Well, now that you've brought up this beautiful example, did you ever ask yourself why on earth you'd want to spend $500 on a watch?
I wear a Swatch Irony chronograph that cost me like $30 used on eBay, does mostly the same as yours except the alarm which I don't need, and looks good enough that I can wear it at black tie events with the president of the country attending. By your logic, it should be stupid to spend fifteen times as much when a $30 investment does the job.
And now don't ask me why I won't spend $500 on that Swatch, ask yourself why you actually spent them. Something obviously made it seem worth it; some expectation of quality maybe? That's basically it.
The other thing is that you could just stop telling others they are stupid, bending over etc. just because their sense of the value of things is different from yours.
And I'll remind you of this discussion the next time you pop up in a Soviet camera thread telling people how it's theoretically impossible to take in-focus pictures with them that hold up to your expectations of sharpness, making it necessary to spend five times as much on lenses. Vis-a-vis the people in those threads, you are in the same position that people are now vis-a-vis to you.
The watch was given to me by my parents as a graduation gift when I graduated from high school 17 years ago. They're the sort of people who spend way too much for stuff they don't need to keep up with the joneses. If it had been up to me, I'd have bought something more modest. If someone gives you something, you don't tell them no. You take it and thank them for their generosity.
I have another expensive watch too, a Bulova Marine Star Chronograph. It probably cost around $500 or so new, like my Seiko. I bought it last year at a pawn shop in Fort Wayne for $20. THAT is my kind of price for a watch. They sold it cheap because it had a dead battery and they couldn't figure out how to change it. I had a local jeweler fix it for $30 (It is a solar powered watch that takes a special rechargeable battery!). So, for $50 I got a fancy watch. I bought it for my son, because he does not have a watch. He didn't want it. "No one wears those anymore, there's a clock on my laptop and in my PSP, etc." Ok, so I kept it for myself. If he changes his mind, its his. I don't need two watches. I still think my son needs one. I'm old and cranky, I guess.
The big differences you are choosing to ignore in what I've said in this thread and the ones on Soviet lenses are:
1) I am not complaining about the cost of lenses themselves, I am complaining about begging manufacturers to increase prices. Everyone keeps choosing to ignore that in their responses to me because they can't argue against that. I'm right.
2) Soviet lenses cannot focus accurately on Leicas. It is not 'theoretical', it is an established, scientifically verifiable, irrefutable fact of their mechanical design, which is based on the Contax standard, not the Leica standard despite using the Leica lens mount. A lot of people here have no clue what accurate focus is and others don;t notice because they shoot everything at f11. Just look in the gallery at all the portraits with sharp ears and soft eyes. If that is your standard of focus accuracy, then fine, Soviet lenses work just peachy. If you want equipment that ACTUALLY WORKS, as I require to make my living, then no, Soviet lenses don't do the job. Brian Sweeny, our resident expert on Soviet lenses, has stated this NUMEROUS TIMES.
I give people accurate advice because I know how FRUSTRATING it is to have gear that you just can't seem to get to work right. It sucks, and it makes photography much less enjoyable. For a beginner, like those who commonly ask these questions about whether cheap russian lenses will work and save them money, the frustration level will be far higher and could make them give up photography because they'll be more likely to blame themselves for their failures due to their lack of knowledge about how the equipment works and how it can undermine you if it does not work. People can argue with me all they want, I will not stop telling people the truth when they ask my advice. To do any less would be to betray the ethical values by which I live. I don't know everything, so I don't answer if I don't know the answer...and if someone writes me directly I tell them that I don't know if that's the case.
