you see something too good to be true anywhere (be it Internet, Romania or Texas) - don't buy it, or better yet report it to authorities.

Ken,

 

Thanks for providing this link, although I'm not interested in rewind crank I find their ML-Grip as a very appealing idea.

 

Mike.

Barry,

 

Without trying one first it will be tough. I had the same dilemma since I wear glasses and I settled on 0.72x for several reasons. It's most usable for 35mm/50mm/90mm lenses which is ALL I use. Since I use 50mm 80% of the time, 0.72x magnification is perfectly useable for me.

 

My prescription is -8D in both eyes, so yes, 35mm framelines are a bit of problem to see in their entirety with 0.72x magnification - I still see edges if I "look around", but it makes catching the moment a bit difficult. No big deal for me since 35mm doesn't see that much use.

 

If you have less than -3D or so, you shouldn't worry about it at all. If you got over -10D then maybe you should consider 0.58x. If you choose 0.58x - forget about using 90mm lenses without high quality (Leica in other words) 1.25x viewfinder magnifier. I wouldn't recommend cheaper alternatives in this case.

 

As far as lenses go. That's where Leica shines. They don't really have "bad lenses". They're all good, although have slightly different character from generation to generation. I have 35mm ASPH Summicron-M f/2.0 and 50mm Summicron-M f/2.0. Both are outstanding optically and mechanically. I'd recommend you find both used in great condition rather than buying new, unless you need USA Passport Warranty. My 50mm Summicron I bought new, along with MP-3 since I like to have peace of mind for first 3 years of ownership knowing that no matter what happens I'm covered.

 

Hope it helps.

Paul,

 

Rewinding will be faster, but I find this accessory a nuisance. I haven't owned it, only tried at store, but my main complaint is that it protrudes from the body. When body is generally speaking streamlined and convenient to use, that rewind crank always gets in the way. Those other variants that have fold-in type of handle for rewind crank may be better in that regard, but I haven't seen or tried one in person so can't say anything about them.

I'd get M7 and MP and 35mm ASPH Summicron f/2.0, 50mm Summicron f/2.0 and 90mm APO-Summicron f/2.0.

 

As to why I would chose this particular combination is fairly simple:

 

MP is all mechanical, meaning it will work no matter what

 

M7 has Auto-Exposure, which means you can rely on it in conditions where you know electronics likely wouldn't fail.

 

Lenses - 35mm/50mm/90mm cover 100% of my needs. I don't like extreme wide-angles due to what I consider unnatural angle of view. 35mm is still fairly natural. 50mm is what I use 80% of the time. 90mm is the perfect portrait lens.

When one private company owns over 90% of shares of public company, usually the purpose is to make that public company into a privately held company. All they gotta do is purchase back the outstanding shares and Leica would be privately held. So, I should have been clear on that saying that it seems to me that Leica will become private. I obviously don't know if it will, but I hope they do that. And by the way, there is nothing that would prevent corporation from investing into private equity firm. The only difference is that shares are not traded publicly (and thus not available to anyone with money).

We're the market. Ultimately we decide. Unless of course as a result of mass hysteria all film manufacturers stop production despite existence of sizeable market. Not likely though.

From what I understand Leica is going private (or already went private). This should reduce pressure from stockholders that want to make a quick buck. This in turn should make it easier for them long-term, since they will concentrate on product more than making few more bucks for investors.

 

Incidentally profit margins on film at Kodak are around 30%.

 

I wonder what are current profit margins on digital P&S. I'd guess under 20%.

Andy, you said that my statement "End result is that increase in MPG in all cars over the last several decades has been due to reduction of weight of the car" is false.

 

Are you saying that weights go up AND MPG goes up? What I said is that MPG improvements are due to weight reduction. Therefore, when weight goes up - MPG goes down.

 

See quote from NYT article below:

 

"Average fuel economy peaked at 22.1 miles to the gallon in the late 1980's, according to the agency, but has eroded since then to 20.7 miles for the 2003 model year."

 

http://www.ca.uky.edu/fcs/HSFP/updates/2004/update0094.htm

I'm simply quoting here:

 

"A Collection of Recent Analyses of Vehicle Weight and Safety

(DOT HS-807 677, May 1991), examined the effect of a 1,000 pound reduction in the average weight of new passenger cars on occupant fatalities and injuries. The 1991 study estimated that the reduction of the average weight of passenger cars from 3,700 pounds (in 1970) to 2,700 pounds (in 1982) resulted in increases of approximately 2,000 fatalities and 20,000 serious injuries each year. The large increase in rollover crashes contributed the most to these increases."

 

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/808-575.pdf

(this is a document from NHTSA titled "The Effect of Decreases in Vehicle Weight on Injury Crash Rates")

 

SFC (Specific fuel consumption) of typical gasoline powered combustion engine is pretty much always the same and it hasn't changed at all.

 

Bigger wheels don't mean more weight. If you recall there weren't any aluminum alloyed wheels on mass produced cars in 70s. No engines with aluminum blocks and heads. And aluminum is three times more expensive than steel and about three times lighter. And yet manufacturers use it today, guess why? Hint: not to keep the price low.

 

Airbags protect you from hitting inside of a car and injuring yourself. They have no effect whatsoever on lethality of hood of a car that hits you on the side since the hood would simply penetrate through it like a projectile. Cars that are bigger and heavier are inherently safer to occupants. Guess which car is safer if we assume head-on collision between Honda Civic and Ford Crown Victoria? Side collision would have similar result.

 

A little extra MPGs are being squeezed out by better aerodynamics of car bodies, better tires, less friction and so forth. But biggest improvements by far come from weight reduction.

 

This has gotten way off-topic though.

Thomas,

 

It really depends on film. See the ILFORD development chart that shows EI and development times for each of their films.

Interiors indeed look sterile. I'm getting impression that most Scandinavians are like that. Look at IKEA stores, the way things are organized there are similar to this (and yeah, I know IKEA is Swedish).

I think I like semi-chaotic Italian style the most :)

To El Fang - Neil Ambrose brought a great point about Xpan. It's spot on.

 

Do you really have any doubt that politicians will outlaw certain types of cars if they think it helps their chances to get re-elected or advance their agenda? The only thing stopping them is car-manufacturing lobbyists from Detroit and labor unions. Heck, if you recall politicians always want to up the Mile-Per-Gallon standard, regardless of whether it can be achieved practically. They don't want to let engineers figure it out. They think they know better. End result is that increase in MPG in all cars over the last several decades has been due to reduction of weight of the car. That quite often compromises safety, but politicians couldn't care less. They don't care that 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year - dead people don't vote.

 

When I moved to California I wanted to buy diesel-powered Volvo or Volkswagen Passat sedan. Guess what - passenger diesels are pretty much illegal here. You can't buy one. You can self-import one, but you can't go to a dealer and get one. That's despite the fact that almost 50% of sedans sold in Europe are diesel-powered and they get much better fuel economy than gasoline engines, require less maintenance and last longer. End result is, their cumulative effect on environment is not as bad as gasoline engines over their lifetimes. Just the 10,000 mile service interval alone is probably reducing pollution and toxic waste costs significantly enough to beat the gasoline engines.

 

Diesel are a better alternative than hybrids. All that to California is irrelevant. What was relevant to California is the level of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter (and perhaps some other elements). From what I hear maybe, just maybe, in 2008 some passenger diesels will be allowed on market in California again. That is, until some bureaucrat changes his mind.

 

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/fueleconomy/articles/93338/article.html

Jim,

 

Critical mass is a good point, but when it comes to B&W specifically I believe there will always be enough people using the stuff and it's not that difficult to produce. Efke runs their production every few months and manages to turn profit. B&W are easy to produce, so those won't disappear that easily. And with ILFORD having largest market share of B&W it won't go away any time soon either. It's the color film that is "endangered" to some degree. But then again, I'm convinced it will be available for a minimum of a decade or possibly longer than that. Incidentally sales of Kodak motion picture film went up 1% for the last year. Sales of all film were going up 1-2% every year due to natural growth until digital started to steal P&S market. So, that 1% increase in sales of motion picture film by Kodak is a pretty good indicator that it will be around for quite a while. As long as it's available, some form of professional photographic film will be available as well.

Most commercial labs do recover silver. Strictly speaking the commercial photographic process is much cleaner to environment than say the process of manufacturing of electronic circuits. Amount of toxic waste produced during electronics manufacture process is very high, which is part of the reason why most of the plants doing the bulk of work are outside of US. Toxic contamination of land and water due to all industrial waste including semiconductor industry is a serious problem in China for example, which is usually not being discussed.

 

And electronic junk gets outdated so quickly that I would say typical user of P&S digital would go through 30-50 or more of those during a typical lifetime of Leica M camera. So, Leica MP is by all means better for environment - practically no synthetic materials are being used and no lead-free circuits to fail due to tin whiskers that would make the camera completely useless and impossible to repair as would be the case with digital P&S. M7 with AE and some electronics is still better than digital P&S in that sense as well.

 

Paul - if you're big time "environmentalist" that does what you can to keep environment clean and safe by say bringing your own canvas bag to shop at Trader Joe's, not using A/C when not absolutely necessary, walking 5 blocks to a restaurant instead of driving then it's great. If on the other hand you're one of those feel-good types like Al Gore with a mansion that wastes unbelievable amount of energy and that flies with private jet and preaches "global warming" in the same breath, then you would be the type of environmentalists I'm talking about. Those are the types that want to ban incandescent bulbs for example saying they're evil because they "waste" energy. They would love to force everyone to use CFLs. That's despite the fact that quality of light is different and overall expense of using those is higher since CFLs contain mercury in very toxic amounts (and how many of those are broken every day and tossed into general waste? And how much mercury seeps into underground waters?) and ballasts aren't cheap either.

 

Not to mention that practically all CFLs are manufactured in China and India, where environmental safety standards are practically non-existent and for a small bribe to local official would never be enforced even if they did exist.

 

This is a make-believe approach that serves two purposes for those environmentalists - gives them control over other people's lives and makes them money in the process. And those are the types that can kill traditional photography.

I'm not particularly worried that ALL film will disappear. I could see a possibility that most (or all) color film will disappear before 2025 or so. I don't think B&W materials (film included) will disappear though, as long as there is demand for it. The biggest threat to film and traditional photography in general is environmentalists and politicians aligned with them. By just declaring the whole thing "evil" and "extremely harmful to environment" they could simply make it illegal. Then we have a real problem. As long as market forces are there to decide future of traditional photography - I have no reasons to worry.

 

That's why I bought MP-3.

Consumer film was always the biggest part of film sales. Fuji Provia, Astia, Velvia, Pro 160S and all other professional film sales were never close to being the most significant market by volume or dollar figures for the film manufacturers. It was always the consumer film like Reala, Superia, Kodak GOLD and so forth that was making big bucks for them.

 

Now that every soccer mom has a digital P&S, consumer film sales are down significantly. It's picking up however in China and India.

 

Professional film market went down probably 30% or so worldwide (I'm guesstimating here) and for the most part stabilized. It's essentially in zero-growth phase right now, which is nothing to worry about if you're using film and intend to use it for long time to come. Most of serious amateurs and "pros" are using professional type of film, be it color or B&W and thus I see no reason to worry that Kodak GOLD sales are going down. Personally I don't even like Kodak, I use Fuji or ILFORD. And these two, judging by press releases and information available, seem to be more committed to film market than Kodak. Therefore why support the company that doesn't quite want to support you?

 

As far as digital Ikon goes - I honestly don't see any market for it right now. I could use a film Ikon that would be fully mechanical though...

Jose,

 

Well, if you guys keep voting communists in that keep raising the taxes and making your life miserable I think you will be saying that the filter was only 100 EURO in 2007 several years from now :)

Alex,

 

I tried scanning using different brands of "desktop" scanners. In my opinion they all fall short of delivering what I had on original slide or negative. Ironically even though they're supposed to be better at scanning slides I was seeing generally better results with negatives - scan would typically look closer to original negative than original slide. This could be due to image latitude difference between negatives and slides. This could also be due to limited color space of those desktop scanners - too many are just slightly larger than sRGB color space, which is much smaller than that of color film.

 

I'm personally going to try having few of my slides scanned on real drum scanner, like Heidelberg Tango. Imacon is not a drum scanner. It's a "flatbed" in terms of technology, it uses CCD and not PMT like Tango. It's a better kind of "flatbed", but it's not a drum scanner.

It uses that virtual drum arrangement and when scanned with fluid mounted originals it produces better results than typical desktop scanner. With fluid mounting solutions available for other desktop scanners (like from www.scanscience.com) the difference between Imacon scan and other desktop scanner when using fluid mounting becomes much much smaller. Real improvement should happen with drum scanner. I will know in few weeks I guess.

 

In terms of printers - assuming you meant inkjet, I'd say that Epson makes best photo-grade inkjet printers now. Which one you choose will be up to you obviously.

 

Desktop darkroom - Photoshop CS2 is good. Maybe not best, but it's good and it's the most popular one. Which means that when you need help - you can find it. Once you get really good at it you may find other solutions that would work well together with Photoshop making your life easier.

 

Hope any of this helps.

 

 

Mike.

Fun experiment, but Luigi's are still better. Handmade Italian calf leather is probably 60% of the cost there. Plus EURO/USD exchange rate, insane tax levels in Italy and their current Communist government all add up to relatively high price. Worth it though. Really good quality stuff.

Raymond,

 

I believe you missed the point too. It's the innovators that stand to lose the most. They spend a lot of their time and money for R&D and then fighting an uphill battle trying to convince the general public why their solution is good. They're the ones to take the highest risk.

 

Later adopters that use technology and ideas developed by someone else benefit the most by not taking as much risk. That's why they're so hugely profitable, their profit margins are substantially higher specifically because they didn't have to spend as much time and money developing something entirely new and then trying to make money off of it.

 

Competition coupled with supply and demand is what's driving the pricing on the market. If you recall before AMD became a real competitor to Intel, Intel could charge just about any amount of money they wanted for their CPUs. They were the ones however who spent the most on R&D and took a lot of risks. Luckily for them they also managed not only to survive, but also to make it big. Didn't work too well for many of their other non-CPU related businesses though.

 

The problem with most revolutionary ideas is always the same - nobody wants them. It takes a long time for revolutionary idea to become "common sense" and by that time the original inventors are usually gone out of business. Do you really think Canon or Nikon would have been around in camera business if they were the ones to spend decades perfecting the CCDs, inventing the AF, taking a huge risk by introducing the first ever digital SLR camera (kodak DCS) that would fall far short of film quality and on an on? Most likely not. Most likely in this case they would be out of business. Canon and Nikon are in business to make money, they adopt many outside ideas to create a product for which there is a demand in order to make money. Once demand dries up, they no longer want to keep the product alive, no matter how good or innovative that product is. Think about it, most CCD and CMOS sensors are about APS sized. Neither Nikon nor Canon wanted to spend time and money on R&D to develop entirely new system that would be based on this new size of the medium. Instead they adopted what they already had - their EOS and F bodies, their existing lenses and accessories, even same shutter mechanisms and so forth. There was very little innovation going on there as far as consumer is concerned.

 

Four-Thirds system is pretty innovative for example, despite the shortcomings (one of them being that I personally believe best image can be obtained using sensors where each photosite is about 8 microns in size).

 

But you don't see much of sales in that system. Part of the reason is because technically they're ahead of their time. I could see a variation on that idea being adopted by Canon or Nikon in future, especially if CMOS sensors become more common. Time will tell.

 

With Leica however, as I mentioned, their main innovations are always in lenses. The M body in all its variations has very little effect on the final image. It's the lens that has the most effect. And that's where true heart of Leica system is. The body is there to make it easy for you to use the lens to its highest potential to capture the moment as you wish. There isn't much innovation required there - it already does exactly what it's supposed to do. In lenses however there is always room for improvement. R&D in optics however always takes a long time and a lot of money to do. And then it takes a while to make up for R&D costs and start making profit. The end result from Leica or Zeiss is almost always quite spectacular though.

Jim,

 

I don't know where you're located, but there are quite a few photography stores where you can rent just about anything. You could walk in and rent any Leica they have available and shoot few rolls with it. That way you can quite literally try before you buy.

Samsung uses lenses designed by Schneider Kreuznach as well.