We are all guilty of it.

There’s a car that is one of the fastest in the world. It is exceptionally affordable. It is supremely reliable, has very high engineering standards and comes in red, if you want. It’s possibly the fastest production car made yet the manufacturer cannot give them away because the brand is wrong. It connotes nothing so much as beer-bellied ol’ boys at the ball park on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Not the image you quite want for something that is meant to advertise “I am single, available and sexy”.

That car, of course, is Chevrolet’s Corvette. A Ferrari with like performance and looks (OK, like performance) is five times the price.

A branding failure, no matter how much GM tells you it’s there to reinforce the message of Chevy excellence. I wouldn’t be seen dead in one.

It’s the same with watches. We have all been told a thousand times that a quartz Timex keeps time as well as anything, and that is correct, yet I have two manually wound timepieces in the desk drawer which cost egregious sums to acquire and are anything but accurate, not to mention needing constant, costly maintenance. I wear neither so there they are, waiting for …. I know not what. But the makers, unlike Chevy, got the branding dead right. Low production volumes, word of mouth advertising, scarcity, exclusivity. That’s what makes a brand.

It used to be that way with cameras.

The esteemed brands which shared the qualities of those watches were few. In the ’50s the Speed Graphic (crude and effective) and the Linhof (anything but crude, and equally effective) ruled, but only one was a brand in the sense of this piece. It was not the Speed Graphic.

Rolleiflex has always been a brand and remains so to this day. Any number of great photographers used waist-level Rolleis, ungainly as they may be, and some great studio work is being done to this day with their ne plus ultra medium format, single lens reflexes. I owned one of these nuclear deterrents many years (a 6003 Pro) and it was as easy to use as any medium format camera can ever claim to be easy to use. And it was a real Brand. When you locked that Zeiss Planar or Distagon lens on the body you were not the sort of person to be messed with.

In the ’60s there was really only one 35mm brand. The Leica. Cartier-Bresson used one. That’s all you had to know and no advertisements were needed to remind you of that.

The final years of great brands were the ’70s. A fading Leica gave way to the Nikon F which is to the Leica like Hulk Hogan is to Audrey Hepburn. Neither breaks easily, but one also doubles as a blunt weapon. Thanks to an America which appears yet again to have invaded the wrong country, Viet Nam gave the Nikon F its baptism. Thereafter there were no excuses needed for its Far East provenance. It had become a brand.

Then something funny started to happen to the whole brand idea. Maybe taking a leaf out of Chevy’s book they reasoned “We have the Corvette. Why not make some econoboxes. The brand might wear off.” So Canon, Nikon et al started making genuinely horrid consumer cameras, emblazoned with their name in a prominent, contrasting shade on the front. Now Aunt Maude could make sure everyone knew that she too, like Donald McCullin, used a Nikon.

Others came at it from the opposite direction. So desperate was Olympus to be seen that they gave British birdman Eric Hosking several sets of gear to displace his aging Zeiss Contarex. It worked. The former maker of toys was suddenly being taken seriously. Pentax did the same with David Bailey and Sam Haskins while Minolta did it with David Hamilton. More recently, new brands have piggybacked on their reputations in other fields. Ricoh and Casio make great copiers, so why not cameras? Samsung of TV fame? Why, cameras of course. And there’s no need to go on about Sony and HP.

So brand identity, in a strange way, lost its elitist leanings. First, counterculture chic dictated that the rich be seen wearing Swatch watches and using disposable cameras (for their equally disposable photographs). Second, who was to know whether your Leica was the cheapy Panny from China with the red dot, or the more-money-than-sense M8 (probably also from China but they aren’t telling)? Labels, in other words, had obsoleted brands. If you can get millions to buy your Benetton emblazoned T shirt so that you can go motor racing, then clearly the label means more than the brand.

So rather than further rue the demise of Great Brands, let me just let you gaze at some of the finest, most of which I have been fortunate to use and exult in.

Much anticipation leads to a failed product.

My primary interest in the Sigma DP1 was as a street shooter – meaning minimal shutter lag.

Well, I’m afraid they blew it, as the always objective DP Review reports.

Looks like I will be sticking with the Panasonic LX-1 for now.

What a disappointment.

Still, it never hurts to be curious:

Bert the Border Terrier checks out Mr. Lizard.

Those brilliant Japanese.

Talk of warranties requires that I point out that Joseph Juran died the other day at the grand age of 103. With W. Edwards Deming he taught the gospel of quality control to Japanese management and workers after World War II. Why the Japanese? Because when he tried to teach Americans he invariably found the bosses stayed away and sent only low level workers to his lectures. To this day Detroit has not learned the lesson that quality starts at the top.

Today ‘Made in Japan’ is a touchstone of quality whereas ‘Made in Detroit’ is what ‘Made in Japan’ was in 1945.

But it isn’t just quality that distinguishes Japanese products.

It is also innovation.

Yet you still hear that old saw that the Japanese are mere copyists and incapable of innovating.

Never mind that while GM’s CEO just stated that he is going to devote more time to lobbying (read – going to Washington with his right hand out, the other in the taxpayers’ pocket), Honda is test marketing a hydrogen powered car in Los Angeles. It comes complete with a device that plugs into the natural gas line at home and makes hydrogen for the car. Washington will doubtless try to quash this innovation as there go all those gasoline taxes. Much the way in which Detroit destroyed rail travel in the US. For all its talk of free competition America still loves monopolies and cartels. Can you say Microsoft? A company which never learned the meaning of quality and which could learn a lot from the likes of Juran and his followers.

Look at camera gear. The last innovation out of Germany was the wonderful view/rangefinder in the Leica M3 -1954, though designed in 1938 or so. No need to dwell on the reasons for the delay. No, it had nothing to do with quality.

The Japanese? Look at some of the functions in cameras which they have perfected. The SLR instant return mirror, auto diaphragms, auto-focus, matrix metering, all sorts of viewfinder displays, linear focusing motors, affordable aspherical lenses, miniscule motor drives, eye controlled focus (beats me why Canon ceased offering that – the camera would focus where the eye was looking – sheer genius), image stabilization, face detection, smile detection, tiny mass storage devices, LCD screens. Amazing stuff. Great innovation.

The elegant and affordable Pentax Spotmatic – the camera whose maker made the instant return mirror a reality.

Innovation is not invention. Innovation is bringing the invention to market in quantity at an affordable price with a guarantee of quality. Juran knew that. Anyone can invent.

So next time your neighbor tells you the Japanese are copycats, just purr away in your hydrogen powered car, your magical Japanese DSLR in the glove compartment, leaving a trail of water droplets in his driveway while he ponders the challenge of a refill at $10 a gallon to drive his Detroit steel to the repair shop.

But there is hope. It seems that NASA gets it.

The soul of the machine.

What is it that makes a machine a classic? For that matter, how do you define classic?

Well, it has to have class. I can’t define that but I know it when I see it.

It must be superbly functional.

Its use must be second nature.

It must have magic. Yes, that sense of fitness for purpose you get when you pick it up, use it.

It must be made well enough to survive the ravages of time and use.

It must be reliable.

For as long as I can remember, I have used a classic. No, not the Leica, that was sold a while back and yes, it was and remains a classic. The one I continue to use daily is the Bic Cristal ball pen.

A classic if there ever was one. 5D, 85mm.

I was reminded of the sheer genius of the Bic Cristal’s design (it used to be just a ‘Bic’ until newer, poorer variations came along) when my last one, above, got dangerously low on ink. The local office supply stores no longer carry it. Clerks, when asked, return the question with a vacant stare. How can this be? Here’s a device whose hexagonal barrel fits the hand just so, cannot roll off a desk, is clear so you can see the ink level, writes for ever without leaking and comes with a push on cap that, while easily lost, cannot possibly fail. The only moving part is the tungsten carbide ball tip. Anyway, I got on the web and tracked some down in Chicago. The order will likely last me until I’m six feet under, pushing up the daisies; meanwhile, you can bet that some accountant at Bic will make sure it’s discontinued because the profit margins don’t work.

In the internal combustion world, motorcycles have given us but three classics – the Brough Superior, the Vincent and the BMW air cooled twins.

In cars, the VW Beetle and the Porsche 911. Utility and purpose combined. The Mini was chic but a passing fad. No classic.

In camera design there are as few classics as with pens, bikes and cars. Indeed, give me just about any modern camera, or pen, and I will turn right around and either sell it or give it away. Not much out there with the sheer design genius of that Bic.

But I’m lucky to have owned a few. Heck, no, not lucky. I sought them out.

The Leica M2, obviously, preferably with a 35mm lens. An instant classic whose beauty and functionality defined the 35mm film era and while the functionality died with film, the beauty remains. Many refer to the old screw thread mount Leicas as classics but they are nothing of the sort. Poorly made compared to the M2, a truly awful viewfinder, a rangefinder almost as bad and the inane two shutter speed dials. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

The waist level Rolleiflex. About as clunky and strange a design as you could conceive of, but it worked, was near silent, delivered large sharp negatives and was lovely to behold.

The Crown Graphic. Nothing too subtle here, but it worked, made enormous originals yet folded into a small box. And you could fix it with a Swiss Army knife when it went wrong, which wasn’t too often.

And then you come to digital which, after ten years on the market has not come remotely close to producing a classic. Maybe that’s because the rates of change have been so high during that decade that no one has come up with a stable, survivable design. Maybe no one ever will? But do I ever think of my two digital cameras – the LumixLX1 and the Canon 5D – as classics? Not remotely. When they fail or get materially improved, they will be discarded just like that Bic.

But the Bic will remain a classic.

This lot should last me.

Not your father’s Nikon

Some neat pictures of the asesemly line for the Nikon D3 full frame DSLR appear here.

I was surprised how seemingly un-sterile the general environment appears.