The Future, Erwin Puts Predictions

Bill, thanks for the reference to Puts' article. It is an interesting read.

In reading it, I started feeling somewhat nostalgic for the passing CRF (coupled rangefinder) technology and Leica. Puts suggests that some of the advantages inherent in the CRF technology (photographers can select the focus point much more accurately than an 'umpteen' point AF system; viewfinder better; etc.) might make it possible for a company like Leica to hold on to some market share into the future. I disagree somewhat. Unless Leica can completely revamp their pricing, they are going to face the unbeatable competition of ever-improving digital wonders coming out almost monthly now. For example, the micro four-thirds stuff is beginning to take off and is probably only a generation or two from the so-called "Decisive Moment Digital Camera".

And when our generation dies off, how many people of the next generation are going to stay involved with film and rangefinders... surely far fewer than today.

Leica needs to build "it" before Panasonic, Olympus, or Samsung does. And it can't be ten times as expensive... in my opinion. :)
 
Jamie Pillers said:
And when our generation dies off, how many people of the next generation are going to stay involved with film and rangefinders... surely far fewer than today.
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i'm not so sure. more gen y kids shoot medium and large format than any other, probably. same goes for rangefinders, except for maybe those fabled days in the 60s when used leicas were dirt cheap.
 
I just bought some Tri-X and one of the young shop staff was leaving early, bicycle helmet in hand, Konica Hexar over his shoulder. These gen Y kids want to drive manual cars even. I am not sure about a lot of EP's arguments, which are always hard to follow. Lots of people, maybe more than ever, are using RFs and enjoying the distinct advantages. Compact, reliable, no nested menus, just a minimum of controls. The future of M film or digital bodies is unlikely to be too different to what we currently have, despite his musing on autofocus etc, or it wil indeed be something else entirely.

I read your chapter on available light photography in the 1977 Leica Manual when it first came out and only recently got my own copy on the auction site. If I can correspond with you about rangefinders on the internet here 32 years later, I am pretty confident I and many others will still be shooting film Ms in another 32 years, when I am 80. Thanks for the privilege of answering your invitation.
 
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Thanks for the link Bill, one this one I'm even partly agreeing with Puts (which is a rare occassion).

I'm convinced rangefinders will be used for a long time to come. The progression of computer tehcnology has brought us digital, which is the film camera killer pur sang, but internet has also broadened the view of many young people in more ways than we can even fathom (I'm a computer technology teacher at middle/high school) and they have the ability to choose from a far greater range of gear than we all had before the computer age.

Those young people that shoot rangefinders have come to shooting them by sheer will alone, since there are so many alternatives to be found. The 'newcomers' will keep the rangefinder community strong, they are the most dedicated, I'm convinced.

Home developing and B&W film will be logical artistic addition to this group of RF shooters. Developing and printing will never be a completely digital thing, even if they evolve so much that the distinction between digital and analog would be gone. Collectors and connaisseurs will always put value in a well developed traditional print, I'm positive.

In the end, rangefinder shooting may be limited to those art school students and old practitioners. Forums like these will slow that development down by singing the praise of the Leica.

Once the market has shrunk to 'art school students sizes', Leica will be gone I guess. Collectors will start to unload their cameras onto the market, since the pulbic eye will look upon the Leicas as having lost the opportunity/possibility to be used for their purpose. (Better make some bucks of the dinosaur). With these amounts of cameras, there will be no market left. Only some tech repair men will survive.

But: I love being self-sufficient with a good Leica, stocks of film and Rodinal!
 
At an earlier article Erwin Putts deemed the old M rangefinder system dead. He now seems to understand that, if so, there will be nobody around reading his long articles.

The future of the Leica M system is really not up to Erwin Putts. It's up to, first of all, Leica to design and produce a camera that is far better and more reliable than the M8 which will be attractive also to younger folks. That implies that the price of this camera is affordable too.

I forsee obvious improvements to the Leica M system, if it's going to compete in the future market:

This mechanical, unreliable and all too expensive viewfinder system must be changed to an electronic & solid state system that costs a fraction to produce and will be far more accurate. - By the way, is the new 0,95 Noctilux out yet...?

There is really no way around AF. It got to be introduced sooner or later.

But first of all Leica must solve this sharp-light-angle-hitting-the-sensor problem. Or a sensor designer/producer must create such a product. do anyone know that such a product is available at, say, Kodak? Last time somebody performed a bodycount, just a few months ago, there was no such sensor available. So, how Leica can claim that the development of the M9 is well under way is beond me. If they don't have a suitable sensor, they have no camera.

With the majority of the customers being over 60 Leica is in a hurry. The major part of the customer base might be under the turf by the time such a sensor is available.

That's my 5 cents. Far shorter than Erwin Puts, but still...
 
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I decided to stop reading that fool's long-winded, strangely worded ramblings 2 or 3 years ago.
 
Leica has backed itself into a corner price-wise by insisting on only building a high end and high priced product. For the most part it's only the over sixty crowd that can afford them. The once plentiful supply of used Leicas following "The Great SLR Revolution" ? They're either being used by those who can find one, sitting in a "collection" unused, or forgotten someplace at Grandpa's house.

I don't think that we'll ever see a return to the traditional neighborhood camera shop with showcases full of used cameras, but then we now have a generation used to ordering on-line, and Fed-Ex will get it to you over night so you don't have to wait for Saturday to go shopping downtown. Odds are that the shipping will be less than you would have paid in sales tax had you bought from a local shop.

Those of us who grew up with traditional cameras, whether by Leica, Canon, Nikon, or even Yashica, Miranda, Pentax and others, might think that a Bessa just doesn't "exude quality" but college students don't all drive Mercedes and BMW's either. Nikon saw the future when they realized that their original Nikon F was priced out of the range of most people. They introduced a Mamiya made but Nikon badged camera equipped with the then new "Copal Square" shutter, which also had a much higher flash synch speed and a built in meter rather than the add-on metered prism of the F. The Nikkorex wasn't so much marketed as a "lower priced Nikon" than as a second body that could do things that your F couldn't do, yet still allowing use of all of your F optics. People didn't stop buying F bodies. A whole new bunch of photographers could now afford "a Nikon" and would be buying Nikon lenses.

Leica missed the boat when it let Zeiss grab the upgraded and rebadged Bessa. There will continue to be an over sixty crowd to buy "real" Leicas. In the meantime the Bessa is getting a lot of younger photographers back to rangefinders and film. A lot more than Puts is doing.
 
Everybody except Leica left the rangefinder market nearly forty years ago. First Zeiss, then Nikon, followed by Canon. Of course some cameras were still being produced in the Soviet Union, and Minolta half-heartedly flirted for a few years with the CL and CLE. The lens companies such as Schneider, Shacht, Angenieux, Komura, etc. stopped producing LTM glass about that time also.

Actually, we have it pretty good these days! Hey, Canon! How about a modernized VII with a behind the lens meter, M mount, black paint over brass option of course, and a modern design, perhaps aspheric, 50mm f/0.95 lens? And a new 19mm f/3.5 too!
 
Al,

You forget Contax. I was very close to buying a G2 just before the digital was let loose on us. If a suitable sensor - to a reasonable price, was to appear on the market, it could be technically possible to blow life into that old brand. With AF and all...
 
Al Kaplan said:
Everybody except Leica left the rangefinder market nearly forty years ago. First Zeiss,
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Which really still depresses me. How much better off photography as a whole would have been if they had built the Contax IV (S3 like finder, plans for TTL metering, Voigtlander glass... ) instead of opting for the money-pit that was the Contarex...

William
 
Spoks said:
Al,

You forget Contax. I was very close to buying a G2 just before the digital was let loose on us. If a suitable sensor - to a reasonable price, was to appear on the market, it could be technically possible to blow life into that old brand. With AF and all...
Click to expand...

Konica Hexar RF was made not that long ago too.
 
My advice to newbies: Buy a Leica MP and joy the next 60 years :D Someone will be able to repair it, you will be able to find film with 99% certainty and the rest is up to you. I dont think film will die and so neither will 35mm I suspect. The RF may only be made by one manufacturer in the end, but if it is, there will still be enough for those who want to buy new. For the rest, there are used cameras aplenty.

Puts has exactly what relevance to photography? He is neither a professional photographer nor a visionary. If he choked when the ZM lenses were released, what chance has he got of getting the future of RF right?
 
Four Thirds Film Format?

Four Thirds Film Format?

OK guys, my crazy idea: Take the basic Olympus Pen F body, shutter, film transport, meter, etc., but no SLR "guts". Adjust the thickness so it'll take M lenses. Make it with a rangefinder, looking out over both sides of the top of the shutter disc. Don't cripple the marketing folks with a namby-pamby name such as "Half-Frame" or "Single-Frame". Pick something BOLD lke "Four Thirds Film", FTF for short. Yup, that's it! The Pen FTF! We could jokingly refer to the new camera as the "F. U. Leica". :eek:
 
I am not so sure that the current gen-y crop shooting film in CRF or MF gear will be that long a trend. I see their commitment to be largely a reaction to pricing of high-end digital gear, inscrutable and dysfunctional user interface design and generally crappy image quality with respect to emotional content.

The young have time to their advantage -- no family responsibilities, low cost of living, entry level jobs that mostly do not require extra work during "free time" ... not to mention youthful energy. When those conditions change, we may see a huge falling off.

I personally don't care if Leica ever makes an M9. I am content with a film CRF, be it M4, ZI, CL/E, Bessa, etc. I cannot afford a new MP, much less an M8. I do not see how Leica can survive without a complete revamp of their pricing structure.

Thankfully the world is awash in used bodies and glass ... even new glass is somewhat reasonable from Zeiss and CV ... and one can stockpile chests full of film and chemicals to prepare for Digigeddon.
 
Maybe they're developing a hemispherical-shaped sensor that could then receive the light at the proper angle without using all the 'bells-and-whistles' being used today? :)
 
Take it further, Al. Leave out the film transport and replace it with a 1.5x RAW sensor. No LCD needed to make all those JPEG adjustments. Done. M9 killer.
 
Trius, I wasn't so much thinking of a "new" film format so much as figuring out a way to give the 18x24mm film format a more "macho" image. When the original Olympus Pen F, the meterless model that started the whole thing, hit the market back in 1964 there was plenty of speculation about a rangefinder version.

The Univex Mercury and Mercury II had no rangefinders, but the screw mount lens was interchangeable. I don't think that they, or anyone else for that matter, ever made another lens to fit it though. It also had a rotary shutter like the Pen F seies, but the camera was big, heavy, noisy, ugly, etc. I recall that it only got about 55 exposures per roll because the frames were slightly wider, about a 4x5 aspect ratio instead of 3x4.

Jamie, we now have a generation of casual photographers who wouldn't believe that they actually made an exposure if you denied them an LCD screen to chimp! Nor would they have a clue as what you do with a RAW file.
 
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