Joel Halbert wrote:
PC Wheeler wrote:
Has even one Lumix m4/3 camera been rebadged as a Leica?
My guess is no because then there could be a Leica camera with non-Leica (e.g., Olympus) glass: How gauche!
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Phil
First of all, I do have a couple of Olympus lenses in Leica screw mount, very nicely made, not gauche at all!
Leica cameras with other-brand lenses are nothing new. Nippon Kogaku made a good business with excellent L39 Nikkors for Leica, Canon, Nicca etc. David Douglas Duncan and others were big fans of Nikkor lenses. There is a long historical list of such non-Leitz lenses for Leica, some now quite sought after, and a much shorter but non-zero list of Leica lenses in other mounts or on fixed-lens cameras.
Jumping to the modern era, Leica "officially" stated that they would not pursue MFT because they believed the achievable image quality wouldn't be high enough. In my opinion, that was an inadvisable statement as well as a significant planning error.
I do think Leica could contribute to (and profit from) MFT, but my hope would be that they would do more than re-badge and have Panasonic slightly re-finish the body. The significant price difference should be justified by real feature and/or build quality. Something like the GX7 could have been done as a joint Leica/Panasonic project a year or two ago. And there is still room for premium lens development. I don't think that MFT "needs" Leica, but I do think that the system would gain from another high-end participant (too bad Fuji didn't bite).
The apparently late-coming decision to brand the 42.5mm f/1.2 lens as a Leica (originally shown as a Lumix brand prototype) may indicate that more is to come; we'll have to see. But I do hope that Leica doesn't just dress up the GX7 and bundle Lightroom; it should be something more than that. But I have to admit I'm not sure what exactly.
