Hasta La Gadget!

When I tell you that Leica is killing its manual focus R-Series camera line, many of you will say "Leica still makes a manual focus SLR?" Your surprise is justified. When I read the press release today I thought the exact same thing — and I should know better.

Despite proudly showing the R-Series on its stand at the PMA show in Las Vegas, Leica will no longer be making either bodies or lenses. All of its efforts will instead go into the S2, the 35mm DSLR sized body with a huge  53.15mm sensor (that’s the diagonal length, measured like a TV screen, and our new metric here at Gadget Lab for combatting the weasely obfuscation of sensor sizes by camera makers).

We’re neither surprised nor disappointed by the move. After all, what was the point of a Leica SLR? For the price, you’d get almost nothing. Compare the R9 to Nikon’s last film SLR, the F5, for instance, and you’ll see that the Nikon gives a lot more gizmos for the money, and at SLR sizes, the Leica lenses just aren’t that much better. Curiously, the cameras remain on Leica’s site.

Leica ceases R-series production [DP Review]