Lowest M8 price?

crusius

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Hi all,

I have an R-D1 and positively love it. The only thing that bugs me is that it is 6MP only. Being a big print lover, I hate the fact that the thing maxes up at about 11x14 without cropping, and way before that with cropping. (Yes, I crop. Often.) The 10MP of the M8 would help a lot.

However, $5k is way too much for me. For $3k I could perhaps skip some (a lot of) lunches/dinners/etc, sell some stuff, and get myself one. I wonder how far is the M8 from getting there? What prompted me to ask was finding it for around $4k:

http://www.kyramart.com/proddetail.php?prod=1DC524524&source=froogle

So, would you mind telling us for how low were you able to get a new M8 for?

Cheers,

- Cesar
 
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This is the first i have seen of anyone selling them for less than list. Better get one before he finds out he is under pricing them. Even for list it is worth it, in my opinion.
Gene
 
kbg32 said:
Good luck. As the saying goes, "if the deal looks too good, it problably isn't". Save your bucks and buy from a reputable dealer.

Thanks for the concern. I won't buy from him. Even at $4k it would be too much for me. If it weren't I'd do all the usual paranoid things I normally do before jumping into a deal like that. But I don't expect to get my hands on an M8 anytime soon.

That said, that was not the point of the post, and the question remains: how low were people able to get an M8 for? That's (I hope) the information we'll get from this thread: The cheapest new M8 price so far, that resulted in a camera being delivered.

- Cesar
 
Here we go again... Dear thread reader: please forgive me for starting a thread that enticed you to read it, expecting to find out what was the lowest new M8 price so far, only to find out that none of the replies were related to it.

There was a recent thread about Ken Hansen having good deals. As far as I know, list price is not good deal. It's not bad deal either, of course. But noone told us how much they paid.

There is a new Leica on Ebay now for 4665, buy it now for list. Did anybody snap an M8 on ebay for less than list? If so, for how much?

The replies so far (except for Gene, who at least said it was the lowest price seen so far) boil down to:

1) I don't know of anybody who got it below list. Therefore, nobody did.

2) Your low price is bogus/you're an irresponsible spender/etc.

C'mon people, how hard is it to stay on topic? I was going to reply to some off-topic replies, replied to one, and thankfully realized that I'm getting too old for that sort of stuff.

If you don't know anybody that got it for less, fine. Maybe somebody does. If you couldn't care less, fine. Good for you. You don't need to read this thread then. I just want to find out if anybody did, and for how much.

- Cesar
 
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crusius said:
As far as I know, list price is not good deal. It's not bad deal either, of course.


List is $5300. Street is $4795

I haven't seen the M8 from a reputable dealer for less than $4795.

from Amazon:
List Price: $5,300.00
Price: $4,795.00
You Save: $505.00 (10%)

I've also seen the $5300 list price in Leica's literature and other places. The M8 is still hard to find and so long as that is true, it is unlikely that you will find an actual new one for anything significantly less than the common $4795 street price.

HTH.
 
Joe Mondello said:
List is $5300. Street is $4795

I stand corrected. "Street price is not good (or bad) deal" then. I'd expect that the people who got the camera from Ken paid less than $4795 given that thread replies.

M8s seem common enough on Ebay nowadays that we will start to see new M8s going for less than street with some frequency.

- Cesar
 
Just remember that whilst you might end up congratulating yourself by saving a few dollars on the purchase price by going to a box shifter or discount seller, what type of support will you get if you ever need any dealer services? I can't count the number of posts I've seen on other forums where people 'saved' $50, $100 or $150 on a $5k purchase and ended up with nothing but grief and more expense when things turned out wrong.

How likely is the dealer going to be to handle a problem for you if you have an issue? Will they exchange it if you are not happy with your camera for some reason?

Sometimes people focus too much on saving relatively pennies on a purchase and then wonder why there are no specialist dealers to help them out or go beyond the call of duty when they need them. If you are in the market for something like an M8, do yourself a favour and support either your local dealer or one of the specialists who support sites like this.

BTW: I'm not a dealer, I don't work for any camera company and my sole motivation here is that I want to be able to have a camera dealer who will demo goods to me, be a viable economic entity that I can trust my business with, who will support me and do the right thing for me should I ever have a problem with something I've bought from them (or even stuff I didn't buy through them). These folks exist but they are disappearing rapidly due to the box shifters and internet vendors who have little or no interest beyond $$ and volume.

One day we'll be wondering whatever happened to Robert White, Cameraquest, Calumet, Tamarkin, CameraWest, <insert name of your local specialist dealer> etc etc etc.

/rant off
 
Honestly I don't think you'll see M8 prices fall below $4k except when a new model comes along or on the used market.

But your original post about cropping with the M8's 10.3MP sensor versus the R-D1's 6.1MP sensor got me to thinking.

Here is very heavy crop from my R-D1 which I think holds up pretty well. The original is horizontal and heavily skewed since I had no time to frame. Shot with the CV 15mm.

Having had an M8 for a week, plus having lots of experience with other 10MP cameras (Nikon D200 and Canon G7) I haven't found there to be a great difference in overall IQ.

If you want to crop in superclose, you might find a dSLR with a long-ish zoom more to your liking. HTH.

319228687_b46e43e1a0_o.jpg
 
If you check this sellers site you will see that he does not agree to the Leica minimum selling price and therefor is not a Leica dealer. There is no Leica warranty
but you may purchase a three year warranty for a price. This dealer is located in California, so add the 7.5 sales tax if you live here. Add it all up, and the mail order price from NYC looks good.
 
I have heard speculation that by summer the price may dip to $4K. The "street" price now seems to be $4795, which is where I have seen it priced consistently. Digital products have a short life-time and tend to fade quickly as new ones are released. Moore's law makes all old technologies loose most of their value after about 5 years or less, since they improve exponetially every 18-24 months.

T.
 
crusius said:
Hi all,

I have an R-D1 and positively love it. The only thing that bugs me is that it is 6MP only. Being a big print lover, I hate the fact that the thing maxes up at about 11x14 without cropping, and way before that with cropping. (Yes, I crop. Often.) The 10MP of the M8 would help a lot.

However, $5k is way too much for me. For $3k I could perhaps skip some (a lot of) lunches/dinners/etc, sell some stuff, and get myself one. I wonder how far is the M8 from getting there? What prompted me to ask was finding it for around $4k:

http://www.kyramart.com/proddetail.php?prod=1DC524524&source=froogle

So, would you mind telling us for how low were you able to get a new M8 for?

Cheers,

- Cesar

If it's just a matter of being able to print larger formats, then there's a cheaper way than buying a M8: Alien Skin Blow Up
For not even $200 US you can enlarge any file to your hearts desire without losing quality (unless of course you're getting greedy).
 
It would seem $4795 is the low price. Leica's production capacity is small so this is unlikely to change for a while. Check back in a year.
 
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