80 p g pDIGITAL STARS
A er 18 years, why does the Leica Digilux 2 still
stand out from the crowd? John Wade explains
Testbench DIGITAL CLASSICS
C
onsider what makes a camera a
classic. It has to be of a certain
vintage. When new it would have
had innovative features. Those
features will have stood the test of time.
And it still works. Apply those criteria to lm
cameras and you come up with names
such as Leica, Rollei ex, Zeiss, Voigtländer
and many more. Apply the same thinking to
digital cameras and what do you get?
Not a lot, actually.
Few digital cameras have
been around long enough for
one to truly justify the term
vintage. A particular model
might have been innovative
when new but its innovation
was undoubtedly surpassed in
the model that followed a year
later. So no one single camera
is likely to have stood the test
of time. Also older digital
cameras have a habit of failing
to work.A digital classic
one digital camera quali es as the rst – and
maybe even the last – to be called a classic.
It was launched in 2003 and it was called the
Leica Digilux 2.What came before
The rst digital camera from Leitz was the
Leica S1 in 1997. It was little more than a
scanner with a lens on front, aimed chie y at
studio photographers, museums, medical
workers and the like.
The rst consumer cameras to bear the
Leica name arrived in 1998 with theAll of which begs the question: has there
ever been, or will there ever be, a truly classic
digital camera?
Well, here’s where I stick my neck out and
risk the wrath of readers ooding AP’s Inbox
pages next week to disagree. For my money,The Leica Digilux 2,
a true classic among
digital camerasThe Fujifilm-made Leica Digilux 4.3 (left)
with a Fujifilm Finepix 6800 Zoom that
was the basis for the Leica Digilux Zoom