Brand Loyalty in

I went to London to get the sensor cleaned on the Leica M9. It used to cost a lot of money to get this done, Leica Mayfair still have my beautiful clear grey JPEGs on file, now however it's totally free. There's a problem, some of the lovely Kodak CCD sensors are falling apart, in my heart I new mine was going so the grieving was already in-check.

The M9 is a fantastic thing, but, it is far from perfect. It has a battery life of a little longer than the time it takes to drink an espresso, being CCD based it's not great at high ISO ratings and it is painfully slow to store the image files. It is almost totally manual, but with the M9 you have something that you can carry round at ease and it will do this,

and then a little later it will do this...

and this...

and finally this...

Which takes me to the film crew at the top. They were in London's glamorous West End and interviewed me me about banking products, specifically what would make me jump ship. But the guy on the right couldn't resist interviewing me about the Leica. I didn't want to tell him the bad news though I still hadn't fully processed it (if you'll excuse the pun).

I have some options; Leica in Germany will fix it FOC and keep doing so if it fails again; they will pay me (not very much) for it; or they will give me a reasonable price against a new version of the M9 that doesn't have the problem and has addressed most of the issues above.

So the crew were asking me in effect about brand loyalty and on the face of it I have every reason to jump ship with the Leica. But my problem is, do I get it repaired, get a new one or maybe even get the Monochrom, a hugely expensive camera that only does black and white? I already have Nikons and I could live without the Leica but I don't want to.

Only fleetingly have I considered selling the Leica gear.

Brand loyal? You bet I am.

(Shot with my HTC)