Building 100 a week

[Rod Fung]

I attended Kenmore's (Seattle area) Camera Sponsored "Leica Academy" where reps from Solms came to talk and show off the M8. It was my first hand's on with the camera and I was impressed. The seminar mostly consisted of a various PowerPoint presentations but they had multiple M8's there along with a nice lineup of lenses to try out. LHSA was there as well showing off cameras and recruiting members for the club.

A couple interesting take-aways from the seminar:

- The Leica Academy speaker said that Leica is working 9 hrs per day including Sat. and that they can only produce 100 cameras a week. Backlog for pre-orders is extensive.
- The cameras have been tested extensively in adverse conditions (he didn't define adverse conditions)
-I could not get either M8 to exhibit the "banding" issue in my informal shooting indoors (high iso , shooting in and around bright light sources).
-During the Q&A when I asked about the banding issue reported on the Leica Forum, the US rep said "that the root cause of the banding issue was from the first 5 cameras (sold) in the country were pre-production models".
-They had the new tri-elmar (16-21-28) there to try out and I was very impressed with it; especially how light weight the lens is.


Overall I was very impressed with the Leica presentation, the speakers, and the camera. My pending order for a blk M8 still stands. Thanks for hosting this seminar Kenmore Camera!

 

[Rod Fung]

Yes, I felt that the US rep was either being somewhat evasive to the 'Banding" question but I let him answer it and I moved on to other questions. An additiuonal question that I asked them was if Leica has a dedicated software team working on firmware updates. He answered yes and that updates will come when needed. The Solm's rep did say that there are some color balance issues and cited the Magenta cast

 

[Mark Norton]

I don't think anyone seriously thinks the magenta/black problem is a white balance problem.

 

[georgl]

Especially under 1250ASA you need to force the camera to "band" - before I knew it I neither experienced banding or IR-magenta in over 500 shots - that was before I stopped taking pictures and started making tests with halogen lights and black textiles ;-)
I repeat my myself: 99% of the shots are unaffected by these problems. But 1% is still too much for a Leica (especially because these problems can be solved) so they will fix it.
You don't need to cancel your order or put away your M8 - just be aware of the problems and take pictures - Leica will do the rest!

 

[SDK]

I repeat my myself: 99% of the shots are unaffected by these problems. But 1% is still too much for a Leica (especially because these problems can be solved) so they will fix it.

99% is not bad, film can be ruined at almost that rate by development flaws, scratches and operator error.

Still the Solms gurus should fix it so that only the photographer is to blame for bad results.