[Leica] Shopping on paper

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Martin Howard:
>>>I think the EOS fell victim to this: in the equation, for most
people, 10ms
shutter lag didn't seem like a big bonus.  They could live with 100ms
quite
happily.  On the other hand, I'm sure that many could envision a
situation
where 1/2 stop more speed would be very welcome.  That situation may not

occur very often, but it occurs more often and has more impact on the
average consumer SLR user's odd critical picture than the 90ms shorter
has.<<<


Martin,
Perhaps, but my point was that I think that "envisioning situations
where 1/2 stop more speed would be very welcome" is a mental construct,
as it happens, or at least it was for me. That is, it's only important
when you're "envisioning" or imagining. The difference between shopping
on paper and actually experiencing something in use is sometimes
insignificant, but sometimes it reveals a different order of beast.

Consider how it is when features, or the lack of features, usually
matter: it's when they frustrate you. If you use a 35-70 lens and
constantly jam up against the short or the long end, you'll say, "What I
really want it is a 24-70" or "what I should get is a 35-135." If a
camera will only meter to 1 second, one photographer could photograph
for years without ever being frustrated, and another will feel betrayed
by the camera the first time he puts it on a tripod in low light and
expects it to AE at even slower speeds. I don't ever use a twinkie
light, so guess how much I care about flash features? They don't exist
to me. But other photographers get vitally interested in _battery
technology_, for heaven's sake, because they've been frustrated by
running low on flash power at the end of a hard day's shoot.

And so it goes.

The experience of using an RT was in fact much nicer than you might
expect from looking at its features and imagining what it might be like
to use it. It wasn't so much a matter of the reduced shutter-lag time,
as it was a combination of the lack of vibration, lower noise, increased
responsiveness, and lack of mirror blackout; it took the thing a third
of the way to the rangefinder experience while still leaving it endowed
with some of the advantages of SLRs--a bit of a "best of both worlds"
thing--and that was nice. And for me, despite plenty of shooting in
"available darkness" with P3200 and so forth, that fraction of a stop
you're talking about never frustrated. You never notice it. You never
try to handhold 1/6th and think to yourself, "Damn, if I could only get
to 1/10th!" If that fraction of a stop really mattered so much, then
people would never buy zoom lenses.

Photographers were also put off the RT because they imagined that having
the pellicle mirror in the path of the image-forming light from the lens
would reduce sharpness. I heard this objection a lot when the RT was
current. It was in their imaginations. I spent many hours poring over
slides and negs with a high-power loupe (I was more a more conscientious
reviewer in those days <g>), and concluded that the results from the RT
were actually _sharper_ than from the 10S and EOS 1 I compared it to, I
suppose because of the lack of internal vibration. Never assume....

Naturally, people do have to shop on paper. It's too arduous to do
anything else. (I get paid for experiencing everything firsthand,
remember.) Of course, it's for this reason that lots of people decide
against the R8, or the M6....

Consider a feature list something like this:

- --shutter speeds only to 1/1000th, and seldom precisely accurate.
- --can't accept zoom lenses, long teles, macro lenses, or shift lenses.
- --no built-in motor.
- --no autofocus.
- --no d.o.f. preview.
- --no self-timer.
- --no AE.
- --persistent parallax error at close-focusing distances.
- --inconsistent viewfinder framing, depending on focusing distance.

Now why would any careful shopper buy that? The M6 looks postively
perverse on paper. So then how come it has jaded veteran photographers
composing love poems to it at the 1,000th roll of film, and the
10,000th? Which kind of camera is better? Nobody here should have any
trouble answering that one.

I do feel that the tendency of buyers to shop on paper has led camera
designers astray in general. It's led to lots of cameras that are
designed primarily to sell--to appeal prmarily to the analyzing
imagination, while poring over the brochures and the spec sheets--and,
oh, by the way, only secondarily to be satisfying, comfortable,
controllable, and responsive to use, and durable.

So what else is new under the sun?

- --Mike