[LRflex] R10 speculation

Folks, David
Interesting news. The comment about heavy lenses echoes my criticism; you don't have to make lenses weigh a ton to get good optical performance, certainly with modern materials. As I commented on my 250/4 Telyt, it's excessively heavy for its power. Presumably the weight is due to using lots of brass in its construction; what about stainless steel, titanium, magnesium/aluminium alloys? It must be near twice the weight of my sigma 400/5.6 - and that's autofocus, too. I'm pretty sure it's also heavier than my 400/5.6 Novoflex (now there's a statement!!) and I'm sure no-one on this forum would consider that lens a poor performer. Given Leica's high lens prices, there must be scope for using high-tech materials to get the weight down. Brass is hardly state of the art!
The other thing that somewhat shocks me is the suggestion of 40 MP. Why??? 3x4 metre enlargements? 90% crops? You've seen my results off the Sigma and D60; the originals are even sharper, since their image size isn't reduced for the web. And that's only 6 MP on an APS-C size sensor. I know people who still stick to their EOS 1D Mk1 at 4 MP, because they get better results than from the affordable modern equivalent. More pixels doesn't necessarily equate to more sharpness; the more you cram on the sensor, the more noise filtering you need, because you need more gain per pixel to get sufficient sensitivity to light. And that filtering negates the benefit of more pixels - in fact, often giving less sharpness than a lower pixel count. My Fuji demonstrates that well: the 6 MP S5600 produces results easily as sharp as the 9MP S9600, and seemed much quicker to focus, etc. More pixels also means more data to manipulate and store, and that takes more time. So you lose out on things like multiple shots (especially with RAW) and the transfer time to the card. And, potentially, less reliable storage, since you are bound to have to push the boundaries to get fast enough transfer.
Mount: I would be very surprised if Leica make the mount genuinely compatible with earlier lenses without some form of modification. What about 1-CAM, 2-CAM, 3-CAM etc? I bet they did quite a good bit of business adding cams to older lenses! If you swan along in the belief that your customers are so hooked on your brand that they'll just pay up, why would would you pass up the opportunity to do the same again - and maybe at even higher cost? 

I really hope that Leica get the R10 right for the market.  We shall see....
Cheers
Keith Longmore
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