Well, it may be news to you, but the S2 is out and will start shipping within six weeks.
If it isn't shipping yet, it isn't "out" in any normal person's definition of the word. No, this isn't news to me.
The S2 was announced as an utter surprise in October last year, so by what magic have they been "promoting the tech literally for years"
I'm talking about the sensor, not the S2. The elements of the S2 sensor that are new and interesting are not unique to the S2, but are part of Kodak's "truesense" CCD platform, which they officially announced well over a year ago (months before the S2) and have been discussing since at least late 2007.
Anyway, the Internet myth is that the register distance problem with the incidence angle is the sole reason for the 1.3 crop of the M8. It is not. It is one of the reasons in a whole complex that led to that design decision. The main reason is very simple: The M8, of necessity, had to be built out of discrete electronic parts. That means it has limited processing power and heat dissipation problems. The amount of data from a full format sensor with the attendant extra calculations would have taxed the processing to - or beyond- the limit making the camera exceedingly slow.
This is all a double-speak way of saying: "Due to poor planning, we spent all our time trying to come up with some magic to solve light fall-off. When it didn't materialize, we still had to get SOMETHING out the door or we were going to collapse, so we threw together stock electronics instead of having a properly integrated board--which is very much a solved problem that we should have planned on from the start, but see part 1 of this paragraph."
None of those other issues are insurmountable, or even difficult. They had already been solved in a multitude of shipping cameras (the exception being the issue of heat dissipation for a FF sensor and processing in a body that size, but in more general industrial terms this is not an unsolved problem either). Let me ask a question... what advances are there in the M8, aside from Kodak's incremental sensor improvements?
That is, what did Leica spend all those years and millions of dollars of M8 R&D on? I don't have a good answer to that either. Nobody does, as far as I can tell. The base problem seems to be that Leica's camera division had been reduced to a tiny, faltering thing with limited R&D resources, and they used all those resources chasing a unicorn before getting the bones set. They admitted as much in various statements through the last four years of CEO-cycling. I'd argue that the M8's out-of-date internal design and electronics are a consequence of the same broken process that led to the lack of FF in the M8, not a cause of that lack.
Getting a microlens configuration that works is just a matter of improved engineering precision, which seems to have been achieved now.
Heh. Maybe, maybe not, but in the coding field we have a phrase for this. "A simple matter of programming", as in--"All the hardware is there for our man-eating self-driving snowplowbot that can make friends and enemies and only devour the enemies. All that's left is the socialization algorithm, which is a simple matter of programming."
An infinite number of things are "just a matter of improved engineering precision", some will happen tomorrow and some won't happen for a thousand years. The one thing that they have in common is that unless they come from an integrated solutions company, which Kodak is not, the world generally hears about them well in advance of release. Not trade secret details, obviously, but the generalities that will drive purchase and investment.
The situation at the current time is completely different. By a brilliant stroke of Dr. Kaufmann in securing the cooperation of Fujitsy the Maestro chip has been created, solving the processing problems once and for all.
No processing problem is ever solved "once and for all". We also don't know that the Maestro chip is going to be appropriate for use in a smaller body. It may be, but we don't know. This is another case where, if this tech (not the Maestro chip as a discrete entity, but the underlying tech) were appropriate for use in smaller cameras, I can't imagine Fujitsu wouldn't be out there saying that--or using it in their own line of cameras.
The new M9 sensor is just a smaller S2 sensor, which gives total synergy in the R&D for both cameras. That, and the falling sensor price, has brought the camera to be feasable.
The M9 and S2 sensor might well have their light-sensitive layers cut from the same sheets, but that is a far different matter from being "the same sensor" and having "total R&D synergy". That's press release talk.
