nextreme said:
Hey rsl, interesting, but I don't think all of those components require changing for the camera to be brought up to a more current state. I think people would be happy with sensor upgrades first and foremost, which would call for a firmware update and possibly the A/D converter (which I *think* is built into the sensor, like the new Sony Exmor, so might not even be an issue). The rest of the components you list are icing I think.
Anyhow, like I said in another post somewhere, I'm not an M8 owner. I've never owned a Leica. But from where I'm sitting, their idea doesn't make them look like they're living in the past, quite the contrary, their doing something that no other camera company offers.
As Sitemistic pointed out above, the other companies aren't doing this because they want to stay in business.
Probably not all of those components will need to be changed at once for the camera to be brought up to the state of the art as it exists six months from now, but when you look three years out, most will need to be changed. What's more, if a really big breakthrough comes along it may simply not be possible to bring the camera up to the new state of the art. Have any idea how much a sensor replacement will cost? I suspect it'll be pretty close to the original price of the camera. Besides that, though I'm not a camera designer, from what I read there are a number of things that need to be fine-tuned together to make the whole thing work well.
All in all I think a digital camera is like a microcomputer. It has a relatively short life on point. It wasn't all that many years ago that people were changing out motherboards and various other components to keep their microcomputers up to the state of the art. But that didn't work out too well. The art changed state a bit too fast.
On the other hand, if you have a really solid digital camera in your hands, even though the state of the art moves on, there's no reason you need to abandon it. My wife's still shooting with a Casio QV3000EX, which, if I remember correctly, was the first 3.3 megapixel consumer camera. It came out in 2000 and it still does fairly good work. This past year I occasionally fell back on my D100 for available light shots in fairly dark business establishments since the D2X doesn't do that very well. Neither the Casio nor any of my Nikons has ever so much as coughed, much less started throwing green bands down its frames, locking up, losing random frames, etc. The D3 appears to be the most solid of them all and I expect to go on using it for at least five years no matter what happens to the state of the art.
But a camera has to be pretty trouble free before that makes sense. Right now Leica's problem with the M8 isn't how to keep it up to the state of the art, but how to turn it into a reliable instrument. I'd be beating a dead horse if I commented further on that point.
