RYP wrote:M9 Is 80% there and waaaaaay too friggin expensive. BUT if you want Leica lenses kickin it at f1.4 and f2 then its the only way to go. I use the Panasonic because it has a Leica lens without all the pretense.
Leica should get out of the camera business and stick to lenses. They also need to use a CMOS chip and dump Kodak.
Uh, the lenses are made by Panasonic, and Leica sends them a bunch of stickers put in front of them, in exchange for a ton of money. Well that and they supposedly do camera control (which the Japanese are basically able to do on their own).
The lenses are actually quite good, but so are nikon's and canon's and just about everybody else's for a given price range.
One of the reasons why Leica (-made) glass is so good is that they actually tweak their optical designs for each batch of materials.
Lensmakers buy glass in bulk from third parties (generally Hoya), but you can't get exactly the same properties each time, no matter what you try.
Leica apparently tests each time it receives new material, reoptimizes the design and manufactures to the new specification, so they're all winners.
The result for other companies is that A) the lenses they produce have differing optical properties (which leads to connoisseurs trying to locate exemplars in specific serial number ranges) and B) they are constrained in the optical designs they can choose from (because the design has to allow for some variation in glass specification.
Thath being said, in my experience, most lenses sold today are good enough, especially for the sort of thing you do. Nobody's going to look at a picture of 8 year old kid holding an ak47 and say "Cool, but if only I could count the tree rings on that stump in the background"... :D
Mr. Andrea Matranga
andreamatranga.googlepages.com
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Those who aren't afraid to die for their ideals, can only die once. The others die every day."
Paolo Borsellino, who only died once