Re: [Leica] Interesting Leica news

[Christer Almqvist <christer@almqvist.net>]

Quite good Martin, but last year's Swedish car boot sale story was better.
Or am I just being nationalistic?

Christer

>You know how Leica M cameras are renowned for being quiet?  Well, I read an
>interesting tid-bit in the news section of the German part of Leica's site
>today.  My German isn't the world's strongest (it's been a while since I
>studied it in high-school), but I'll do my best to convey the essense of
>their message.
>
>It turns out that the key to the quietness of the Leica M shutter is not
>just the level of the sound, but also it's frequency distribution.  With
>the recent popularity in rangefinder cameras (offerings from
>Cosina/Voigtländer and Konica just to mention two), Leica has apparently
>decided it needs to take steps to preserve that which is uniquely Leica
>about their cameras (in addition to the level of craftsmanship).  If I
>understand correctly, they've used some pretty sophisticated audio analysis
>software to exactly pinpoint what it is about the Leica shutter sound that
>makes it so unique (there are some German technical terms there that I'm
>not even going to attempt to translate).
>
>The most interesting part about all this is that they've applied for a
>copyright on the sound.  Apparently German law doesn't allow anything but
>hardcopy applications, so the solution was to sample 101 different M
>shutters, do some kind of sophisticated calculating of the "Eigenklang"
>(which I think is some kind of signature sound) and then print the
>resulting audio file out as numbers.  Yep, all 4711 pages of it.
>
>I wonder what the postage on a copy of the application would amount
>to... ;-)
>
>(See the whole thing at http://www.leica-camera.de/news)
>
>M.
>
>--                               | You can lead a horse to water, but
>Martin Howard                    | you can't get him to use floats when
>email : mvhoward@mac.com         | playing in the baby-pool.
>  web : http://mvhoward.i.am/    +--------------------------------------