M8 - Long Term Investment?

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Oh Two

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I've always been of the opinion that the new DSLRs are disposable and designed with a predictable depreciation; although I did find a page that shows that they can indeed be repaired, but with compromises:
http://www.abo.fi/~jskata/300Drepair/

However, I'm willing to bet the M8 is a tad bit better designed for the ages. It would be interesting to see if they have modular construction. It appears to me that the Canon is a throw away design, in the same fashion as computers. From my net searches Canon DSLR owners are claiming 12,000 shots before the camera is junk. That's 333 rolls of film. Even the orphan and much disparaged M5 ended up being a very good investment. My M4 which I purchased new has easily kept up with, or surpassed, original value despite inflation.

If the M8 with its moducum of teething problems are in the Leica mechanical tradition I would guess that they will be a good investment. I can't imgaine that they are as cheap looking as the Canon is inside. It appears to me that once R&D investment has been met to the manufacturer, Canon appears to be the camera which overpriced, not the M8.

One must remember that any Leica M is in the unique position of competing with not only other manufactures, but with most every M still in use as well.

The marks that succeed at this have a strong niche and dedicated followers who believe in the product and keep it's value high.
 
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only time can say for sure but i highly doubt that the m8 is going to be a good investment.
it's only m related by means of being able to use m lenses.

what's mechanical about it?
what can it do without a battery?

i think the idea of an m mount digital camera is great and it's the first leica released such camera but i think that may be it's sole claim to history.

joe
 
I think that the M8 will eventually be a good investment, but it appears that as with other new electronic devices it will be the third or fourth generation before it beomces the type of investment that other M owners already experience with the older M's.

Canon and Nikon have worked already out the major issues with their DSLR's because they adopted the digital platforms many years before. They also had their share of "bugs" with their cameras when they first released them. When you consider that the form factor of the M8 is similar indeed to many of it's older siblings, Leica has done an admirable job at using the present digital technology to work with the classic body that is the M.

It can only improve from here. Digital is the future good or bad, but I'll wait until I'm forced to give up film and maybe by that time the M8 or M9 will be the investment that we all feel we share now with older M's

Scott
 
Roll film doomed the plate cameras to extinction as the camera of choice, 35mm damaged roll film a lot, digital is going to kill off roll and 35mm.

There are no camera shops in my village/town, there are phone cam shops. mini lab in hypermarket.

Barnacks early shots were e.g. mobilisation for Great War, it is like 78, vinyl, radio, etc.
 
Oh Two said:
From my net searches Canon DSLR owners are claiming 12,000 shots before the camera is junk. That's 333 rolls of film.

If the M8 with its moducum of teething problems are in the Leica mechanical tradition I would guess that they will be a good investment. I can't imgaine that they are as cheap looking as the Canon is inside. It appears to me that once R&D investment has been met to the manufacturer, Canon appears to be the camera which overpriced, not the M8.
Click to expand...

INCORRECT. The SHUTTER in DSLR will fail, some have failed as soon as after 12,000. Some have failed out of the box. (I've seen picture of an M8 with wrecked shutter out of the box as well, just so you know) The M8's shutter will fail overtime as well, and just by the sheer number of units sold and the fashion in which they are used (manual hand wound in the R bodies) I would assume the shutter from the Leica R/M8 is not as reliable or as well field tested as the Canons.

Also, what does "cheap looking inside" mean? Is it really important what the cameras look like on the "inside"? Silly points really, but since you've brought it up...

The M8 will depreciate much faster than its film counter parts. It's a shame that it will not depreciate as fast as the DSLRs due to its artificially trumped up value by Leica aficionados
 
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that's rather funny, sirs.
Metal focal plane shutters of slrs are designed to last 100 000 shutter releases, some even 150 000. The better ones.
If it fails after 12 000 that's definitely not how it SHOULD be. That is a faulty camera, not a faulty design for a whole model.
 
There aren't that many companies that make shutters.

On the one hand this means that mechanical shutters are overrated; I remember the discussions about Seiko stopping production of shutters for the Leica R6 where the mechanical shutter was the main selling point, due to the nimbus of reliability that surrounds them. Having the shutter manufacturer pull the plug tarnishes the image just a bit.

On the other hand, it means that a shutter similar or identical in design to the M8's is probably working in a lot of other digital cameras. Under this aspect it doesn't make sense to say that DSLR X shutters tend to fail at 12.000 and you hope to get 300.000 out of the M8. It's a commodity component. Maybe a high-grade version is picked for the M8, but then so it is for other high-end digital cameras in the >$2000 price range.

If you want to invest money, a camera isn't the right way to do it, unless you want to purchase limited-edition Leica collectibles and store them in their unopened boxes.
 
Not sure if the M8 owners would like their cameras categorised as investments, especially as it would put them several rungs on the ladder below the most profitable investment camera of all, the Lomo.
 
You can pick up used 11MP medium format digital backs today for the price of a fancy point and shoot and they were selling for $16,000 plus not that long ago. When I was using film many of my cameras were 20 or 30 years old. Those are now beautiful relics of the age of the machine.

Digital cameras will eventually catch up to digital everything else. Cheap and disposible. Unfortunately right now they have only managed to get half way there -expensive and disposable ! By the way, I am the very happy owner of an M8, but as much as I like it I have no illusions about its likely value 3 years from now.
 
I think the more interesting question is how will M8 images hold up in the future, as digital technology continues to improve.
The camera certainly produces fantastic digital files now. How will they compare to what Canon and Nikon and others will have made common in five years time? That will be the biggest test of the camera's relevance.
I bought mine to use, not as a financial investment. Hopefully within 3-5 years, I will have gotten sufficient output from it not to regret anything.
Calculations like these, by the way, are a complete departure from tradition Leica M ownership. Take the oldest camera and it still shoots pics as good as the most recent film body. Add Leica lenses, and some would say better.
Ditto for my main body, a Rolleiflex 2.8 Xenotar, which was built sometime around the year of my birth and has produced most of my best images.
 
You are wrong about the Canon DSLRS.

Plain wrong.

Yes, the cheaper models may not be as long lived in comparison to say a yashica GSN or a Nikon FE or a leica.

The difference in DSLRs is that they take a HELL of a lot more pictures than a film camera. When I'm on assignment with my 1d mk1 or 30d, I can take up to 1200 shots in a little less than a few hours. Easily.
Most film guys take a roll a day, and even thats quite a bit.

Thats why dslrs are expected to fail before a film camera does..


Even so, The descent canon DSLRs aren't disposable by any means.

I have a 1d mk1, which was canons first pro DSLR they EVER brought out, and I still use it with my 4month old 30d.
Its only 4.2mp, but the quality of the pixels themselves are excellent, so it still shines in a feild of 8-16mp cameras. Not only that, but it works flawlessly, is built like a bombshelter and is weather and dust sealed.


I expect it will still be around in 10 years taking pictures. Easily.

The shutter on a 30d is rated to somewhere around 100-150,000 exposures.
The shutter on a 1d is rated to around 200-250,000 exposures.


Hardly Disposable.
 
Oh, and when the EOS 3 came out, a European magazine (Chausseurs d'Image?) tested the rotarty magnet shutter (same as in your EOS 1D) and it held up for 390,000 cycles - more than double what Canon rates them for.
 
Just M8 images? What makes the M8 digital images different from all other digital images? Hardware, software, and technology we have today for making and archiving image files probably won't be around in 25 years, as well as the means for reading them. What makes any camera revelant is who is behind it. I don't really care what comes down the pike, though it is interesting to look to the future. What matters is what tools are available today, not tomorrow.
 
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"Tests conducted by French photographic monthly Chasseur D' Images prove that Canon's EOS 3 has a more durable shutter than it's main rival SLRs.

The magazine tested the EOS3's shutter - and those of the Minolta Dynax 9 and Nikon F100 - after Canon claimed it would operate for over 100,000 exposures.

A shutter testing machine was hooked up to a computer to count the number of shutter fires that each camera was capable of.

The Minolta's shutter failure was recorded at 82,586 firings, equivalent to taking 900 pictures a year over 90 years. This is pretty good but a pro shooting ten 36-exposure rolls per week would finish off the Dynax's shutter in four and a half years.

The Nikon F100's shutter failed after 130,847 exposures which works out at around 145 years with 900 exposures per annum. The ten-roll-a-week pro would have to replace its shutter after around seven years.

The shutter mechanism on the EOS 3, however, was shown to be able to last for 424,477 exposures. This equates to 471 years of shooting at 900 exposures per year and a professional lifetime of around 22 years.

The secret of the EOS 3's durability lies in a re-design of the mechanism. What Canon calls a 'rotary magnet shutter' deploys an electronically controlled, non-contacting rotary magnet to activate the first and second curtain movements. The design is claimed to be free of sticking problems caused by dust and grit - which helps to make it more reliable.

The set-up also needs no power to hold up the second shutter curtain open during a bulb exposure and this helps to increase the life of batteries. Canon claims that an exposure of up to 1000 hours (more than 41 days) is possible from a single battery. However, that claim has yet to be tested by any magazine."
 
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