a quick Leica ad...

[Dean Taylor]

here is a brief Leica lens advertisement...

[video=vimeo;26251829]http://vimeo.com/26251829[/video]

 

[gone]

The thing is hardly brief. Thanks for posting it, but I couldn't make it all the way through because it's really pretty boring and WAY too long.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Thanks for the link. I found that quite interesting. Wish it could have been longer.

Amazingly, I had no problem sitting still and paying attention for only 153 seconds to watch it.

Ken

 

[Richard S. (rich815)]

I thought the length was just right.

 

[summicron1]

saw something similar about mechanical processes, highly automated, making Canon (I think) lenses -- very automated, but seemingly very precise. Always fascinating.

 

[Jeff Kubach]

That was kinda cool.

Jeff

 

[cramej]

I thought the amount of dust on the lens element at 1:44 is amazing... and that she is handling lens elements with her bare hands. Hopefully she just had the gloves off for the video.

 

[BradleyK]

An interesting little advert. No doubt intended to get the average Leica Fanboys heart racing! lol

 

[E. von Hoegh]

I thought the amount of dust on the lens element at 1:44 is amazing... and that she is handling lens elements with her bare hands. Hopefully she just had the gloves off for the video.

Typical advertising fluff, superficial to the point of being misleading. It would take a long series of one-hour programs to do any justice at all to the science of lens design and the near-art of manufacture. "Manual blackening of lens edges, for a perfect result" or some such...

When after WWII the Japanese started making cameras and lenses which were every bit as good as Leitz, Leitz realised that, even though they made exceptionally good cameras fitted with exceptionallly good lenses they couldn't compete with Japan without some kind of gimmick. In the 1950s, you could find ads for Leica in fashion magazines, travel mags, etc. This was the beginning of Leica KoolAid. Pros bought Leicas for the quality, the rest for the image. It was the image buyers that kept Leica in business, much like Rolex.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Sure...

But I still found it interesting just to see some of the steps being performed. For example, we all know that engraving is an automated process. But I had never actually watched the tooling perform that task on a lens. Kinda' neat to see.

I'm not so much worried about secondary or tertiary ulterior motives. Just the experience of seeing and learning new things is always rewarding to me all by itself.

Ken

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

When after WWII the Japanese started making cameras and lenses which were every bit as good as Leitz, Leitz realised that, even though they made exceptionally good cameras fitted with exceptionallly good lenses they couldn't compete with Japan without some kind of gimmick. In the 1950s, you could find ads for Leica in fashion magazines, travel mags, etc. This was the beginning of Leica KoolAid. Pros bought Leicas for the quality, the rest for the image. It was the image buyers that kept Leica in business, much like Rolex.

Go , have test your IQ.

 

[Zathras]

Go , have test your IQ.

WTF???

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

People buying 10 dollar Nikon and than want to believe that is better than Leica. If someone do such a thing
look mom , I have a Toyota Corolla and better than Mercedes.

If Leica products have high quality and people are buying

What to say for Nikon users ?

 

[Dan Fromm]

Mustafa, people have been banned from this board for calling other posters losers and idiots. Think about that before you post insults. And think about what your insults tell us about you.

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

Why people dont get banned for puting Leica users as brand hunter idiots ? Do someone need to be call me openly idiot or post Leica users as rolex users ? What is the meaning of calling me as brand hunter , is not it saying we are idiots ?

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Losers? Idiots?

It was a 2½-minute video showing a few of the manufacturing steps used to make a camera lens. It was interesting and fun to watch. I saw some things I hadn't seen before. I enjoyed that.

Am I missing something more sinister here?

Ken

 

[Zathras]

People buying 10 dollar Nikon and than want to believe that is better than Leica. If someone do such a thing
a - he is loser and
b - a real idiot like that example

Well well well, somebody just earned himself a spot on my ignore list.

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

ah I am so sorry to lose you !

 

[shashinzukuri]

Mustafa, don't take it so personally; nobody is calling you a brand hunter (at least not on purpose). E. Von Hoegh was saying that, just like BMW or Rolex, Leica has customers who buy because they appreciate and take advantage of the quality, and customers who buy because they like the reputation and cachet. You have to admit it's true - do you really think that someone paid 1.8 million USD for the Jony Ive Leica because it was that fantastic a practical working camera?

( And no, of course a Toyota Corolla isn't the same as a Mercedes - but even Mercedes engineers will admit that Lexus gives them very good competition for all but the very best, custom-built cars, the kind the factory spends a year or two making sure is exactly right for you. For everything else, they're not necessarily better or worse, just different. )

 

[Richard S. (rich815)]

I think it's time.

 

[Newt_on_Swings]

I noticed the dirty lens a well in the clip. The show how it's made also had a very nice segment on the manufacture of modern lenses. There is also a very nice video though dated called quality in photo graphic lenses which covered every step of the process in detail.

http://youtu.be/X7_wL0ZZi6k

http://youtu.be/tpziDTklPs0

 

[georg16nik]

...
When after WWII the Japanese started making cameras and lenses which were every bit as good as Leitz, Leitz realised that, even though they made exceptionally good cameras fitted with exceptionallly good lenses they couldn't compete with Japan without some kind of gimmick. In the 1950s, you could find ads for Leica in fashion magazines, travel mags, etc. This was the beginning of Leica KoolAid. Pros bought Leicas for the quality, the rest for the image. It was the image buyers that kept Leica in business, much like Rolex.

After WWII, Japan was placed under international control of the American-led Allied powers in the Asia-Pacific region through General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.

So, its not like Japan woke up the morning after WWII and started making cameras and lenses to compete with Leitz, Zeiss etc.
Japan received knowledge boost from the allied powers and used it to mimic German optics.
By the time Japan managed to produce passable cameras, Leitz and Zeiss shifted into aerospace optics, cartography etc., alongside the only veteran in that game., Russia.

In the meantime Voigtländer was killed by Zeiss, so Japan was pretty much left alone in the consumer photo camera field.

Present day Canons, Nikons, Olys, Fujis. camera designs clearly shows Japan still lacks innovation and taste.
In the meantime, their customers are snapping more and more with smartphones.

 

[Dan Fromm]

Typical advertising fluff, superficial to the point of being misleading. It would take a long series of one-hour programs to do any justice at all to the science of lens design and the near-art of manufacture. "Manual blackening of lens edges, for a perfect result" or some such...

When after WWII the Japanese started making cameras and lenses which were every bit as good as Leitz, Leitz realised that, even though they made exceptionally good cameras fitted with exceptionallly good lenses they couldn't compete with Japan without some kind of gimmick. In the 1950s, you could find ads for Leica in fashion magazines, travel mags, etc. This was the beginning of Leica KoolAid. Pros bought Leicas for the quality, the rest for the image. It was the image buyers that kept Leica in business, much like Rolex.

Emil, to disagree a little, what killed Leitz in particular was the world's shift from rangefinder to SLR cameras. Leitz took their time developing the Leicaflex, brought an uncompetitive product to market and never made a really satisfactory anti-Nikon. After they gave up on their own design they made Minolta SLRs under license, but not as well as Minolta made them.

What killed most of the European manufacturers of photographic equipment for the civilian market was Japan's cost advantage and responsiveness to consumer demand. Some Japanese makers turned out very high quality equipment, others weren't so good. Remember Miranda? Many features, nil reliability. Remember early Sigma brand lenses? Poor performance, nil reliability, but cheap.

When Eric Beltrando and I were working on our Boyer article he shared a story with me. Boyer's last owner was a man of high integrity. Boyer received a request to bid on making lenses for small format cine projectors, refused to bid because the owner knew he couldn't match Japanese lens makers' prices. The customer told him to bid anyway, said that Boyer's quality was so high that he'd never rejected a lens Boyer had sent him and that the rejection rate for the lenses he got from Japan was intolerable.

Re watches, as soon as I was old enough to work legally my parents sent me to work for a jeweler. In those days Rolex were seen in the trade as second rate, Omega as third rate. People who knew wore unobtrusive Pateks. The jeweler was Bueche Girod's US agent. IIRC, BG was the first with a 1 mm thick man's watch.

 

[shashinzukuri]

Georg, that's a nice story, but it's grossly unfair to the Japanese. To be sure, they received a lot of assistance in post-war reconstruction, but they transformed into a world-class manufacturing and design power and made a lot of genuine contributions along the way.

Asahi (now Pentax) invented the automatic-return mirror in 1954, with the Asahiflex IIB. Nikon introduced the F in 1959. I think it's pretty safe to say that they were building "passable" cameras by then, and it's very likely that without the contributions from Asahi the 35mm SLR wouldn't have nearly the dominance that it does today.

Leica was so "innovative" that they wrote off SLRs as a passing fad until 1964, when they introduced the LeicaFlex, and they were so chronically far behind in features and design that they gave up and partnered with Minolta in 1976 to catch up, an arrangement that lasted through the R7's retirement in 1996. It's only recently that they stopped rebadging Panasonics for their compact digital line.
Voigtlander/Zeiss didn't stop producing cameras until 1972, thirteen years after the F made Nikon an unmistakable contender. For having "shifted into aerospace optics, cartography etc.," they sure took a long time to wind down that factory.
Kodak was building consumer cameras in the US and Germany both until well into the eighties.

The Germans didn't think, "Oh, the Japanese can build passable cameras now, so we should leave that multimillion-dollar market to them. Time to do aerospace and cartography lenses." That was a knock-down, drag-out fight for market share.

In the meantime, Japan put out some truly world-class cameras and optics. The XPan is widely praised, and that's a Fuji design. Fuji has a long history of building new, interesting cameras, "just because they can". They even released a new, very tasteful GF670 in 2009. Think about that: they built a new film camera in 2009! Ctein rates some of the EL Nikkors as the best enlarging lenses he ever saw, and certainly the Cosina lenses are no joke. The Mamiya 7 lenses are triumphs of manufacturing precision, and the tests say they'll go toe-to-toe with anything Leica ever put on an M, only bigger. Japanese companies certainly owe a debt of inspiration to the Germans for the head start, but it's no more than they owe for the automobile. In the meantime, they raised the bar in a very big way, and photographers everywhere came out ahead as a result.

A good lens is a good lens, and a good camera is a good camera. Some German companies build world-class optics. Some Japanese companies build world-class optics. Some American companies build world-class optics! Who do you think builds the sniper scopes that can draw a bead on a target a mile and a half away? Why are you people so invested in ignoring Japanese achievements and contributions? I swear, I love my Zeiss lenses as much as the next guy, and I'd like to own a Leica one day, but this cultish Teutonic superiority complex gets really, really old.

 

[oldtelehacker]

Interesting video

I used to grind & polish lenses in an ophthalmic lab in the '60s. Interesting to see that the basic principles haven't changed but we'd have donated organs to have precision equipment like in that video.

RE:Sniper scopes, Raytheon ELCAN in Midland, Ont. are a major supplier. That area was at one time home to a few optical companies (Bausch & Lomb, American Optical). Interestingly, Raytheon ELCAN is the old Ernst Leitz CANada plant, home of the made in Canada Leitz lenses and the M4-2 and M4-P camera.