BTW - It is a Leica M2. I inherited it by my father.
The other one is a very old Leica II. It looks a littlebit like this one (out of Wikipedia - a Leica I) but is in much better condition:
Posted on 01/19/2006 12:45:19 AM PST by HAL9000
TOKYO : Japan's Konica Minolta, one of the world's leading photographic equipment manufacturers, said on Thursday it would stop making all cameras because the market had become too competitive.The company plans to slash 3,700 jobs or about 11 percent of its global workforce by 2007 under a restructuring package that will also see part of its business making high-end digital cameras sold off to Sony.
Konica Minolta will also gradually stop making camera film by 2007 to focus on its more profitable optics and medical imaging activities.
"In today's era of digital cameras... it became difficult to timely provide competitive products even with our top optical, mechanical and electronics technologies," the company said in a statement on its website.
"For colour film and colour paper, while considering our customer needs, we will step-by-step reduce product line-up and cease our film production and colour paper by the end of fiscal year ending March 31, 2007," it added.
The announcement comes less than a week after Nikon unveiled plans to stop selling most of its film cameras to focus on hot-selling digital models.
Konica Minolta struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing shift to digital photography and away from traditional film.
It slumped into the red in the first half of the current financial year and forecast a large full-year loss due to falling sales of conventional photo film and intense competition in digital cameras.
The group, formed through the 2003 merger of Konika and Minolta, made a net loss of 3.48 billion yen (US$30.2 million) in the first half to September, reversing a net profit of 8.20 billion yen a year earlier.
In November it forecast a net loss of 47 billion yen for the full year
That's a shame. I have a Dimage Z5, and it's a terrific camera.
Digita media is not yet secure. If you want your images to last...STAY WITH FILM!!!
Minolta to stop makings cameras. Whamo-O has been sold to a Hong Kong distributor. Whats happening to the world as I've known it?
You ain't seen nutin yet! Stand by for the demise of two of the big-3, GM and FORD are in serious financial trouble. FORD may shut down up to 10 plants, and GM is much worse than FORD, financially.
Now back to the Konica-Minolta thread........
My Minolta Dimage A1 died about 4 months past it's one year warranty. The flash stopped working some time ago. I took very good care of it. I'm not happy.
Toyota is destroying them.
And rightfully so.
Sad. Other producers of film cameras suffer from the same problems. Leica in Germany also has its problems i.e.. I own two Leicas and they make terrific photographs that can't be compared with those low-pixeled snapshots of some digital cameras. Furthermore i feel a kind of "erotic" to make traditional pictures if I focus and adjust all by myself.
"Furthermore i feel a kind of "erotic" to make traditional pictures if I focus and adjust all by myself."
Don't you mean neurotic? ;-)
" Stand by for the demise of two of the big-3, "
Good riddance ... Dirty unions and corporate greed mixed with a multitude of lousy designs and so-so workmanship over the past 20 years or so ... is bound to do you in eventually ...
BTW - It is a Leica M2. I inherited it by my father.
The other one is a very old Leica II. It looks a littlebit like this one (out of Wikipedia - a Leica I) but is in much better condition:
Only from the mind of Minolta.
How many years ago was that? I must have been like 8.
I have a Minolta X700 that I bought back in the 80's that is one of the best camera's I've ever owned. I don't use it much since digital came out so it stays locked up tight in it's case. I've had several people try to buy it lately and I've seen a few on Ebay selling for the same thing or more than I paid for it new. I think it's a keeper.
Oh well....I've always been an Olympus fan.
ha. what happened to the good old days on FR when japanese auto makers would be mentioned, then followed with posts about "my chevy/ford/dogdge will flatten your jap car without even slowing down"
then we entered the denial era...any mention of US cars being low on reliability and resale were countered with "my chevy/ford/dodge has 175K miles on it and all I ever did was change the oil"
/drives an acura
The unions have destroyed American Steel and heavy industries, and have the big three teetering on the brink.
Bankrupty to end the union strangleholds would be a positive thing for the automakers and America in general.
ford does have some cars that are great. the escort and now the focus seem to last forever.
too bad we cant be as proud of US made products as we could decades ago.
japanese electronics used to be a joke. now they are some of the best.
Dang!
Even though I have $7000 invested in Nikon digital camera equipment, most of my best photos come out of my older Minolta 5MP digital.... and I was thinkng of buying a newer Minolta.....
Well, Nikon announced that they are cutting all but 2 or 3 of their film cameras.... I guess that the camera business is going to be really 'interesting' the next few years.
Ford makes some fine products. Can't say much for their cars, but their trucks ROCK! I have a '97 F-250 Crew cab diesel with 260K on it and it still runs like a top. Never done anything but routine maintenence. It'll pull or haul anything and gets 24 mpg. By contrast my last truck was a Toyota and although it was also very good about not leaving me stranded, by the time it had 260K on it, it was a rust bucket. Funny, I didn't know the Budweiser cans my Toyota was made from would rust....
>...Toyota is destroying them.
And rightfully so....<
Certainly glad to know which side you would have rooted for at Pearl Harbor...<
Toyota launched a sneak-attack on GM? When?
My Minolta SRT-102 is going on 40 years old, and it's still the best camera in the house. I'll be sorry to see them leave the market.
I recently bought a Konica Minolta elite 5400II scanner for negatives because I had about 5,000 negatives.
I'm currently scanning in some 110 negatives (taken with a Minolta 110SLR btw) from 1976. I'm using less than the highest resolution and I'm storing the digital files in jpg format. File size is on the order of 1.8meg after compression (22 meg before).
I've printed some 8 1/2 by 11's and they look great. This is in spite of the fact that some of the film is faded and 100's weren't meant for anything other than snapshots originally.
I doubt any of my digital files from my Canon digital rebel will be even readible in 30 years (including these I'm making now!) because the tech is changing so fast. But........film will still be film.cb
If you can make monochrome color separation negatives of your photographs and store the film in a temperature and humidity controlled environment, then stay with film.
I just finished scanning my 40 years worth of color slides and the older they were the worst condition they were. The ones that I recoverd should be good for a really long time on CD.
I have a Canon 35mm EOS Elan7 with a lot of lenses. I bought a digital Rebel (8mp) and a good hp printer. I use the 35 sparingly, these days. My lenses work on both systems, though, which is why I bought the DRebel.
I started taking pics in high school, on the yearbook staff. In the navy, though an FT, I took a lot of the official pics for the ship and cruise books. I did the darkroom stff onboard our tin can.
I taught in a local photog class for a while, and we played with pin hole cameras. The class did some interesting things with them.
Digital pics can be sharp, easily manipulated, and easy to reproduce, but they pale in comparison to what you can do with a little bit of silver salts...
Would this mean downsizing? Sure! Would this mean better profitablitly? Probably! It would most certainly mean recapturing the full sized truck market with superior products.
I own a Sony 8mm vcr, a panasonic videodisc player, Beta, VHS, SVHS, MiniDV, and card readers for any type (currently) flash media. I bought them because I use the technology, and wanted to keep it useful. I will probably own a museum full, by the time I am 70 (58 now), but I even have my 1984 FatMac, as well as 14 other Mac renditions. I figure that since they still work, they still have value to me (though most sit idle on shelves, stored in cardboard)!
Of course, we also own 9 cars...
Damn!! I been using Minoltas for more than 40 years and have a whole bunch of great lenses. I've been waiting for them to come out with a digital SLR so that I could use my lenses on it.
They gave up on film a long time ago. Nikon just a few days ago.
How sad! I bought the Dimage Z1 as soon as it was released. I have absolutely loved it.
Don't forget all the cool stuff we used to get from Ronco! I miss my Mr. Microphone ... lol.
"The ones that I recoverd should be good for a really long time on CD."
Maybe, maybe not.
CD life is about 10 years from what I have read.
There are some long-life CDs available which are projected to last about 10 times longer but they are more expensive.
True. But every few years take a few minutes to burn a new copy. Digital copies are exact copies. No data lost.
I have 2300 slides on one CD. It took aboyt five minutes to burn it.
Make crap and die. Not that complicated really.
Supposedly burned DVD's have a much longer shelf life than CD's.
ping
I read a news article the other day about an IBM study that concluded cheap CD-Rs last about two years and top notch CD-Rs last five years. Those are averages, BTW.
Here's the article:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/10/73755_HNcdlifespan_1.html
One problem. Film is irreplacable. If the original negative is lost, the image is lost forever. Also, not all film is created equal. Kodachrome will last, most older color films will not. Also, poor processing and washing will leave even quality film with a dramatically shortened lifespan.
With digital, you can make as many originals as you care to.
You can store your originals on CDs, DVDs, hard disks, online storage and keep originals off site so if you home burns, your images are not destroyed with the house.
Certainly archiving is an ongoing process, but I believe that digital has many advantages over film.
Even the Library of Congress has not made the move to digital...they suspect the life of DVDs, etc.
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