Topdog1 said:
Yes, $1800 or so dollars is alot to spend for a camera, but that's probably less than you spend for a good PC to process your photos. And what is that PC's life expectancy? If you get 4 years out of it, you are doing real well. Probably more like 3. And when you are done with it, do you repair it? Do you upgrade it? Or do you just retire it? Your expectations are set for the mechanical rangefinder era. You need to reset them for the digital era.
Well, there's obsolescence and there's "obsolescence": I'm tapping this reply out on a six-year-old PowerBook G3 (Pismo, in case anyone's keeping score); the photographic heavy-lifting at home gets done on a slightly-newer Power Mac G4 tower (albeit with RAM maxed out to 1.5GB and a pair of fast internal HDs); the lone digital camera here (and likely to remain so for a while) is a 2.1mp Olympus p/s number from around 2001/2 which works just fine.
Besides choosing my products carefully, my general attitude toward technology in general is "it's obsolete when I say it is." If it still works within spec and does what I need it to with reasonable efficiency, there's no need to replace it.
And, generally speaking, most digital gadgets, from cell phones to PDAs to pocket digicams (and products that handle all the above), and more, are designed to take a certain degree of abuse before giving out, at which point, unfortunately, they end up getting tossed (so much for "going green"). What makes the RD-1 situation particularly galling is that the product in question outstrips the price of the typical p/s product Epson makes (or made) by the proverbial order of magnitude, yet their respose to service issues is inversely proportional to its price.
The idea of "geting used to" limited life-cycles is interesting: we used to be tolerant of this idea even regarding big-ticket items like cars, but that's changed radically. I don't see why this change in attitude shouldn't take place with items like computers (not exactly a "little ticket item, at least as far as I'm concerned), and, yes, digicams big and small.
What complicates this idea, of course, is corporate instabilty in the industry. We've already had several photo-industry flame-outs over the last three years, and the game of musical chairs is hardly over. Film-based cameras might be fixable by others (albeit with some effort), but digital shooters will often be SOL. Buyers of "cheap" dSLRs might get a rude surprise if and when something on the electronic end of their
wundersnaps goes south post-warranty and find out that the proposed "solution" is to ashcan the thing and buy the new
latest thing...from another company, of course, since the outfit that made/marketed their old camera became a causalty of a merger/buyout/dissolution. (Bonus points if the owner invested in an extra lens or two.) It's telling that the most successful company in the digital-camera biz across the board (Canon) relies least on that end of their business for revenue. Photography, from pro to duffer, might be a "prestige market" thing for companies like this, but in terms of dollars it's largely irrelevant.
So much for Epson. Over to you, Leica...
- Barrett