M8 just gave up

Gid --

Alas. And you also sold me your Bronica RF645...

Hope don't you don't have too many of your eggs in that very iffy M8 basket.

Good luck.
 
So far I have read of 3 owners having total failure and a few more having resetable failures due to the uncalibrated battery meter. My camera's serial number would indicate that at least 2700 have been sold and from what I have seen others I would guess they have sold over 3500. This is less than .1% and even if we take the other 4 or 5 that have reported an intermitent failure that was fixed by the various techniques described in the various forums we have only .2% failure rate. How many complex products do you know of with a lower failure rate? Things get maginified by the fact that they appear in these forums and get repeated (same people same problems) on multiple forums. Soon it appears everyone's camera is failing or about to fail. I'm sure Leica would like to see no failures as would we but I don't think that is realistic. Further, if my camera was one of the failed units or it fails I too would be concerned. However, sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. If Leica is able to hold failures to 3 in 3000 they will be doing above industry norms for such a complex piece of equipment.
 
barjohn said:
So far I have read of 3 owners having total failure and a few more having resetable failures due to the uncalibrated battery meter. My camera's serial number would indicate that at least 2700 have been sold and from what I have seen others I would guess they have sold over 3500. This is less than .1% and even if we take the other 4 or 5 that have reported an intermitent failure that was fixed by the various techniques described in the various forums we have only .2% failure rate. How many complex products do you know of with a lower failure rate? Things get maginified by the fact that they appear in these forums and get repeated (same people same problems) on multiple forums. Soon it appears everyone's camera is failing or about to fail. I'm sure Leica would like to see no failures as would we but I don't think that is realistic. Further, if my camera was one of the failed units or it fails I too would be concerned. However, sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. If Leica is able to hold failures to 3 in 3000 they will be doing above industry norms for such a complex piece of equipment.
Click to expand...

If you follow Sean Reid's "poll" on LUF it's a lot more than 3 owners having total failures and many more partial failures like mine

Let's not invent statistics to prove that this camera is reliable... so far it is not
 
AusDLK said:
Gid --

Alas. And you also sold me your Bronica RF645...

Hope don't you don't have too many of your eggs in that very iffy M8 basket.

Good luck.
Click to expand...

Dave,

I've still got my R-D1, two Olympus E1s, an Olympus E400 (great fun) and a Canon F1 (for those film moments), so I'm not hard done by and all of those exceed my mediocrity :eek:
 
herbkell@shaw.c said:
If you follow Sean Reid's "poll" on LUF it's a lot more than 3 owners having total failures and many more partial failures like mine

Let's not invent statistics to prove that this camera is reliable... so far it is not
Click to expand...

I counted failures in his poll and came up with 9 failures (interesting is that there were far fewer failures with 1.06 version than with 1.09 version, perhaps they introduced new bugs when trying to fix old ones). There were 28 intermitents failures reported. Note: my numbers could be off because of the way the data was collected left far too much room for ambiguity and many owners had more than one camera. Again, assuming around 3500 have been sold this would represent around 0.26% of units. Is this an accurate static? No. Why, because it depends on sample size and having a truly random sample of the population. It is at best a rough magnitude estimate of the problem. The sample is scewed in that it only sample people that frequent the forums (the Leica one in this case) and are registered forum users. He was targeting 200 users but that might have represented 300 cameras. The stats could be as bad as a 3% failure rate which I am sure Leica would consider unacceptable. It looks very much to me a like a firmware bug rather than hardware though I could be wrong. After more than 30 years in the computer business and software development in particular, the differences between 1.06 and 1.09 would seem to point in that direction. (This is based on looking at the 1.06 users that were still using the original camera without having sent it back with no serious failures.)

I hadn't looked at Sean's poll since I posted on it and I had forgotten about it before I posted my intial stats which were based on the last weeks posts on this and the Leica users forum. I wasn't trying to whitewash the camera's failings or to create a better view than it warranted.
 
John touches on the problem of assessing the incidence of failures. This data will only accurately be held by Leica in terms of them knowing the total number of sales. The web poll idea is never going to be that accurate. The real issue is how much use these early M8's are getting. It may be that a number have been purchased and have not had the opportunity to really get heavy use yet. There may also be over reporting of minor charging / sd card hiccups purely because anxiety levels are running high.

One poster notes how loyal leica owners are. The real thing is that this camera is simply a superb piece of equipment and I suspect that very few people will actually be asking for their money back because if this camera is running it really has no competition.
 
As with the Zeiss Ikon, I don't think you can take the numbers here and then extrapolate them into the entire group of cameras sold.

I would expect that only Leica could provide accurate numbers on problems reported. However, it would be difficult to know if those problems are categorized: DOA, battery, body, memory card, etc., and which were corrected with a call to customer support.

And when you try to use Sean Reid's site as a sample, then it become even more difficult, because a paid site further restricts the sample. For example, I wouldn't pay one cent to read someone's opinion about a camera.
 
In fairness to Sean, the poll was not taken on his paid site but rather on the free Leica users forum. Of couse, like most forums you must register as a user before you are allowed to post. What I saw in his poll was many users with two and three bodies that had 2 to 3 thousand shots on at least one of their bodies. The prevailing issue seemed to be the need to do a reset (various techniques described) which more often than not resulted in a recovery. All of this points to an internal camera OS that has crashed in one way or another and needs a reboot. What I suspect makes it so difficult to perform a true reset/reboot is that the OS is probably designed to periodically save its state so that when the user switches the camera off all is not lost and the user can start back where he/she left off when the switch is turned back on. The internal battery keeps the saved state along with the clock from being lost during battery changes and during extended hybernations. A crash that prevents recovery from hybernation requires a true reset to a known state and unfortunately, Leica has not revealed the method for acoomplishing this. Just removing the battery is often not enough because the internal battery is still saving the state left and not allowing a true reboot. Of course if left long enough (don't know what that is) the internal battery will run down too and you will get a true reset/reboot.
 
herbkell@shaw.c said:
If you follow Sean Reid's "poll" on LUF it's a lot more than 3 owners having total failures and many more partial failures like mine

Let's not invent statistics to prove that this camera is reliable... so far it is not
Click to expand...
How does the saying go? "Vote early and vote often!"

If you follow the news, there is a major malfunction in human nature, and we're all dying of cancer, or "lead poisoning".

Let's not invent statistics to prove that statistics are a reliable way to prove them unreliable.
 
So far I have read of 3 owners having total failure and a few more having resetable failures due to the uncalibrated battery meter. My camera's serial number would indicate that at least 2700 have been sold and from what I have seen others I would guess they have sold over 3500. This is less than .1% and even if we take the other 4 or 5 that have reported an intermitent failure that was fixed by the various techniques described in the various forums we have only .2% failure rate. How many complex products do you know of with a lower failure rate? Things get maginified by the fact that they appear in these forums and get repeated (same people same problems) on multiple forums. Soon it appears everyone's camera is failing or about to fail. I'm sure Leica would like to see no failures as would we but I don't think that is realistic. Further, if my camera was one of the failed units or it fails I too would be concerned. However, sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. If Leica is able to hold failures to 3 in 3000 they will be doing above industry norms for such a complex piece of equipment.


John,

I think we are unable to estimate how many failures that there currently are. How many people bought the M8 and never even post on a forum. They might also have a dead camera. Lets assume that 30 M8 owners post of a forum and 3 died, then that is 10% failure rate. We will never truly know how many M8's are dying, and I am sure that Leica will not tell us. Heck they did not even tell us that all blacks come out as purple. I would not expect any company to come out and say hold on; 25% of our cameras are dying please be careful buyer.

Furthermore, in the long run I do not think this will be an issue with the M8. I am sure that the company will sort it out ASAP. I would just recommend you do not trust the M8 until it has sound reliability.
 
barjohn said:
Are you being humerous or do you have a real solution? If real, please explain.
Click to expand...

i figured if the maker doesn't even have a solution, no point any of us here trying to figure it out.. might as well be humerous.
 
I hear that if you register the M8 Leica will send you 2 pencils that will allow you to draw what you see through the rangefinder. Obviously, with the sharpness and clarity of the rangefinder; the drawings with these new pencils are the best I have ever seen.

J/k... seriously good luck with your camera, and at least a cheap P&S backup should be available for almost any type of gear people use.

Regards,
Steve
 
Check spersky's posting history. He came in here trolling under the guise of being an interested potential M8 customer with a straw man argument for the camera that he then tore down. He is actually a Canon photog who most likely hates hauling that cannon around (I can't blame him.)

That he keeps coming back here is the telling thing. The same goes for Brian the dog. As it stands the M8 is one of the words greatest digi cameras in the 35mm format. That it has a firmware glitch is not such a big deal- that it takes the incredible pictures it does and is as small as it is the big deal and the reason so many Canon Trolls keep coming back here. I mean why else would people who do not own the camera and have no intention of purchaseing one or in the case of spersky don't even shoot a range finder hang around? Either they have a very small... or they...
 
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I like self help as much as anyone but isn't it time just to get your faulty camera to your dealer and have him deal with it? The customer support you'll get in these forums is abominable. You paid $5K to your dealer for this camera. Make him work for it.
 
Sailor: Trolling is relative. For the same reason you think I am trolling, you are a troll to many people here.
 
As far as I am concerned, the humour helps, whether well intentioned or not. There's no need to get defensive. The potential of the M8 is significant - if it wasn't then the other issues would have caused me to send it back. The only issue, for me, is having confidence in the camera's longevity. I'm no Leicaphile and if there was an alternative that came anywhere close in terms of the complete package I'd jump ship without hesitation. However, I'd be lying if I said that alternatives were not being considered.

Mike_j,

As nice as your R2 is, I'll pass ;) , but an a la carte MP and a coolscan 5000 ......................
 
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