Leica Just Recorded the Highest Revenue in Its Entire 100-Year History
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
Sure they make good cameras, but I think the real blessing they give the photography world is the way they function as a sponge, soaking up a lot of money so it's not going around and inflating the price of the other vintage camera stuff I want to buy.
I don't think I've ever seen the vintage camera market this inflated, stuff that would have been <$50-100 5 years ago is going for $400+ and that's if you can even find stock of it. Even film has skyrocketed in price, despite more of it being produced now than any other time in the last decade or two.
And yes, the used market in general has been in a rising tide lately (especially for perennial niches like rangefinders) but you can still get into very high quality vintage gear for peanuts if you shop around a bit. Hopefully the surge in demand will get more manufacturers looking at making film bodies again so we're not sifting through the dwindling supply of used gear.
Thanks to social media, namely TikTok and Instagram, the secondhand film camera market has seen prices skyrocket. Cameras that roughly $100 have seen their value triple, sometimes, quadruple. It's never been more expensive to get into the hobby.
That said, I outgrew the Q3, sold it for pretty much what I'd paid for it and bought two Sony cameras and some lenses. I got tired of "zooming with my feet" and the Sony 70-200mm GM II shoots like it's from the future.
Regarding digital, Leica made several false starts - its M8 and M9 were excreble - and it finally understood that you couldn't spend all the money on machining brass to protect the innards made of cheese.
The Q2 is/was/whatever in a league of its own and the closest thing I have yet found to my old G2. The lens is pretty much too good, it resolves everything, and everything is there, always, and you want for nothing. The rest of the camera is a joy to use, I've had it for five years and they have nailed the usability. It is constrained, of course, but as an everyday camera that is a joy to use, it's amazing. Couple that with brand cachet and awareness, and no wonder they're finally doing brilliantly. The new digital strategy also shed some of the duller old-school gatekeepers like the late Erwin Puts with his whining about the "soul of Leica products being eradicated" (see https://photo.imx.nl/blog/files/75caecf5a21140ab6c9b46f825ef...).
And many of the comments about the Q-series talk about rediscovered the joy of photography and shooting. I lent my Q2 to a friend for an extended play and they were in love with in and what it let them do.
Joy-to-use. Wins the oh-I-like-your-camera-competition. Superlative image quality and colour. Luxury brand that reminds you how awesome you are when you look it, which, let's face it, is the only reason you look at a Rolex or Omega on your wrist too.
The software, convenience, and always with you aspect ensure phones will probably always be dominant. But as Leica is showing there is still a hunger for photos that look better.
With photography, optimizing hardware (sensor, glass) is going to yield more results than optimizing software. Sensor size has an impact on the resulting photo.
That, and presumably a lot of their revenue is from licencing their brand name to all sorts of phone manufacturers.
I wouldn't be surprised if their own rangefinder line (which is what I believe most people into photography associate with the Leica brand) was at best breaking even - it is merely a means to maintain the cachet of the brand, methinks. YMMV.
(Said as a longtime Leica enthusiast, but the digital Ms are out of my (comfortable) reach - when out shooting rangefinders, it is mostly a Leica M4 (1968) or a Cosina/Zeiss Ikon ZM (2005-ish, methinks)
The usual joke is "for dentists who want to take some family snapshots" (which is a slur at dentists, not at Leica. I've used two of their cameras, the Q and the SL2, and both are very pleasant experiences).