So Leica will unveil something or things on May 10.  Just about the time people in the real world will be getting their hands on Fuji’s rangefinder-style X-Pro1, having sold their overpriced Leica gear to pay for it and have lots left over for whatever.

The previous rumor/speculation had focused on Photokina later in the year for the speculative M10.  In the meantime Fuji has people hot and bothered over the X-Pro1.  Could Leica have bumped up its marketing schedule to try to take some wind out of Fuji’s sails/sales?  Could it be an M10?  Could it be a black and white only digital M that’s coming?  Could it be an X2?  S3?  Something completely different?  To my eyes the invite implies announcements in more than two categories:  “a whole range of product launches”.  And, hey Leica, where’s my invite?

I was lucky to be in NYC for the M9 announcement in ’09 but I never did buy the camera.   The sensor was not improved enough over the M8 to justify the cost.  So I’ve been waiting for the M10.  But the X-Pro1 may just do the trick at a fraction of the cost so there’s a good chance I’ll get off this money-sucking Leica train.  If the Fuji satisfies me.

On the front page of The New York Times today is a gee-whiz story on Lytro, a start-up that claims to be developing a camera that lets you focus after shooting, shoot fast (since it doesn’t waste time focusing) and shoot in low light.  Interestingly, the big photo blogs have strikingly different reactions to this.  The Online Photographer loves it, Ken Rockwell glibly dismisses it as useless and, no surprise here, Nikon guru Thom Hogan slaps us in the face with numbers that temper expectations (if his write-up has vanished from his homepage scroll to the bottom of it for his archive links).

At first Rockwell’s reaction surprised me because he’s a sucker for new cameras — and the guy could sell a 110 Instamatic to Ansel Adams (“It just works!”).  Then I remembered Rockwell is interested in getting a completely finished product out of his cameras (a la slides) so why would he want to fool with selecting focus in post-processing?  Still, I think he’s missing an important innovation when he scoffs and says autofocus already works just fine on compacts and cell phone cameras already get everything in focus.  Compacts still respond too slowly and why should I always want everything in the frame in focus?  TOP sounds a bit too enthusiastic about the reality of Lytro’s camera but I tend to fall on TOP’s side of the argument.  Hogan takes apart the numbers from both the tech and the business perspectives, saying Lytro’s camera is likely to have an extraordinarily low pixel count and the hardware sales aren’t likely to add up to enough revenue for the company.  Instead, he suggests a big part of Lyrtro’s product will be a cloud gallery and software to manipulate the focus-later images.

Lytro is confident enough to say it’s taking reservations for the camera.   What I’m interested in is whether Leica will go this route.  An M-style camera you don’t need to focus (saving tons of money on the rangefinder mechanism), accepts the old M glass and maybe new glass, too, that can be made more cheaply because it won’t need focusing mechanics.  This would change things.

From now through March 27 two of my photographs are on display at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York.  The house is where the famous American realist painter was born and spent his childhood.  The pictures are part of a group show called Hopperesque:  Realism and Light in Photography.