Why does a Leica camera cost so much?

Question

I was amazed that a Leica camera costs about the same as a new Mazda does ($30K).

Why? :) The best lenses?

Asked by garik

Answer

It's not only a special edition of the camera (the M9 body is ordinarily around $6-7K) and the lens; the lens is a special edition of the Noctilux, which is just a hair faster than f/1. Not f/1 point something; f/1. The "normal" Noctilux is rated at f/0.95, is actually sharp wide open, and is understandably expensive (at $11-12K). So the special edition doesn't carry that much of a premium over the black-finished version.

Now, Leicas are really, really nice cameras. (That applies in particular to the S2 medium-format-in-a-DSLR-form-factor camera—I could see myself doing something particularly immoral for one of those should the subject ever come up, even with its ISO speed limitations.) And the Leica lenses are certainly among the best lenses made. There is, in both the build quality and the performance, a good reason for some of the premium pricing attached.

But there's also the undeniable fact that there's a certain cachet associated with the brand, particularly in the M series of rangefinders (both digital and film), that began with the quality and took on a life of its own. For every photographer who wants the action/feel of a rangefinder, the per-pixel detail of a sensor without an optical low-pass (antialiasing) filter, and the legendary optical performance of the lens system, there is at least one other who wants to be seen carrying photographic jewelry with its name in a red disk and has the money to get it. That means both that Leicas tend to be artificially scarce (collectors snap them up like Bleeding Gums Murphy after Fabergé eggs) and that it's hard for the company to find a price at which people would stop buying them.

(Incidentally, they nearly blew the whole brand image going forward with the M8, which not only had an APS-C sensor that didn't fit the rangefinder well, but used an older CCD-type sensor with poor low-light performance and an insufficiently strong IR filter.)

Answered by Stan Rogers

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