Jorgen Udvang
Subscriber Member
1. The people at Leica knows that users are willing to pay a premium for they cameras. That has been proven a zillion times. Why sell it cheaply when they can make a healthy profit on each body?I had no idea that achieving simplicity was so complicated and expensive.
2. Leica probably doesn't have the capacity to make these in large numbers anyway, and the market is limited. Even if many would have liked to buy this, Leica lenses are expensive, even used ones.
3. In this hi-tech world, making a different body is cheap, while making electronics in small numbers is very expensive. Look what Nikon did with the Df; took a D610 chassis with D610 electronics and added some retro body panels and a D4 sensor. The result is rather nice, but it makes the F4 look like a Barbie-cam. Still, the price at launch was close to half of what this rather unique camera costs.
If Olympus made a digital OM-2, the price would probably have been lower than this, but not really cheap. I do have a lot of OM glass though, so for me it would be much cheaper. One can always hope
Edit: When I got my OM-1 in 1974, the price was around NOK 2,000 or nearly USD 700. 700 1974 dollars is the equivalent of 3,600 2016 dollars. The Leica M3 was only USD 270 in 1960, which convert to around USD 2,200 in 2016. Remember though that Leica made more than 200,000 M3. The M-D is a niche camera and I'd be surprised if more than 10,000 copies are made. The numbers will probably be much lower.