This makes the number of professional film cameras being produced today countable on one hand, and Leica, unusually, makes two of these – the MP (unveiled in 2003) and the Leica M-A (released more than a decade later in 2014). Nikon recently stopped selling the Cosina-produced FM10 (they still offer one pro film camera, the F6) and Leica just discontinued their most technologically advanced rangefinder film camera, the M7. Canon recently discontinued the EOS-1v, or more accurately announced that they ran out (production ended several years ago). Today, it’s rare to find a brand selling film cameras side by side with their digital bodies. Still, Leica never stopped making M cameras to their own unusually high standard. Sure, it’s a rangefinder, so it’s an extra complicated box, but Minolta, Canon, Voigtlander and others proved long ago that rangefinders can be made inexpensively and that people will buy the box without the exceptional build. This despite the fact that, as with all cameras, the Leica is nothing more than a complicated, light-tight box designed to suspend a lens a certain distance from a light-sensitive capture media. While the adjust and fit days of Leica manufacture are long gone, the brand is still emphatically committed to quality. Notably, Leica has rarely deviated from this philosophy, as the analogous Mercedes did during the 1990s when quality waned to compete on price with the newly-introduced Lexus LS400. Since its inception, Leica has operated under a similar ideology of quality at any price, and to enthusiasts of the brand and casual photographers alike Leica’s cameras have always embodied this ethos. With the 300SEL, Mercedes had instantly re-calibrated the luxury zeitgeist. It was also a car built to last generations, not just to the end of the financing period.
While others had attempted to combine luxury and serious performance, the 6.3 was the first to do so in a reliable, usable way. Up to that time, the 300SEL 6.3’s combination of engineering, ambition, and sheer bloody mindedness had never been matched. In 1968 Mercedes-Benz introduced the world to the pinnacle of the luxury sedan.
0 kommentar(er)
