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Originally Posted by ghoti
They exist.
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Well, I'm totally out of the loop on good digital cameras. I was pretty disenchanted with the whole disposable nature of them (dropping $2000 on a camera that will last about three years before it's obsolete/broken/dead due to old batteries and screen? Way too expensive for me.) One of my Nikon FM2s was made in the early eighties (titanium shutter model) and it works like new in 2006. I still use film, and will continue to do so until someone makes a camera I like, and one that I will get at least five years out of and preferably ten.
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Originally Posted by ghoti
Also, the market for them is extremely small (think Leica!), so the prices won't come down anytime soon. People don't care about the quality as much as they care about size, portability, and styling.
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And that's perfectly fine: I think it's great that so many people got excited by photography with the arrival of digital. But there were lots of niche cameras in the days of film, so why are there so few equivalent cameras today? It was understandable in the days of Nikon D1 when digital was so expensive and fast-paced, but now it's cheap[ish] and development has slowed down (or at least improvements are less important). Also, digital has proved that everyone from casual holiday snappers to dedicated pros are willing to pay vast sums of money on cameras. No casual snapper (who shot maybe three or four rolls of film a year) would have paid $300 for a camera even five years ago: now this thread is full of people who are debating the merits of various cameras in that price range. Even a Leica doesn't seem so outrageously expensive today as it did years ago when other cameras were far cheaper. What I'm trying to say is: I think people would spend serious money on good non-SLR cameras if they were available. It seems to be a price-insensitive market.
Also, the Panasonic and Leica digicams you referred to have zoom lenses. Probably pretty good zoom lenses, but I'm a bit old-fashioned about zooms too.
The Leica is certainly a
decent-looking camera, though the sides are a bit square for someone used to an M6. And the CCD is only 2/3", not really good enough for that kind of money in my opinion (for depth-of-field control if nothing else).