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.

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.

57th Street

Man in stairway

I took this picture coming up on three years ago, a few months after having begun using the M8, which really allowed me to do much more street work than I had in the film days.  Recently I got a pleasant surprise, learning that this image had been used for a book cover, my first.  It was an even bigger surprise to learn what book it was used for:

Considering all the crap that gets published in a year it’s really cool seeing my picture on a classic like “Beautiful Losers”.   So why is this post headlined, “Always the Last to Know”?  Because the glacial pace of the publishing industry means that I learned of this only after getting paid, more than a year after the book came out.  And it’s the UK version, not (as near as I can tell) a U.S. release.  But I’m not complaining, no, not at all.  It’s a real thrill.