Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/06/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Dan Dory began this thread by speculating that the ZI will not sell well & by supporting this statement with the assertion that the Konica Hexar RF "failed" despite being a very well engineered camera. First of all, we have no idea if the Hexar RF "failed." What we do know is that Konica made a business decision to discontinue production of this camera. This decision occurred at a time that they were going through a very complicated buy-out of Minolta & decided that the Minolta line would be the face of the company in camera products. The reasons why Konica decide to discontinue this low volume, niche market product are known only to Konica & are not necessarily an indication of failure. By many companies standards, the Leica M7 & MP would be considered "failures" & would have been discontinued long ago. Leica is losing money & has been for the past few years. This is not an indication of a successful product line. However, Leica has made a business decision to continue production of these cameras as they are the flagship products for the Leica line-up. Further, Leica is not sufficiently diversified to turn its attention to other more successful product lines as Konica, for example, is. Was the Hexar RF well engineered? Well built? In many ways, yes. However, its rangefinder was very fragile & was easily knocked out of vertical alignment. Regardless of how well built the rest of the camera is, this is a serious flaw in a RANGEFINDER camera. There was also, of course, the notorious lens compatibility problem - another serious problem when your own lens line is limited & you build an M-mount camera. Konica's marketing department did a terrible job of communicating with the public about this. One never got the feeling that Konica was seriously behind this product when they allowed such a problem to fester for as long as it did. They just seemed to be dabbling in the RF niche. If the ZI does not sell very well, this will be no different than the Leica M7 & MP, which we know do not sell very well. The real question is whether Zeiss is sufficiently committed to this product line to stick with a low sales volume niche. They certainly have a greater capability of doing this than Leica does. The other question, of course, is whether the real goal is production of a digital ZI. No film cameras are selling very well right now, so there is no reason to expect that the ZI will do any better than anyone else. And yet, Nikon has just come out with an F6, when the common wisdom is that this is a fool's errand. We know that Nikon will stick with the F6 for a full product run even if they lose money on it. Nikon is big enough to do this & it serves their corporate image to offer a full range of camera products - even if a niche is small & profit is low or non-esistent. time will tell whether Zeiss will take the same attitude with the ZI or whether they will abandon ship if interest is limited. Cheers, Bill