EmilGil said:
I was afraid of something like this. If you and your friends had bad luck there's nothing I can do about it but mine has worked like a charm. Those bodies still running are probably not the ones most prone to fail and thus provides a good value entry point to the M system. Any 25-30 year old camera can fail, be it Leica, Hasselblad, Nikon or any other brand. I only got a M6 as I couldn't get used to lug around a separate light meter, not because I was unhappy with my M4-2.
As I said some people have been lucky, including you.
But...
- Everyone from DAG to Sherry and everyone in-between will tell you that the M4-2 is a risky proposition.
- Boards across the web are filled with stories that echo this notion.
- My M4-2 was fully rebuilt by a crack technician and the shutter failed in less than 6 months. I opted to not have it repaired again, because I can't rely on it. I can't afford to have a camera die in the middle of a job or when I am on the road.
- I know of two other people that had the same experience. One of them sent his camera repeatedly to a very well known service shop. This technician spent days trying to adjust the camera to spec and finally had to throw in the towel. It is not uncommon to find all sorts of shims and washers inside of M4-2 cameras, that were added in an attempt to bring the camera into adjustment.
Some history.
When Leica introduced the M5, they discontinued the M4 and the traditional M body assembly line was shut down in Germany.
The M5 tanked in the market for various reason, the main ones probably being the Nikon F and Leica fundamentalists, -eh traditionalists revolting against the bigger body. As a result of plummeting sales Leica was nearly bankrupted and pushed to the brink of going under.
Leica was talked in to resuming production of the traditional M body by the head of Leitz Canada, but need to find a more economical way of doing so. The solution was to move production of the M series to Canada.
So, Leica moved the entire assembly line to Canada, where several things happened.
- The design of the M4 was stripped and economized to reduce costs. These measures included removing the condenser from the RF (which introduced the flare problem), plastic frame-counter gears etc.
- Tooling was shipped from Germany and a new assembly line was set up
- The production line was changed from the traditional "fit and finish"method to tolerance-assembly.
- A new workforce had to be trained. Assembling an M series camera with over 1200 parts is no simple matter.
Now, as you can imagine this was not a trivial task.
I reckon that the spotty QC of the M4-2 has a lot to do with training the workforce. I can imagine that by the end of the 16,000 unit run they were up to speed and the less capable workers had been sorted out, but along the way it appears that a lot of questionable cameras were assembled.
Leica also tweaked the design of the M4-2 along the way and improved it in many ways. The M4-P is the result of this transition / development period. A camera that is more economical to produce, yet has the reliability of the earlier models.
So,
your M4-2 may be perfectly fine, because it was assembled by someone who knew what they were doing, but that does not apply to the entire production run which is known to be spotty.
And that is why I will not recommend the M4-2 to someone as their first M camera. These are not cheap cameras, especially once you add in the obligatory CLA, and the QC on the 16,000 M4-2 units is all over the map. Getting a dud may turn off a new user for good, which would be a shame.
