No, I would guess that the S series will fail because the Leica myth alone might not make the camera interesting enough.

Tom

Their flagship cameras had no autofocus, thus rendering them useless for many types of professional work. Sure, professional work has been done long before the advent of autofocus, but today you can’t compete in journalism or sports without it.

The other thing is digital. They tried to enter the market from three sides: by cooperation with Panasonic they produced Ove’s Digilux-3, which is a respectable camera, no doubt about it, but more expensive than comparable cameras from other brands and not distinctive enough to make for a revolution. All the other fruits of that cooperation were basically re-badged Panasonics, where you had to pay almost double for a red dot. Those compacts severly hurt Leica’s image.

The digital back for the Leica R was expensive and not much more than a prototype. In the market it was hardly recognized.

Enter the M8. For the first time Leica did it (almost) right in digital. The camera expanded on the success of the M series, the rangefinder class, where Leica still ruled surpreme, though mostly because everybody else had pulled out of the market. Not even the IR filter blunder hurt the success of this camera, though success is relative, when you look at absolute numbers. With the profits from the M8 alone, the company would not be able to live on.

Thus Leica needed to do something new. DSLRs? Forget it. As a small company you can’t compete with Nikon and Canon. Compacts? Forget it. No margins, a crowded market with the flair of a war zone. Medium format? Maybe, but when you look at it, this market is not only small, it’s extremely competitive as well, with not many players left.

They chose something in between DSLR and MF, and this time they even have autofocus. Time will tell if this was a wise decision, but probably it was the only way left. As a plus, they can claim to have invented a new class of camera. That may give them some momentum, though it would have been stronger if they had had something to back the claim when they announced the S series almost a year ago.

The problem is, that they set the prices in MF territory. At $30,000 you can get a camera and a lens from Mamiya/Phase or from Hasselblad, and in both cases you’ll get more megapixels in a well tested body.

B&H has the Hasselblad H3DII-50 SLR (50mpx, including 80mm normal lens) for $26,995. I don’t find any prices for Phase/Mamiya online, but they will be competitive. Thus: the S2 will have to be at least as good as an H3DII, and I guess this will be extremely hard for the first product in a series.

My prediction: the S series will fail, mystique or not.

@Ove: I guess that you are paying for premium brand (is it premium because of the quality, or because of the ‘mystique’?), and very new and unique technology. I suppose that is enough for some folks. They will, I imagine, sell a few. However, it seems odd to release such a pricey monster during a global recession.

About the photo: When I took it, I had been watching these two for a couple of minutes. They had been bobbing up and down, looking at the sky, looking at the ground, then back to the sky. Who knows what they were doing? But, it was entertaining.