First the Lunar and then this, the X- Vario Leica with APS-C sensor and very slow zoom. Exactly 20 hours ago I told you that Hasselblad would now sell one single camera they have for sale at Amazon US (Click here). And indeed all 8 cameras are still there. And today Leica priced their super unexciting camera at $2850 (here at BHphoto) which is exactly the same price range of the Sony RX1. I think both companies do seriously risk to devalue their brand value if they keep doing cameras like these.
And if the rumors I am working on are correct by end of 2014 Leica will have lost their uniqueness in the Full Frame Mirrorless market. Sony and Fuji will make equal (if not better) cameras for half of the price. Yep, watch out for Sony’s new FF mirrorless and RX cameras. There will be no reason to buy a $7000 Leica anymore!
Dear Leica fans…Stay tuned on SAR…were you will see some REAL innovation soon 🙂
48 Responses
Yeah, Leica is bold!
Who is the sensor maker?
Exactly! It is the one and only who also enables the Lunar!LOL!
Vivek?
BOOYAH!!!
GO RX1!!
HAHAHAAHAHA
A few excerpts from the official press release.
Leica X Vario offers great versatility and creative freedom.
From expansive interior shots, landscapes to portrait photography, the range of focal lengths offered by the Leica X Vario opens up entirely new horizons for creative photography.
The Leica X Vario is distinguished by an intensely focused design concept.
wrist and carrying straps that can be combined with all Leica X and M cameras are also offered…..
Seems that Leica is relying on the buyers who have a red dot for an a$$hole.
The sad part about it is that some people will buy this camera “because it’s Leica so it must be good”.
What is sad about this? The state cannot officially levy any fools’ tax – so companies like Leica do it.
Thanks Sony for existing. Leica R.I.P. I Facepalm thinking about all the brainstorming that generated this camera..
Well the new Leica is a real disappointment but its odd why the SAR owner have to keep posting stuff like this on a Sony Rumor site. Are you just asking people to troll about other brands here? I like Sony’s products and I’d like to know what they’re doing but there’s a lot of articles here which has nothing to do with Sony that turns up being a trollfest.
Presumably the reason for posting Leica stuff here is that there are quite a few of us with Leica-M lenses who use them on Sony NEX bodies.
The internals of the camera are a Sony “part”. So, in essence, you are here proclaiming your ignorance in matters concerning Sony.
What “internal parts” are Sony? Leica used to have a Kodak image sensor, have they changed to Sony?
Same one as in a NEX-5N/R/6, Nikon A1, Ricoh GR, Pentax K01, ….
All of the Leica APS-C fixed lens compacts have Sony sensors (the other two being the X1 and X2, with the X2 sharing the X Vario’s 16MP Sony CMOS sensor and the X1 having the older 12MP CMOS sensor)
Leica only used Kodak sensors in their DMR and M bodies
All of the Leica APS-C fixed lens compacts have Sony sensors (the other two being the X1 and X2, with the X2 sharing the X Vario’s 16MP Sony CMOS sensor and the X1 having the older 12MP CMOS sensor)
Leica only used Kodak sensors in their DMR and M bodies
X Vario vs. Lunar…. FIGHT!!!
haha…
Well, at least Leica seems to produce the camera themselves, not? Even if it may not be very technically convincing, this is a major difference to the Hasselblad. I would not put them both into the same category. The Leica may be quite bad and expensive, but the Hasselblad is nothing but a dubious shiny fake.
I would not bet on that … Are we sure it is not produced by Panasonic?
You can do a 2 hour guided tour Leica’s factory in Germany and watch the camera production process. I guess all that Hasselblad could offer is a 2 min tour through their Chinese plastic button manufacturing backyard.
Yes, but if you did a tour now, would you see this particular model being manufactured, or just the S and M series?
Perhaps it’s time to say
“All hail Sony” ?
Making conclusions about the IQ without tests (or actually trying it themselves)? Sure, on paper it looks worse than a NEX 5 but maybe the lens is HOT HOT HOT. The only reason why I don’t buy an RX1, coolpix a, Fujifilm X100S, etc it’s just too much loot to put down for a fixed lens. I’m intrigued by a fixed zoom / large sensor point and shoot.
Buy a Fuji X-E1, the 18-55 OIS zoom, and a bootle of superglue. carefully put glue around the lens mount, fix the zoom onto the Fuji and you have a fixed zoom/large sensor point and shoot camera. Print a red dot with Fuji name inside and glue it to the Fuji and you have a very convaincing Leica look-alike 🙂
What a disgrace for Leica. Never believed that I see F6.3 lens in portrait focus length. Leica is losing it. Hard to believe.
This news is not worthy of the SAR site. Its JUNK…
To compete with leica this new camera would need also good manual focus; both the lens and the choosen VF aid. Leica is a RF camera and it makes it unique; if I was a street photographer that is the camera I would like to own. It is true that common people can not afford it.
I bought the Fuji X100 whwn it came out and sold it aftyer a couple of months because the updates would not fix the most fustrating thing about the camera; unbeliaveble slow manual focus. It looks like a rangefinder camera but behaves like an old digital compact
I do not understand why SAR is putting this up here. The camera is not a Sony, the only relation with sony is that it has the same price as a Sony camera. So can somebody why it is posted here.
I think Sony is not giving much rumors at the moment so they have to do something to post and they are taking anything. This camera is not a alpha camera and it is not a Sony…
But it may have a Sony sensor just as the Nikon D800/E, Leixa X2, Nion A1, Ricoh GR and the Lunar.
And even when it has an Sony sensor, does it make it a Sony alpha camera?
This is a (very expensive) p&s camera. the make or size of the sensor majes no differense.
Good question. Yes, it does. The same way RX100 and RX1 apparantly are Sony Alpha cameras.
Next, it is the turn of playstations, televisions and even record labels and movies. These, you see have no problems with flashes and such non sensical accessories that a camera system have to have. 🙂
> Same price as RX1.
And, to think, we laughed at Sony!
I don’t think there is any way I can justify the X-Zoom price, except that the X2 is already (over)priced at $2000, so one would expect the zoom to be more. Meh.
We’ll see about the lens’s performance. Leica has a habit of producing slower lenses than the competitors, for, I think, good reasons…
By cropping an RX1 image you can still get an APS image at around 50mm 😛
sorry, wasn’t meant to be a reply.
Admin, since we know that there won’t be any A mount products until 2014, are we going to get some NEX rumours soon?
But can you do 27mm on RX1? Part of that beatuful landscape (or a cathedral interior in a foreign country you’ll never visit again, or good company) is left out of the frame, oh well, at least I did it with a FF camera!
And 50mm eq is not 70mm eq as the Leica can do.
Leica R.I.P. Hasselblad R.I.P. Hello new king SONY!
Well, when someone asks in the future when was the moment that death of Leica and hasselblad was pronounced? This is it.
Now enough clowns like leica and others, we need some real FF things – come’n SONY – bring it in!
“There will be no reason to buy a $7000 Leica anymore!”
There will always be a reason to buy a $7000 Leica. It will inform the small group of people who know what a Leica is that the owner can afford a $7000 camera. For a good number of people, that alone is worth the price.
It’s sad. Leica has the opportunity to bring its excellent lenses (the real ones, not the Panasonics) to a larger pool of photographers who really care about photography. Instead, they dabble in marked-up garbage and ‘special editions.’
The legacy has been squandered. As the company descends further into ‘jokehood,’ it will become more and more difficult to sell the core products at 5x Canon and Nikon prices.
Personally I am looking forward to reading the reviews and see if they compare it to the RX1. Interesting times ahead me thinks.
Si
No, the Leica X-Vario woun’t compare to RX1 (if that was what you meant). Not even any of the FF cameras out there would, when it comes to IQ. Of course the D800 will have a bit better resolution, but it seems to not reach other Image Qualities of the RX1.
X-Vario will compete with a fixed lens NEX-7. 🙂
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what baffles me is why sony and fuji don’t introduce their full-frame mirrorless cameras sooner. once they do leica will be reduced to a producer of amazing lenses–and ridiculous and/or overpriced cameras.
Because a mirrorless FF camera is far, far more difficult to come up with, than the state of the art RX1. That’s why we soon will have two versions of RX1, while we woun’t have any NEX FF until next year (according to the rumours). And most probably not from any other manufacturer either (if ever).
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> There will be no reason to buy a $7000 Leica anymore!
There never was a reason to buy a Leica. Particularly not after Nikon came out with their F in April, 1959.
Unless (as previously noted elsewhere here) you want to impress complete strangers with the vast sums of money you have to dump into something as meaningless as a manual focus $7000 camera and another $5500 to pour into a lens.
If there was a visible advantage of one camera/sensor/lens manufacturer over another, don’t you think the pros would pile into that brand and ignore everything else? Nope. The world doesn’t work that way, except as camera fetish bling.
Sensor’s great, since we’ve seen that with NEX-5N/R, NEX-6…
But what’s with that el-cheapo class lens on a 2800 USD camera?
Oh wait, I know… It is for those who can’t afford the 7000 USD Leica or Hasselblad Loser…
This camera don’t compete with RX1, it is in the league of G1X/RX100… (compact camera with large sensor and zoom lens)
Caveat: I have no experience yet with RX-1 or RX-100
I have a Leica film camera. It has been around a LONG time, and it works flawlessly. I can get it serviced regularly, and repairs are NEVER a problem–had to have 2, due to mechanical impacts.
EVEN IF this camera is worse than the RX-1 in IQ, “photography” is about more than IQ. It is, at least in part, about reliability, service, and support. Although potentially inferior in IQ, it could arguably be a superior photographic tool.
Again, I don’t know how robust the RX series is, or how good the support is from Sony.
What I DO know is that within a particular price, I would preferentially put my money into service and support, rather than IQ, if it came down to a choice between the two, as long as the resulting inferior IQ was still acceptable to me.
Mechanical Leica is EASY to get repaired… Any half competent repair shop can do it, but what about the electronics? It’s not something you can fab with your lathe and CNC system.
From what I heard, getting the digital version fixed might not be as great an experience as the mechanical version.
As for comparing to other cameras, How about getting 4 RX100 instead of this camera? I’m quite sure 4 RX100 will easily allow you to do more than this camera, and allow rather easy backup in critical situation. Not to mention it is still cheaper than ONE X-Vario. As far as reliability concerns, I think this is far better than having to find any repair shop when you are abroad…
What’s the point of all this Leica-bashing? I don’t think we (assuming we’re all Sony-users) should be so concerned with how bad Leica’s cameras are. What concerns me is why so many Sony users feel the need to buy adapters and screw Leica glass on their Nexes, despite all the technical limitations that brings with it? I don’t care if Leica builds crappy cameras, I care that Sony produces crappy glass.
Wow.. thats just embarrassing Leica.. Talk about epic fail.. This will be remembered forever.. Haha. Go Sony!