forum_shopper

It's the last Nikon lens I would give up and I think you will find it superb. Check Bjorn Rorslett's reviews for reassurance. An f/2.8 lens is not for low light shooting . . . It just isn't.

The Summitar is a very nice lens, considered by many to be superior to the collapsable Summicron that followed it, at least in the center. Summitars are also considered by many to show the elusive "3-D effect" more than almost any other Leica lens. You definitely will want a shade, and the original folding "barn door" is best.

 

It would surprise me a lot if the Canon 50/1.8 could not be improved upon by a number of Leica

lenses.

 

With the superior handholdability of the rangefinder, you should more than make up the difference in speed between your 50/1.2 SLR lens and the Summitar.

.

Find a better lab. They exist.

 

Bill's response is ridiculous. I can enjoy baking bread without having the slightest interest in growing the grain or milling the flour. I can enjoy using a Leica without having the slightest interest in some aspects of the complete photographic process. Some people prefer to pay others to do things they don't know how to do, or don't do well, and not everyone can make--or cares to make--the investment of time, money and space that is involved in having a home darkroom and making creditable use of it.

The only "issue" with the counter is that it is there: it allows a way to estimate how much use a camera has had, and a way for sellers to tout "low miles".

 

In short, God help us if Leicas had such counters.

ZF 50/1.4 or 135/2 DC, but most likely nothing in the foreseeable future.

 

Ronald, the 110 XL is phenomenal. Your only regret will be not getting one sooner.

This is a version of the old "bait and switch". Check the seller's bona fides here and on resellerratings.com. Expect to be shocked.

 

You should be prepared to cancel your order and to advise your card issuer that any charges put through by the seller after that will be fraudulent.

 

Then order from one of the relative handful of reputable online sellers, whose names you can easily uncover in moments by searching here.

Technically, the answer to the question in your first post is no, it is not possible to have everything in the frame be equally sharp. It is often possible for everything to appear acceptably sharp and in focus, but there is only one plane parallel to the plane of the sensor that actually IS perfectly in focus.

 

I suggest that you get a good basic book such as "The Basic Book of Photography" by Grimm and Grimm, to help you understand some of the theory. It's great to experiment, but you will learn more from your experiments if you have a theoretical framework to fit the results into. Otherwise you could just end up knowing a number of unconnected "tricks", settings that worked in the past, etc. I recommend finding a good book in addition to reading your manual and participating here. Good luck.

I'm sure that many of the valid issues and concerns raised in this thread were never considered by those who made the decision to eliminate FS posts. It is therefore too bad that no one with authority is even willing to go back, reconsider the decision or consider ways to accommodate the legitimate concerns of both "sides" here. Why not? To me, not to do that seems unreasonable, especially since no one even did us the courtesy of asking for opinions and input before telling us how it will be. People like to be consulted. No great surprise there. Has anyone running Photo.net ever heard of "managing expectations"?

 

Josh, I agree with Rob's point #2 above. The disconnect between the "I don't want to hear it" tone of your first post above and the title you have is, in my opinion, not the sort of thing it makes sense to cultivate.

 

I think you will have your work cut out for you if the community continues to be ruled by fiat.

Here is another idea: set it up so FS posts start out in the FS section and never "intrude" on the main discussion. Delegate moderation of these to a new volunteer.

 

I tried to take a "you can't fight City Hall" attitude in my prior posts, bowing to the fait accompli. But really, City Hall, there are numerous great points in this thread and I think you should continue to watch it develop with open minds, sleep on it and then reconsider the change Tony announced. If any part of the reason for this has to do with cluttering up the main forum with (often educational) FS threads, I have just suggested one easy solution. Ditto if any part of the reason has to do with the burden of work for Tony and the other moderators. Tony did not cite the moderation burden in his list of reasons above, but I have to think that is another reason he is pushing this change, because the moderation burden WAS cited when FS posts were restricted to Leica items.

 

City Hall, how about pondering this decision a little more and then coming back with a win-win, "out of the park" solution that takes account of the many valid concerns and great points expressed in this thread? I'm sure most of us have total confidence that you can do this if you have the will to do so. And you should--make all the constituents happy.

Thanks, Tony. Having an RSS feed will really improve the usefulness of that section of the classifieds for me and others of us who read the Leica forum frequently during the day but rarely if ever visit the classifieds for reasons already well expressed above.

 

Gaining the ability to monitor FS items using a feed reader or with Live Bookmarks in Firefox would turn this change from a clear negative to a potential positive as far as I am concerned. However, I still worry that much desireable gear will simply stop showing up on Photo.net where our forum members can have first crack at it. It's too bad we may be effectively losing that little perk, as it was a nice one that many of us have benefitted from over the years. And really, knowing that the occasional smokin' deal shows up here from time to time is probably what leads some people to visit frequently instead of just sporadically.

Although I think this is a change for no good purpose that diminishes the forum as a community and as a resource, such is life. I'm reminded of what Emerson said about foolish consistency.

 

Tony, can you please answer one quick question, yes or no if at all possible? Will Photo.net create an RSS feed specifically for the rangefinder category in the classifieds?

 

I still hold out a little hope that this "reform" will go the way of some others announced here in the past with great fanfare. Remember the "zero tolerance policy"?

I agree with others that the ability to buy and sell reliably the very kinds of specialized and most uncommon equipment the forum is about is one of the biggest appeals of the forum. I own my core rangefinder equipment because I had the confidence to buy here and take advantage of very fair pricing. It was also my understanding that this privilege was grandfathered in, and by the logic of grandfather clauses that means permanently, not just until one of the original parties to the arrangement decides to change its mind.

 

I find the classifieds here to be cumbersome, hard to search and unappealing. It is undesireable to have to monitor the classifieds in addition to reading this forum and several others.

 

None of this is to suggest that all of the concerns of the moderators are invalid. Here are three suggestions I believe the moderators and site owner should consider in light of the widespread unhappiness this policy change will provoke.

 

1. Solicit volunteers to serve as "FS/WTT Moderators". These new moderators would take over responsibility for the posts we are discussing and relieve pressure on the regular moderators in this area. I am sure one or two reliable members would be willing to step up and volunteer in order to preserve an important forum service.

 

2. Limit FS/WTT posts to Fridays and expire them all on Mondays, with no right to repost any items that do not sell. This sort of thing has been done elsewhere, obviously.

 

3. Set up the classifieds so there is a specific rangefinder category (if one doesn't exist already) and enable an RSS feed for just that category. This would presumably be at no cost to Photo.net's resources once set up, and would enable web-savvy users to have all the benefits of the current setup, most likely.

The effective rangefinder baselength is tiny compared to any M. It will be worth exploring what this might mean for your ability to focus some lenses with sufficient accuracy and all lenses with critical accuracy. I think the CL gives up way too much in this area.

There is a longstanding problem with archive searches. If you (logically) enter your search in the Google search box on a Photo.net page, you will NOT get complete results. For some reason it misses threads it should be returning in the search results. Anyone who doubts this should compare the results from a Google "advanced search" with the same query and specifying the photo.net site.

 

Why this has never been fixed is one of those little mysteries.

Just some slight confusion, I think. There is no ASPH Summicron.

 

This is a great choice for b/w. Also, unlike most current M lenses, they routinely pop up for sale here, very lightly used, for less than half of retail.

Don't agonize extensively over how much you prefer to sell the three items "as a package". It hardly seems worth forming such trivial

preferences.

In the time it took you to write this, it seems like you could have compiled it yourself from the original thead. Oh, well.

Troll

I suggest you revise item 12 in the "about this forum" section to reflect the changes in policy. They should be memorialized somewhere more permanent because people in the future are unlikely to arrive at them intuitively.

 

Seems unfortunate that the number of keystrokes would determine moderation decisions. I hope you were exaggerating.

While there is actually something to be learned about photography from most M8 posts, the same cannot be said about the self-indulgent and exclusionary original post in this thread.

 

This is a Leica-oriented forum and there has never been a rule that those who do not own certain gear should not post to discuss it. It is not necessary ever to have seen an M8 in order to make intelligent contributions to discussions about its merits. The same cannot be said about, say, the Noctilux.

 

As for the profusion of posts about the M8, if Leica and some reviewers had been more candid and forthcoming at many points during the development and introduction of the camera, I'm sure there would be a lot less need for customers, potential customers and interested third parties to hash things out in internet forums that the original poster has exactly zero obligation to read.

If filters are to be the solution, which seems very probable since Leica undoubtedly knew about the IR issues and would have solved them pre-release in a more elegant way were that possible, then Leica is in a very bad spot. They made it much worse for themselves by being disingenuous in many of their communications with the marketplace.

 

If they think the filter solution will be accepted they are either delusional or too desperate to allow themselves to believe anything else. I suppose it is also possible that they have decided their true market is rich dilettantes who will roll over and take the filter solution. I suppose we should all hope that is their thinking and that they are right; otherwise this will be a hard one for the company to bounce back from. They will have killed their credibility on a camera that still doesn't work as any camera should. How sad. Better to withdraw the M8 than to go forward as they seem to have decided.

Hard to imagine investing so much of myself in what strangers advise other strangers to put in front of their lenses, but that's our beloved forum for you. I'm sure many of us have carefully shot through ordinary window panes at some time or another and found we couldn't tell at all in the finished image, so Al has a point. Few of us would choose to shoot this way all the time, so Jon has a point. The best advice is to insure your gear, go bare and avoid touching the lens.

 

I don't know about anyone else, but I can't see the old :*) without becoming a little suspicious.

For an educator, Frank, you are remarkably condescending and mean-spirited when participating in these kinds of threads. I can only assume that in your classroom, there very much <i>is</i> such a thing as a stupid question.<p>

 

Please, a little Recent History 101, please. Scarcely more than a week ago, you suggested that putting film in a lead bag would protect it from cosmic rays while flying. Where was Physics 101 when you wrote that?

I think anyone who wants to use a medium format camera when everyone and his brother has gone digital--and comes to a Medium Format Forum for guidance--deserves to find a welcoming environment and not to be implicitly lumped as part of the lay weak public, the peanut gallery . . . a greenhorn. Here I (what's up with that construction, by the way?) have an opinion that the old prospectors ought to be a little more welcoming to the greenhorns, unless we'd rather have this be an old prospectors club. Here I used to find lots of nuggets with my gold pan--why do you greenhorns think you need to use that sluice box?

Your sympathy for those who don't live and breathe old cameras is really touching. Is this the same "lay weak public" that gets duped into believing that they might benefit from installing a Maxwell screen that didn't even exist back in the good old days?