Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/09/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Responding to my comments of Lieca quality, Jim Brick <jim@brick.org> wrote: >A lot of what you just said becomes true only when you place the product on a pedestal, view the company as "God-like", and otherwise inspect every tiny detail of everything Leitz/Leica made/makes with a microscope. In my family, Leica photography is a hereditary disease, not a hobby. Thinking back to the hours spent talking Leica with my father, you're right - he did put Leica on a pedestal. To him, this was a rare example of a product built to a standard, not to a price. He was a collector/user (or should that be user/collector?) who took an immense pride in the fine quality of the cameras and lenses he used. >To take a hand made product one step farther and run a rigorous QC on every single item, would put the company out of business. I understood that's what Leitz and Leica claimed to do - rigorously test every single item. >Things like putting it on B (or not winding after the last shot), the loading door, etc, are things that you very quickly learn to use and then never give it a second thought. Here we're getting into the philosophy of what constitutes good design. As a former design engineer I believe the product should conform to the user, not the user to the product. A meter switch activated by pulling out the lever wind would have eliminated the problem with running down the batteries. I'm amazed how reliably the M6 loads, but this is neat work-around rather than in ideal solution. The first time I loaded my Leicaflex, I opened the rear door and thought "At last - a Leica which loads properly!". Good design, I was taught, involved many factors, but one of these factors was paying attention to detail. In my original posting I mentioned the way the M6 lever scuffs the top plate - well that's the sort of detail I mean. Back in the early 1980s, Leitz either didn't notice this was happening or didn't care. That's lack of attention to detail. A tiny scuff mark makes no difference to the camera's ability to take pictures - it's the sort of thing of concern only to a collector or a collector/user. But as a former designer, when I see one example where the designer didn't notice or didn't care, I wonder where else in the design he cut corners or was negligent. (I remember using this argument in the late 1960s when I took over a design project from a guy who'd quit. Finding careless minor errors in his work, I delayed passing the drawings for production until I'll checked his part of the design from end to end. That check took me a week, but uncovered a bad mistake which would have required a major rebuild after system delivery. However, lest my halo glow too brightly, I must admit that in the process of this check I failed to spot design error I'd committed, and which had to be corrected after delivery! <grin> One of the customer's engineers came up with a really neat fix - instead of redesigning things to remove my error, he devised a simple and inexpensive modification which made my error harmless!) Regards, Doug Richardson