Some time ago I posted a piece called A Quick Ebay Tutorial on Leica M Cameras. Its subject was the remarkable stupidity of the canned Ebay product descriptions for various Leica M bodies. I was poking around Ebay the other day looking at various “vintage digital” cameras (my latest fixation) and realized there existed a whole subset of ridiculous product descriptions for digital Leicas. Yes, these are the actual product descriptions:
The Leica M8: A portable, flexible body always ready for snapping and holding on to large numbers of action shots because it comes with batteries
Designed for delivering bright and beautiful pictures and preserving great pictures for you in a variety of different conditions, the Leica 10.3 MP camera is a portable body only that is flexible. With its silver body, this Leica M8 will be a refined platform for preserving memories. This Leica rangefinder digital camera has a 2.5-inch LCD screen, therefore you can share photos with ease. With the 10.3 megapixel image sensor found on the Leica 10.3 MP camera, you can create 9×14 inch prints of the moments of your life and share them with family and friends. Enlarging and cropping won’t adversely affect picture quality if you get a camera with additional megapixels. This Leica M8 is excellent for snapping and holding on to large numbers of action shots, with a flash memory card slot, so that you will be able to select the number of pictures stored in the camera. You will be able to always be ready to catch the moments of your life as this Leica rangefinder digital camera comes with batteries.
The Leica M9: A Sleek Device For Capturing Photos of Family, Bucolic Meadows and Beautiful Flowers
Made for delivering amazing photos and storing great pictures for you in a variety of conditions, the Leica 18.0 MP camera is a flexible portable body only. This Leica M9-P can help you capture dramatic snapshots of family anytime. Capture family pictures, your closest friends, bucolic meadows, or beautiful flowers with this Leica rangefinder digital camera. Few things are more fulfilling than viewing life’s passages in a photograph. With a flash memory card slot, this Leica M9-P is just right for snapping and storing large numbers of special photos, so you can extend the memory size of the camera. With its black paint body, this Leica rangefinder digital camera is a sleek device for taking pictures. A greater number of megapixels means cropping and enlarging will not adversely affect picture quality. With its 18.0 MP sensor, the Leica 18.0 MP camera is perfect for producing wonderful prints, so you can create wonderful prints as large as 12×18 inches. This Leica M9-P allows you to always be primed to capture your life’s great moments with its rechargeable Lithium-ion batteries.
The Leica M240: Very Good at Helping You Reflect On Favorite Moments
Reflect on your favorite moments with your friends using the Leica M Rangefinder Camera. Ideal for enlarging your pictures, it boasts 24-megapixel resolution to deliver impressive image quality. The Leica camera features a USB port, making it easy to transfer your travel photos to your laptop. Discover a world of photography with this Leica M Rangefinder Camera.
The Leica X1: A Rangefinder Camera with a Lens That is a High Quality Piece of Equipment, Developed With Care, Which Allows You to get Up Close and Personal With Your Subjects
You’ll be amazed at the quality of pictures produced by the Leica X1 and its lens, developed with care by Leitz. This camera will vie to become your go-to compact camera for all your important events and memorable moments.The Leica X1 captures images at a resolution of 12.2 megapixels, a principal measurement of photo quality. Images on this rangefinder camera are recorded on an embedded CMOS image sensor. It allows users to produce results that normally would require greater technical skill. You’ll get tremendous photographic value out of this camera model from Leica, which is well known as a leading manufacturer of high-end photo equipment with quality lenses. At 12 megapixels, the images captured by this model can be printed to a variety of sizes. A fixed-mount Elmarit 24 mm lens with an aperture ratio of 1:2.8 is offered with the X1. These Leitz lenses offer pristine quality. Leica lenses are high-quality pieces of equipment, so you’ll be able to get up close and personal with your subjects without sacrificing picture quality.
The Leica D-LUX: Ideal for Photos of Distant Sights While on Vacation
Establish a keen eye for photography with this Leica D-LUX Point and Shoot Camera. The camera has 10-megapixel resolution, producing beautiful images from your adventures. Ideal for capturing photos of distant sights, it is equipped with 4x optical zoom to magnify images without compromising quality. The camera features a USB port for storing your photos on your computer or laptop to show your friends your beautiful pictures on a larger screen. Capture gorgeous vacation photos with this Leica D-LUX Point and Shoot Camera.
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Indeed, most of the ePrey descriptions are absolutely imbecilic. Do these come from volunteer contributors (=clowns)? Or do they use software to pick up advertising copy? When selling items on the ‘Bay, it is hard to eliminate the huge list of specifications that appear above your personal description. Most of them are useless. For example, if you are selling a Leica M film camera, the buyer of that type of product will not be so ignorant that he needs to be told that it is a film camera or is 24x36mm or whatever. So often when one of these big commercial organizations tries to make their product more user-friendly, it deteriorates down to the lowest common denominator customer.
I’ve often wondered who writes this stuff. There’s probably a boiler room somewhere in Sri Lanka full of peasants being paid a dollar a day to crank them out.
I have a digital Leica, but it is German and I have found that I can only get metric sized prints out of it.
What should I do?
PLEASE, DON’T tell it the POTUS. If he would learn that the Germans still use that godless Communist Metric system, despite they’ve been defeated, he’ll NUKE THEM!
There was actually a guy in California who made Leica-specific metric-to-imperial conversion kits a while back. They’re CNC brass, black anodized, very well made. They were $1000 when he was selling them new, but you can usually snag one on eBay for around 2k when they pop up.
Er… I was joking.
I can’t believe that you are suggesting this. The manual Leicas’, “M” cameras have “M” lenses which have both imperial and metric distance units, and the CL digital doesn’t have any (shame) but being autofocus, Leica doesn’t see fit to provide either, even as a quick ready reckoner DOF scale.
It was the likes of Taylor and Hobson (Cooke) who were the last lot to provide an imperial 2″ lens, as opposed to 5cm (Japanese) or 50mm (everyone else), and that was years ago.
Cooke are still at the lens game, but mainly movies (the Cooke look) and the Cooke triplet, as used in 10 x 8 large format… I would love one of those!
Dear StephenJ,
there’s no room for jokes! Mankind’s future is at stake! And it’s your fault, if someone in the WH may have read your complaint about the Germans! The nuclear button may already been pussed, no I mean pushed, by these famous huuuuge 10 in (=abt 4 cm) grabby orange fingers!
Well, it’s not very practical, since it adds about 300 grams to weight of the camera and looks like a cross between an Amedeo adapter and a slide rule. Inexplicably it also handles volumetric units (maybe for darkroom work?) so I mainly just use mine in the kitchen for when I’m cooking European recipes.
Convert.
🙂
I think it’s entirely possible that the same translators used for items from Japan in the 1960s and 1970s in China in the 1980s and 1990s have not retired and now translate for eBay.
I have always wanted a camera for bucolic meadow picture takin’.
It really *is* like Robert Captcha said: “If your cameras aren’t good enough then your pixels can’t be up close and personal enough”. That’s why I want the 4x optical zoom. If it isn’t optical, how can you see it?
I had to laugh. However, it looks pretty much like standard “Corporate Communications” fare. The humor goes well beyond Ebay.
Try to access your telephone account details online here in Spain. They used to send easy, paper invoices, but when they told us they were stopping – in order to save the planet, you understand – I never believed a word. Today, I just give up trying to get to the stuff on my computer because there are so many opportunities to force one to start the search all over again that I rather wait for the bank statement to come in, though even that takes a personal visit to the branch because I refuse to bank online. Why? Because I read the fine print, and unless my security is as immense as that of the bank, I am stuffed if anything goes AWOL. And even banks get mugged; go figure the civilian’s chances.