Surely the current sales success of the M9 must have Zeiss and Cosina's attention?

Pickett Wilson said:
Juan, my most recent experience with the reality of this is when process film that we used in printing newspapers went away a few years ago. There was still a substantial demand for it by small newspapers with small presses. But Fuji, who was the last company making the stuff, suddenly announced it had stopped production, forcing many newspapers to spend substantial money converting to digital Computer to Plate systems. Many could not afford it, and simply stopped printing.

There was a viable market - Fuji was obviously still selling a lot of it - but it just wasn't worth it to them to keep the lines going.
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For me that's not enough reason to think film will be dead soon.

But the huge pleasure it gives is reason enough to make me think it will be made for centuries. That's what moves us to pay: pleasure. I would pay for film if it was several times more expensive. Companies will discover it.

Cheers,

Juan
 
Perhaps we can give this thread a slightly different focus, a little away from Cosina and Zeiss. Which manufacturer do you think will be the first to produce a full format digital camera, with a focusing viewfinder (not just a rear LCD), that accepts the vast majority of M-mount lenses? I'm not insisting that it be a rangefinder camera; it might have an electronic viewfinder, for example. Of course, the camera should make a serious effort to combat non-telecentricity problems caused by the sensor and lens being particularly close.

What are the advantages that would accrue to a manufacturer from offering a camera like this? They may not include sales volume, but the company would enjoy a significant degree of attention from a particularly broad spectrum of photographers who take their work seriously. I think Samsung would benefit from that attention. Nettar
 
Nettar said:
Which manufacturer do you think will be the first to produce a full format digital camera, with a focusing viewfinder (not just a rear LCD), that accepts the vast majority of M-mount lenses?
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It's not going to happen.
 
Selling 12,000 M9s a year is only a relative success. Not a real one. Right now demand, which it should be noted has been pent up since the beginning of main stream digital (yes further back than the M8), is strong, but what happens when that initial customer base is satisfied?
 
Keith said:
Maybe in the very short term it may benefit you but ten years from now when the only place you can get 35mm black and white film from is those tossers at Lomo for twenty dollars a roll you may not be so smug! 😀
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I wouldn't worry about that. I just got about 750' of Kodak 5285 movie film, identical with Ektachrome E100D, for some 15 cents a foot. For the time being the freezer is full and I don't see movie film going away all that soon.
 
From my point of view... by the time film is fully dead and gone... a second-hand Nikon D3x will will be cheap enough that I can buy a few... rip them apart... and build some really nice digital backs for my Nikon F's. Make a good retirement project for me and Mr. Sweeney!

The same goes for my Leica M5 and the Nikon SP and S2 I am planning to buy soon...

Until then... I am happy shooting film and digital.
 
Keith said:
Cosina are an amazing company ...
Cosina may just surprise us! (hoping) 😀
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I think it is just inevitable. What would surprise me is if they (and/or Zeiss) don't come out with the dRF.

I'm really impressed with the technical know-how people display here, but we were subjected to this "impossible", "too expensive" for years before the M9. The real obstacle right now is marketing. Zeiss and Cosina have to wait at least one cycle after the release of the M9 before they can come out with anything, otherwise they will kill Leica, which is in nobody's interest.
 
Film production is completely out of our (the still shooters) hands. It depends on the movie industry.

But I'm confident that if film ever gets too expensive to buy for us (the "fountain pen analogy"), say, in ten or more years, we'll have more affordable DRF options, with full-frame digital sensors, at least 16bit dynamic range, etc. Until then, why worry ? 🙂

Players could include Canon and Nikon, too, by then, more likely than CV, actually. For them, production of a DRF doesn't have to be profitable, necessarily. They just need to decide that they want to do it, as a fun or marketing project. Like the Nikon SP Millenium re-edition.

Roland.
 
Nettar said:
Perhaps we can give this thread a slightly different focus, a little away from Cosina and Zeiss. Which manufacturer do you think will be the first to produce a full format digital camera, with a focusing viewfinder (not just a rear LCD), that accepts the vast majority of M-mount lenses? I'm not insisting that it be a rangefinder camera; it might have an electronic viewfinder, for example. Of course, the camera should make a serious effort to combat non-telecentricity problems caused by the sensor and lens being particularly close.

What are the advantages that would accrue to a manufacturer from offering a camera like this? They may not include sales volume, but the company would enjoy a significant degree of attention from a particularly broad spectrum of photographers who take their work seriously. I think Samsung would benefit from that attention. Nettar
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The only manufacturers that would have any interest in using the M-mount are those already offering M-mount lenses...Leica, Zeiss and CV.

New players so far tend to make their own mount...Samsung, Sony, u4/3.

If Nikon or Canon did a RF or EVIL as well, why would they need to support a competitor's mount?

With the Sony NEX, sensor size reaches APS-C within 2 years of u4/3 launch. FF cannot be so far behind.

Such manufacturers choose different lens mount/specifications to avoid the Leica problem of accommodating legacy lenses.

The u4/3 consortium chooses a flange to sensor distance of 20mm, and the Sony NEX 18mm, plenty of room for LTM or M-mount adapter makers...from CV to no-name brands.

External glass VF are abundantful. EVF are so far proprietary, but the connector socket is open...or at least I have not read anything about it being proprietary. What is to stop someone using also the Epson VF or a finer chip to make a better VF?

[The Epson chip native pixel size is 12u...300u @ 1m is said to be the threshold of human visual acuity. This provides lots of room for magnification/FoV creativity. What about a 9u or 6u chip...soon?]
 
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Pickett Wilson said:
There is such a limited market for a FF digital RF (...)
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I think there is a very limited market for a non-FF digital RF. Rangefinder people know that size matters, don't they?

Pickett Wilson said:
It would be an extremely risky move for Zeiss or Cosina to go the digital RF route.
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No, I think it would be extremely foolish not to.
 
Tompas, what would you be willing to pay for a digital RF from Cosina or Zeiss? Seriously, if both companies announced one tomorrow, how much hard earned cash would you plunk down to buy one?
 
Pickett Wilson said:
Tompas, what would you be willing to pay for a digital RF from Cosina or Zeiss? Seriously, if both companies announced one tomorrow, how much hard earned cash would you plunk down to buy one?
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Oh, come on, as I've said before: 'full-frame' sensors may be too expensive now (unless you're Leica and have customers that will buy anyhow), but they won't be in 2-3 years. I'll answer your question anyway... 🙂

Bessa RX(a|m): about 600 €
Pentax K-x/Nikon D5000/similar: about 550 €

So, according to my taste/sense of proportion, a Bessa RXd should not cost more than about 2x as much: I'd buy one for 1200 €.

In a few years it'll be no problem for Cosina to build such a camera (economically; technically it is not even now), and so it will be done. Another few years later it will cost not more than a Bessa costs today.
 
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At this point it is all about economics... Leica has proved that you can overcome the technical problems of making a full-frame digital rangefinder and only Leica has been able to produce a full-frame digital rangefinder within the accepted limits of economy, profit margins and manufacturing scale at this point.

How do I know it is all about economy... because I have had a set of schematics for fully functioning full-frame digital back for my Nikon F's in my filing cabinet since 2003. I even spoke to Kodak about supplying the chips. My cousin who has spent his life designing embedded circuits for chips that can be implanted in people's brains and spinal columns and writes computer programs in binary code, designed the hardware and software for it, his comment... a couple of hours of work that was as simple as falling off a log. So why don't I have a digital back for my Nikon F...

Economy... pure and simple... with no profit margin and no wages for either of us, the back would have cost me about $10,000... the big ticket items were the chip... $6000USD and the batteries... about $300... not worth it... I can shoot a lot of film and pay for a lot processing for that money and no one else is going to pay $20,000 for a digital back for a Nikon F.

Eventually full-frame chip technology will mature and the price of chips will fall to where I can see a full-frame digital 'film' cartridge being sold for around $2000 or so.

So if a hack like me can put together the resources to design a digital back for my Nikon F... the questioning of the capability of Zeiss or Cosina is laughable... the technology is there... but at this point the economies are not... so we will wait.

And if this all sounds implausible... remember Leica has already made a digital back that worked pretty much seamlessly on a camera originally designed for film... the Leica DMR for the R9... Leica has been pretty progressive with digital technology... Leica just has not always been presented their products with the best marketing or pricing structure. Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc... could make what ever they wanted... but it is all about economy and profit margins.
 
Economy v. Economy-of-scale

Economy v. Economy-of-scale


Building anything one-off always cost more than mass-building the same thing, even in series or parallel.

I came from an industry where sophisticated cameras and precision optical instruments was a way of life…until the digital era started 20 years ago.

As an example: Leica [then called Wild-Heerbrugg, owned by the Schmid-heiny family, who also owned Leica after E. Leitz’s passing] purportedly had invested $32 million in 1976 dollars developing the analytical stereo plotter that was eventually debuted in 1980 at $250k each. However, the project product life was abruptly truncated by photogrammetric [computer] workstations only 10 years later. I was neck-deep in helping kill the Leica-made analytical plotter.

The reason why Leica, also Zeiss, was so easily dethroned was because for each order, they have to build the hardware from the ground up. Serial building of each Zeiss analytical plotter was known to have cost only $16,000 each…Leica could not be far behind or Zeiss would have killed them. For us, a CD copy then cost $5 while the system sells for $32k++.

Our product development cost 2 years’ time, essentially software developments based on text books long published. As a company principal, I was not paid either.

Before that venture, I also have the dubious honour of retrofitted some 400 old Wild-Heerbrugg analog stereo plotters. Each one would have been a new customer for the new analytical machines.

The reason why I could then, and would now work on retrofitting the Leica or Nikon film-cameras is because the manufacturer wouldn’t; or they would have kill their own new products still-born.

No one else, not even CV would do that either to avoid being labeled second fiddle…as many Leica-philes still deem CV M-mount lenses as second-rate.

Many had posted counter-arguments why I was stupid, fanciful… Arguing the cost of parts, patented 6-bit encoding etc. etc. could not be overcome. The Sony NEX at MSRP $600 proved them all wrong…gut a Sony NEX and you will have all the parts necessary to build an APS-C size retrofit.

I argue that a full-frame NEX cannot be far behind.

The trick is packaging…as was the case in stereo plotter retrofits.
 
Frankie said:
I never knew that.

I am about to post part 2, what color should I use...and how?
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That one is easy: Leave it at the default and set no colour at all! The default follows the theme, and will be bright on dark theme backgrounds and vice versa. Any override you make will inevitably be wrong in one or the other theme, as it will be static and cannot adapt to themes.

Sevo
 
I don't think the cost of producing a dRF has changed significantly despite the advances in sensor technology.

And I can't imagine that Cosina is anxious to build an entirely new camera for a full-frame sensor, not without a partner.

So let's say they can deliver an "R-D1"-based camera with a recent but not leading edge 12mp generation APS-C sensor for $3000, would that be worth the price compared to a used M8?

It would be reasonable to think Zeiss would go for a full-frame dRF if it could match the practical capabilities of the M9 at about half its cost to the consumer. How eager Zeiss would be to build another camera might depend on how they view the Ikon product.
 
sevo said:
That one is easy: Leave it at the default and set no colour at all! The default follows the theme, and will be bright on dark theme backgrounds and vice versa. Any override you make will inevitably be wrong in one or the other theme, as it will be static and cannot adapt to themes.

Sevo
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Ah...the problem is:

I often write in "Word", especially for longer pieces. The writing pad in RFF has too many problems. I have lost too many pieces nearing finishing where all of a sudden, while spell checking, editing, backspacing or something simple...poof, the piece is gone.

So I set font colour in Word at RGB=174/174/174, matching the default white as it now appear.
 
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