I said offset microlenses.
Which is exactly what I was talking about. Read Sony's promo materials on the NEX-5N. They go on at some length about the use of offset microlenses.
Go and read the review of the M9 and learn about the offset microlenses and heroic levels of vignetting compensation required to make up for the short back flange distance. (Even if you shoot at ISO100, it will effectively be ISO400 at the edges of the frame.) And it's that distance which is the key to the small size of Leica's lenses.
Heh...I remember studying the "magic box" at some length in communications theory. Advertising frequently hinges on the "magic box." What makes product A superior to product B? Well, it's the contents of the magic box. It's the reason there are schmucks out there who pay hundreds of dollars for gold-plated, nano-crystal-aligned USB cables that will allow the pure fidelity of their audio components to shine through.
Yes, there are vignetting issues to overcome with offset microlenses, but they aren't uncommon, aren't all that costly and they don't actually work all that well. If you look at a number of the more desirable wide-angle lenses on the M9 you'll notice they're often subject to radical color shifts. When the M9 came out I was thinking of getting one to use with a Zeiss 21mm f/4.5 Biogon, which has almost no distortion. It's an amazing optic on a 35mm M-mount body, but on an M9 you have to either shoot monochrome or live with color shifts at the periphery of the image.
Another way you can tell that they don't do much is contained in what you just wrote. You're indicating a couple of stops of vignetting compensation, but yet the noise levels are comparable to the M8 using the same sensor technology.
AF requires focusing elements in the design as well, making it bigger and more complex. And you completely ignore the issues of zoom and back flange distance (see above), both of which make a huge difference to the size of the lenses.
The back flange distance is an inherent design issue with all these mirrorless compacts. And the Leica's isn't any shorter than any of the other options out there. Fuji is managing to make what look to be very small primes for its APS-C offering and it has a shorter flange-to-'film' distance than the Leica. And zooms always require larger designs, but that's pretty much universal. Never much of an issue to me since I don't buy zoom lenses for the most part.
Yeah right - you're clearly you know more than the camera manufacturers do here.
The camera manufacturers know exactly what the issues are. It all comes down to yields and unit price. As soon as yields are high enough and unit price is low enough the insurmountable technical issues that make 135-based compacts impossible to bring to market will vanish and they'll start popping up everywhere.
In other words, the target audience of a compact FF is a narrow group of people only (don't count me in). Every camera manufacturer knows this, that's why they are not very interested in making small FF consumer grade bodies plus the fact that the lenses would be huge and expensive anyway.
