A medium format DSLR.

With all the money wasted in making the underwhelming Leica M8, a dated and obsolete 35mm format SLR and the silly rebadging of Panasonic point-and-shoots, you would think it was all over at Leica. With its modest resources the company is foolishly trying to compete against the vast capital of Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax, etc. all of whom make cameras far superior to anything from Leica at a fraction of the price.

Well, finally, Leica has taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and is Thinking Different.

The Leica S2. A 30 x 45mm 38 megapixel sensor and a new range of lenses.

Clearly a premium product which should appeal to many professionals, this camera would seem to compete directly with the Hasselblad H range of digital cameras and, I would guess, would be priced similarly, meaning $30,000+ for the body alone. The DSLR format (much like the Pentax 6×7 in concept, but digital) makes for a far easier to use camera than the more tripod oriented Hasselblads and the lens range promised is impressive.

The sensor is made by Fujitsu, and unknown quantity, so it will be interesting to see how it performs. Much of the design work seems to have been done by Phase One, an established presence in larger format digital cameras. That’s encouraging.

Of special note is the fact that all the lenses will have leaf shutters which are ideal for flash sync, as they will properly expose the whole frame with flash at any shutter speed. Of course, the inclusion of a shutter in each lens makes the lenses costlier and Leica lenses are already very expensive, thanks to an overpaid, lazy, unionized German workforce. In fairness to Leica, the many Leica lenses I have used over the years have, without exception (OK, the 1930s 50mm f/2 Summar was a real dog above f/4) been superior to just about anything out there. The Apo-Macro Summarit f/2.5 120mm (equivalent to 85mm on a full frame camera) looks especially mouthwatering. And, joy of joys, Leica has finally discovered autofocus, some 20 years after Japanese SLR makers added this great technology to their interchangeable lenses. I would guess the lenses will retail well north of $5,000 each though who knows what the dollar price will be once the kindergarten known as the US Congress gets through with destroying our currency.

Promised for the summer of 2009, if the company survives that long, you can read more at Leica’s poorly designed, lugubrious web site – if you have the patience to get through all the mindless and time wasting flash videos.

If the camera ever gets into volume manufacture, it could fairty be said that this is truly the first innovative camera design from Leica since the M3, which I used for some 30 years. That game changer first sold in 1954 ….