Tech rebound for Leica cam

Wetzlar / DPA

David Bowie had one, so does Scarlett Johannson, while Lenny Kravitz produced a book with one: a Leica camera. There’s no arguing that the Leica is the German camera everyone covets.
Back in the days when German cameras led the world, a Leica was the ultimate. But then the firm in Wetzlar, eastern Germany began slipping, going from one crisis to the next in the decades starting around the mid-1960s.
“The years between 2001 and 2005 were the worst,” says Andreas Kaufmann, majority shareholder and supervisory board chairman of Leica Camera AG. “In 2005 the firm was almost insolvent.”
Slowly, the medium-sized company with its 1,600 employees is clawing its way back with the aim of becoming a leader with top technology to offer. Just as Leica did when it revolutionized the camera industry at the end of the 1920s with its viewfinder cameras.
Their then novel format, using 35-millimetre cinematic film, ruled the world for decades
for fading before the digital onslaught. Now,
for a change, developments on the world market are running in Leica’s favour. Leica’s problem used to be this: It was not only that its cameras were expensive, but also that they were old fashioned.
Until the mid-1950s, Germany’s camera technology was the world leader, but then the Japanese came along to displace the Germans as the global best. To this day, the Leica M — the flagship of the company’s product line — still does not have an automatic focus.
It was around 2005 that Kaufmann entered the scene at Leica. “Between 2005 and 2009 we restructured, and we invested a great deal of money in research and development.
At times this came to 12 per cent of our
revenues,” he said. The products developed by this high R&D effort are now on sale as new product lines.
The company’s next aim is to recapture some of the market share it had lost among professional photographers. Among photographers, the single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera which long held sway has given way to mirror-less cameras with electronic viewfinders. Last year, Leica entered this hotly-contest market with its Leica SL.
With a price tag of almost 7,000 euros (7,700 dollars) — that’s the price of just the body, not including any lens — this Leica, as usual, is more expensive than the competition’s. But it has been positively received by photographers.
Just recently, Leica set up a new business
division for professional photography. “Once you do all the calculations, a Leica system is
actually cheaper over the years,” Kaufmann
argues, citing the durability of Leica cameras and lenses as well as the high resale value of the cameras.
Despite the gains, Leica will never be a giant again. “Our market share will likely remain under 1 per cent,” Kaufmann says. While Leica sells about 100,000 cameras a year, giants like Nikon and Canon sell many times more. “Our share has been rising, but mainly because the camera market has shrunk,” he admits.
This is because smartphones have taken over the mass-market camera segment. At the start of this decade, the photography industry projected worldwide sales of 140 to 150 million digital cameras for the year 2015. In fact, according to the Japanese camera industry association CIPA, the figure came to only 40 million.
However, even in a shrinking market, expensive cameras are in demand. “The average price is going upward,” says Constanze Clauss of the German Photography Industry Association. “And the share of sales of the high-priced cameras is also rising.”
At the same time, the product cycles — the time-frame for how quickly equipment gets replaced — has slowed down, she notes.
“Households are holding on longer to their photographic equipment,” Clauss says. She also points to a fracturing in camera types, especially among video cameras which now come in the guise of helmet cams, dashboard cams and many more types.
Leica is now becoming active in the field of smartphones. Together with the Chinese mobile phone maker Huawei, Leica has set up a research laboratory in Wetzlar. Kaufmann says 50 to 60 engineers and scientists are now working there.
Smartphones are taking better pictures now than they did a few years ago, but the picture quality is still limited. Kaufmann hints that a future development could be to install several lenses in a smartphone.
“In my estimation, the coming thing will be array technology using tiny sensors,” he says. “This means several optical systems that work together, each system responsible for just one aspect of a picture – for example, one for depth of focus, one for colour and one for contrast.”