The DJI Goggles I got as part of my bundle with the Mavic Air Flymore Combo have now been in my ownership for about 10 months, but I still haven’t managed to complete a full flight with them. The last time I took them to the seaside, I had the Goggles powered up and plugged into the Mavic Air controller, but somehow they wouldn’t link.
Due to the UK Drone regulations, you are actually required to keep the drone in sight at all times, hence the Goggles would in theory only be legal if another person wore them.
What I have been using them for is to watch Amazon Prime Video while plugged into my laptop via HDMI cable. The headset is really heavy, but once set up, the picture quality is decent and battery life is also quite good. At full charge, I reckon that you can get through two full movies.
Ideally, the Goggles could benefit from having two screens, one for each eye, and maybe removable battery packs. The battery pack is huge, hence the entire contraption has to be supported by the headband.
The Goggles also have a micro SD slot on the left side by the headphone output, but I’ve heard that it’s not possible to watch content from the sd Card (except drone footage).
As a normal amateur photographer, there are probably a hundred different cameras that would be much easier to operate and do many more fancy things than the Leica and be much cheaper to purchase.
However, after using the Leica M240 for the last 3 years, I’m convinced that this is my best value camera purchase yet. The camera itself replaced my trusty Leica MP film camera that I got to experience photography in a more raw form.
Hence, the lenses I retained during the upgrade process were very much welcome, since the Leica-M Summicron 35/2.0 ASPH. and Leica-M Summilux 50/1.4 ASPH. (6-bit) currently retail for £2,700 and £3,400 respectively (Leica Store Mayfair – 2018)
When I bought the lenses, the 35mm one didn’t come 6-bit coded, which only means that you have to manually select the lens type through the camera menu. The great thing is that I got the lens from an eBay seller who needed to liquidate his pristine lens collection and snapped it up for only 1.1k.
A similar story was the 50-lux when a German Amazon shopped forgot to re-price the lens on the German Amazon to the UK prices, saving me a decent 25% off retail (2.7k in 2009).
I dare say that if I tried to resell both lenses today, I would probably be able to exceed 100% of the price I paid 9 years ago. Try finding other tools that retain the same amount of value. A normal car loses 50% of its new value after 3 years and 80%+ in 9 years.
While the lenses do not depreciate much, a grudge in the Leica community is that digital Leica cameras depreciate much faster than their film counterparts, noticeably against the likes of a Leica M6, M7, or MP, but so they should, since the electronic circuit boards deteriorate, the battery gets older and things break.
However, if you take a camera like the Canon 5D Mark III, which was sold at a similar time as the Leica M240, the retail price was close to £3k, vs. the £4.8k of the M240. On eBay today, the Canon fetch £1k (33% retention) vs. £2.2k on the M240 (45% retention). At the price I bought the camera from Wex Photography, the retention would be closer to 50%.
The most obvious reason behind the higher value retention is that Leica is an iconic German brand that has built its brand reputation over the last 60 years and also since the Leica-M cameras are released much less frequently than perhaps comparable Canon cameras. To confuse things even more, it’s actually getting more difficult to see what model of camera people are using, since the newer models like M10, M10-D don’t even have a model designation on the front anymore (saving people the hassle of buying duck tape to mask the model designation).
Some people say that part of the Leica experience is the less intrusive nature of the set-up. The camera isn’t supposed to feel “in your face” and if I had one regret it would probably be having the entire collection in black, to be even stealthier. Without a trained eye, most people would just pass you by and thing that you’re trying to be retro, but once in a while someone will nod approvingly and complement you on the camera.
