I am sorry, but this is incredibly disappointing. Fixed lens?!
Management should act and fire product management. They have no idea what they are doing. Are they in touch with the marketplace, at all?
High-end photo hardware is cutthroat and P1 is under pressure from Hassy and Fuji – now is the time to lean in, work with the community and make a killer offering that EVERYONE wants and not just push a "nice idea from a strategy session" onto the market without extensive pre-vetting of the feature set. C'mon. And stay mum all the way before dropping something randomly. Killing off modularity when each lens costs 10k+? So everyone else that invested in XT glass is stuck with the XT body although a compact body would have been welcome and easy to pull off?
Look at companies like Red or Blackmagic - they listen and try to surpass the expectations of their communities; here we have a severe case of "Ivory Tower" product management. 0 comms and randomly pushing flawed products onto the market based on their own taste and some notion of what might be cool ("SWC").
The system design blunders keep on piling up:
+ No auto LCC as suggested in the beginning
+ No large XT to benefit from the IC of 50mm and above lenses
+ Tilt is only 3 degrees, uni-directional (ie no swing because of the Cambo mount)
+ Tilt is not available in other lenses as retro upgrade
+ Lenses are overpriced as is the whole system
+ XC is a complete let-down by not being compatible with the other X lenses; if you spent 10k+ on a 23 X shutter you basically lost; I have almost all X lenses and would have loved a compact body to go along; but NOT a FIXED LENS SYSTEM in the price bracket above 10k
+ It doesn't have a tripod mount on the side, so you need either get a bulky L-bracket or a big tripod head to shoot vertically
+ 0 communication and sounding with the community; some polling would have most certainly fed back that modularity is a big thing to kill off
While the idea of a compact camera system with 150 megapixel resolution is nice ("The SWC / Q principle"), you cannot make it not modular. I own the 23 X shutter and cannot use it with this system as I am forced to buy the body + lens. You can bet this is going to be expensive.
This is not how you keep the business alive in a recessionary environment. Also the "Leica Q" concept doesn't fly as soon as you get to these price levels.
it is one thing to buy a 6k "disposable tech" cam, another thing to break the modularity paradigm and punish people who bought the 23 X shutter lens and release a what - 15-20k disposable lens cam.
Very disappointed. Not going to buy this – also you might not want to use a 23 X lens always, but maybe a 40, 50mm lens sometimes. – so what were they thinking?
Alpa's TC is a way better solution here and it is more compact. With the small TC grip it is argubaly even more portable and you can use all lenses, including legacy Schneider glass and x shutter glass.
With C1 presets correcting for vignetting and distortion at 0/0 position the TC, even if the XC has some firmware related auto correction tricks, is essentially as easy workflow-wise as this offering.
Also it seems like they didn't grasp the opportunity to offer tilt in the XC which would have been nice for a pure play landscape cam.
What is product management thinking ... seriously. Not sure this is exactly what is needed to turn sales around in this economic environment.
This product is going to tank big time. Happy to be quoted if this is the hot pancake of the photo world in the coming months.
Even Dante doesn't want you to burn money completely stupidly.