Hacker News Reader

Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

I never quite understood Leica. The quality of their products is undoubtedly extremely high, I won't try to deny that and they deserve credit for decades of excellence in the field.

But as the owner of a Voigtländer R4A coupled with a Nokton 35mm f/1.4 (bought for a total of $1200, which was quite the investment for me) I can't help but be amazed by how much it would have cost me to buy the Leica equivalent (5 times that amount). It's quite obvious looking at the results that Leica does not offer that superior a result for that hefty price (and even though I know that it's a tad simplistic to reason in those terms, it certainly wouldn't have bought me 5 times the quality).

Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value. Hats off to them for reaching that lucrative niche market.

View on HN

> Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value.

For me Apple stands for high quality products that really work. Just recently I sold a 7 year old Macbook for 250 euro. Back then it was the cheapest aluminium Macbook for about 1200 euro. The aluminium body was as new. I don't know any other laptop that looks like new after seven years of heavy use. Let alone that you can get 20% of the value back.

Take a look at the built quality: the body, keyboard, touchpad, power connector - this is design that works. It works for me at least, and I can't imagine that all these people I see nowadays with their really expensive laptops and iphones, that they still buy if for status.

Take my iPods. The first one, first generation touch, is still working as music player. The second broke after five years of living in my jeans with heat and cold, sweat and rain. I've used my first Mac, a G4 desktop, for 9 years.

All these were relatively expensive products, but totally worth the money.

> Let alone that you can get 20% of the value back.

Then you have never heard of Thinkpads.

> Take my iPods. The first one, first generation touch, is still working as music player.

Lucky if the battery is not dead. If it is, you need to bring it to an Apple Store to replace it. Perfect design.

Out of curiosity, how many power adapters did you get though with the Macbook Pro?

Not the parent, but I've still got a MBP adapter that has to be at least seven years old, and it still get regular use. Out of the four or five MBP/Airs between the wife and I, we've never had a power adapter go bad. We also don't have contests to see who can wrap the wires of the adapter the tightest with the tightest loops, so that might have some bearing on our results.

FWIW, I don't recall ever having to replace a modern-style Mac power adapter. I had one of the early first generation Magsafe ones fail, but the later ones of those have lasted years, and so far all of the second-generation (thin) Magsafe ones are fine too. Pre-magsafe I went through a lot.

Just one. I'm always very careful with it. The cable was still intact. One of the common problems many people have is with breaking cable, especially at the end of the adapter. I always make sure it has enough space.

Wrong on several counts:

1. Their digital bodies are garbage (that's how they're different from Apple). I owned an M9 and between its crappy sensor and faux leather peeling off, I was not impressed at all. The only good thing about that camera was the rangefinder.

2. Their lenses, on the other hand, really have no equal in the industry, and as the very best they rightfully command a steep premium. I had two: 50mm and 35mm Summiluxes. They really put everything else to shame, and they most certainly do offer a superior result. What other f/1.4 lenses do you know of that can be actually used at f/1.4 without significant resolution loss or veiling? OK, nowadays there's Zeiss Otus at 55mm, but it's also not cheap and it's three times the size. Add to that also that Leica lenses are extremely well made and compact, and you'll see why people are willing to part with large quantities of cash to own them.

I'd argue if you're using Canon's 35mm F1.4 at anything other than F1.4 you're wasting a lot of money.

I hear the v2 rev is also very sharp compared to the original. Although I find the rendering of the original quite good enough.

When would you ever want to shoot at f1.4? The low light argument makes less sense in the context of digital cameras with VR lenses, since bumping up the ISO a stop or two, or using a longer shutter speed, would usually degrade the overall quality of the image less than having almost everything out of focus. Nothing wrong with a bit of bokeh, but at the focal lengths typically used with a full frame sensor, f1.4 will almost always give you less than the desired depth of field.

All the time, otherwise you'd buy the 35mm F2 and save about $1.2k.

Depth of Field is a function of Aperture , Focal Length and Distance to plane of focus.

The focal length drives how wide the "scatter" of the blur is, so wide angle lenses like the 35mm have a very "soft" blur as opposed to something like a 400mm F2.8 which just obliterates backgrounds. This is also driven by how close you are focusing so you can shoot a 35mm F1.4 wide open, focusing around ~15ft away and the detail of the scene is very much preserved. It lets you focus on a subject and give them a slight "pop" of focus while keeping the rest of scene coherent.

Can you give an example of the sort of scene you have in mind? I often play around with 4x5 photography, where it would be trivially easy to get that effect for a subject 15ft away with a $100 lens, but I've never actually wanted to do it.

Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF. [edit] If I remember my lens geometry correctly, film size is just the other side of focal length when it comes to bokeh calculations.

I grabbed this random image from the 35L group on Flickr, they didn't include EXIF so I can't be 100% certain they shot it at F1.4 but it looks very close to shots I have at F1.4 from that lens.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/49830238@N04/25021998886/in/po...

>Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF.

It’s only the focal length and aperture that contribute to DoF. With a larger sensor you are typically using longer focal lengths since you need a longer focal length to get the same FoV. That being said, you also have the option of using movements on 4x5, so subject separation can be achieved by changing the plane of focus even when using a narrow aperture. There are some very technically accomplished examples of this at http://www.p1600.com/en/portfolio/london_5x4/ (not my photos), but on balance I think that these are more of a technical tour de force than an artistic success.

There's no way to know what aperture the photo you linked to was shot at, but it doesn't look to me like it would have to be particularly wide. Honestly, I find it a bit depressing that there are flickr groups fetishizing particular lenses.

4x5 is a whole nother beast though. We're talking about SLRs and fixed-lens cameras. Usually you don't get any movements and very little options on that front unless you're using a TS-E.

Don't see any reason why the one I picked wouldn't be shot at F1.4.

Anyway, here's another random one that does have EXIF that shows what I mean. Just because you're shooting at F1.4 doesn't mean that everything is blown away.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoncowellphoto/5534870906

I guess you can call if "fetishizing" a lens if you want but it's a very popular lens for a reason.

Hmm, the second photo is a case where everything is pretty much at infinity, so the only significant consequence of using a very wide aperture is that you’re letting more light in. (Yeah, you can see that the background is very slightly out of focus compared to the bikes, but the defocusing is so slight that it looks more like a mistake than a deliberate effect.)

Plus, look, I know that you didn't choose the photo for it's artistic qualities, but that photo sucks, and the comments on it are like "omg you have a 35L and the photos are sharp". Who the fuck cares if the photos are bad?

The vast majority of the photos in the group either have (i) pretty much everything in the picture in acceptably sharp focus (so that even if they were shot at f1.4, they didn’t have to be) or (ii) a close subject (so that a very wide aperture was not necessary to get good separation). Is it possible to imagine scenarios where you need f1.4 to obtain the desired effect? Yeah, sure. But they’re precisely the scenarios that rarely lead to good compositions. I.e., middle ground in focus and foreground and background out of focus.

35 benefits significantly from f/1.4. 50 benefits too, but to a lesser extent. You get better subject separation at greater distances.

I would like to shoot at 0.95 forever, even in full midday light, because lenses are dreaming at that aperture. https://www.flickr.com/photos/102221463@N02/24974701115/

Compared to 35mm 'Lux, Canon is a Coke bottle bottom. It's worse than Nikon 35 f/1.4, and it is really an f/2 lens at best, with inflated specs. Rent a Lux if you get a chance. I held Canon/Nikon in much higher regard until I tried Leica.

Cool, I'll make sure to drop my 35L off at the local recycling center then.

From what I've seen the Canon 35L II is unbeaten

Well, for me Apple is nothing about status nor perceived value. I'm just much more productive using their laptops than others. Cover it in black paint, same result. And once you are looking for high-end laptops, the margin is not such a big thing, really.

But yeah, Leica gear is out of the question for me (and most others I would guess), price-wise.

At least for me, productivity on laptops is very high after a large initial hurdle when using something like Arch Linux, for instance. In my grade school days I spent a good amount of time familiarizing myself with package managers, desktop environments, etc. and now that I have found an ideal setup (i3 WM) I've stuck with it for years. I find my system is faster due to the lighter environment, more consistent on a day-to-day level due to no automatic updates, and more flexible if I ever need to change my workflow. Additionally, with Linux I more feel like I'm working with most developer tooling rather than against. Given the downsides of traveling this road, I wouldn't recommend it to many people, however.

I think avoiding that large initial hurdle is a large part of Apple's value.

It's absolutely valuable if Mac / OS X is your first and only computing environment. But the hurdle comes when you work in multiple desktop environments, and everything else works similarly enough except for your Mac.

Yeah, I hate their shortcuts. I'm actually selling mine because of this, and just run Windows+Linux. (I use Windows at work)

If I were wealthy (let us say the 1%) I would probably pay 10 times the price for double the quality, because at that level the value of money is not that great because one is oversupplied with it.

While I understand the sentiment, the thing is you do NOT get twice the Bessa's quality when purchasing a Leica camera. Hard to quantify, but it's probably more in the 1.2x range.

Yes, definitely not double. In fact, they aren't actually better than other top end competitors, they are just a bit different, which gives enough wiggle room for fanboys to claim something "magical".

http://www.dxomark.com/Reviews/Leica-M-review-How-does-the-n...

That said, I really like the manual focus tabs on the lenses and the mechanism on the Q looks interesting. The Q is also newer so likely has a few improvements, but in general Leica has always been a bit behind the likes of Nikon, Sony, and Fuji in terms of electronics and firmware. Where they win is build quality.

You might also pay that much if you shot photos professionally, instead of as an amateur like most of HN probably does.

Especially for build quality, if it is a daily tool.

Professionals are mostly likely to be more objective about what they need and are buying, if they view it as a tool (in my experience, at least).

exactly, there are scenarios in which even very small improvements in quality of a product will be worth a great increase in price to the target market.

another situation would be a serious hobbyist, that is to say taking photos is their main enjoyment away from work. They might be willing to spend a lot more even with small benefit.

Camera's, like many complex to produce object, suffer badly from the effect of economy of scale. This way you end up paying far more for incremental improvements.

Think of the price curve in, say a 50mm prime from 1.8, to 1.4, to 1.2 (and beyond). You can end up with 10x the cost, not because you are getting something objectively 10x better, but because relatively few are made. If the extra couple of stops really buy you something, or you love the optics, and you can pay the 10x, maybe you will (build quality is in there somewhere).

This is true.

Though, a Canon 50mm 1.2L is ludicrously bigger than a 50mm 1.8. You might actually be paying the same per pound of glass.

(Okay, so one weighs 4oz, and the other 14oz)

> it's all about status and perceived value

Yet the author of this post taped off the lettering to make it look like a generic camera.

Here in Asia Leica is sold in high end fashion malls, not in the photography equipment or electronics area of town. In fact in Japan there's a Leica counter in the men's fashion accessories area of Mitsukoshi Mens in Ginza. In Hong Kong there's one in Harbour City, a high end fashion mall. In Singapore there's one in ION Orchard, another fashion mall. Where as if you want any other brand of camera in all those cities you go to the electronics area of town. Akihabara or Shinjuku's Yodobashi Camera in Japan, Mong Kok in HK, Sim Lim or Funan Digitallife Mall in SG

In other words, Leica themselves are positioning their cameras as fashion accessories. Something to show you have $$$$$$

If I were Leica and I could sell my camera as accessory in a fashion mall, why not? This tells me more about the people shopping there, than about Leica. It's probably not Leica positioning themselves there, but some smart business people seeing good margins.

The market for luxury fashion items is a lot bigger than the market for specialist cameras.

I notice the more serious Leica shooters, especially street photogs, tape the lettering. Probably to stay inconspicuous to both their subjects and watchful thieves. IIRC, Leica has a couple of recent models where the red dot has been removed from the face of the camera.

I'm guessing most status shooters leave the face untouched to show the world that they're using a Leica.

Taping the logo is an anti-theft measure.

Leica is certainly very expensive. But I have both the Voigtländer 40/1.4 and the Leica 50/1.4. The 40 is a very nice lens and certainly the better bang for the buck. On the other side it is very clear that the 50 is the technical superior lens. It has a lot more contrast, especially wide open, and is the sharper lens. And as some photos in the article show, Leica lenses have a special way of rendering an image. Is this worth the extra you pay for a Leica lens? Everyone has to decide for himself. But when I see people spending more money on a set of fancy rims for their car, I rather have the Leica lens.

To a first approximation, $1200 probably sounds like "too much to pay" for a camera to the same number of people that $5000 does. We all have our baseline for what a camera "should" cost...and somewhere, I suspect, someone is thinking "$1200? I can get a DSLR for $500!" and to that "I will just use my phone, thank you very much."

One of the things about Lecia is that it supports it's customers and will repair their cameras. Nobody fixes Coolpix L11's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

What I was going to say. I've heard Leicas more than once called dentists' cameras.

Edit: No disrespect to dentists intended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com