Sorry to take so long to respond, Marc. I was busying doing tabletop work and readying my Nikon equipment for sale most of yesterday.
... So, you are right, the A9 announcement probably means nothing to SL owners and doesn't require a response or rationale. ...
Thank you.
... BTW, your history timeline is off. The FF Sony A mount cameras have all had lifespans much longer than 2 years ... more like 4 years+. The Sony mirror-less models appear to have come faster, but in reality the different FE mount models are what make that seem faster. ...
I stand corrected. Frankly, my experience with Sony was well-tainted with disgust by the time the FF A mount cameras came out due to owning and being frustrated with their other products before that. Never bought or used any of them as a result.
I bought the A7 hopeful that it would work well with my R lenses, but after a year and a half using it, and seeing the results with the same lenses that came out of the M-P, I just couldn't deal with the A7 system anymore and opted out.
... My DMR remark is based on experience. I had a ton invested in R gear, with film quickly becoming a non-option for the clients I served. Hanging onto a discontinued 10 meg, crop frame, low ISO camera and discontinued lens system with batteries that became rarer and rarer, forced a decision. I could not wait indefinitely for an R digital replacement with R lenses sitting fallow on a shelf. I'm not a lens collector, I'm a lens user. To me, that is the very definition of "obsolete" for a working photographer. It felt similar to the debacle I experienced with Contax: the Contax 645 with ProBack and Contax N to ND system being discontinued and Kyocera exiting the camera business. No path forward at a time when digital was just getting going and lots of advancements on the horizon.
...
So you were frustrated by your R8/R9/DMR experience. However, relative to my statement, the DMR was available for six years (longer than anything Sony has made) and brought those bodies forward into the digital era pretty competently ... to the point where people still remember them fondly despite the five years from when they were gone to when the SL happened along. And there seem to be a number of folks still using them despite being well obsolete now.
Obviously the Leica DMR was not the solution for your needs. A Nikon or Canon ... or Sony of course ... suits your needs better. Nothing wrong with that. When I was in the business, I followed my needs and bought/sold whatever gear got me where I needed to be to get jobs and a paycheck. That was Nikon for the longest time, with dalliances into Contax and Canon. And then when things turned digital, it was Pentax, then FourThirds with both Panasonic and Olympus, and Micro-FourThirds at the end when I closed the business in 2010. Since then, I do photography without considering jobs and assignments other than the ones I assign myself, and use whatever equipment gets me where I want in that.
But this business about the DMR is neither here nor there in the context of my response to the question of this thread, just as how good or bad one might consider the Leica SL to be. I'm happy with the gear I have now, it does what I want and produces the photos I want to make very nicely, and I'm in the process of getting rid of all the excess that I've gone through along the way to figure that out. The Sony A9, for good or bad, is completely out of my radar and I have zero interest in it. The only reason I responded on this thread at all was because it seemed to be posed as a challenge to Leica and SL owners: What I wrote should be read as a dismissal, not a disparagement, because I don't see the point of such a discussion.
Now if the OP had written "Leica SL or Sony A9 ... Which should I choose?"
that's a subject worth of some discussion since the A9 is, for all intents and purposes, Sony's response to the Leica SL. It's not automatically a better or more desirable piece of equipment, but the two cameras are similar in specification and could stand to be compared objectively and with a thought to what each offers as advantage and disadvantage.
But that never seems to happen any more. The discussion always seems to become this absurd religious recitation about how snooty Leica owners are, how expensive and behind the curve Leica equipment is, and how state of the art Sony equipment is. I'm kinda sick of it.
G