I’ve long suspected that the CL’s internals were designed by Panasonic people and that the SL and SL2 were done with at least a significant amount of help from Panasonic. I could be wrong, but why else would Leica have cited the “disbanding” of the team of CL’s engineers as a partial excuse for offering no successor to it?

On their own, internals of their M series have faced challenges since the start, going from LCD discoloration on the M8 to sensor corrosion on the M9 to widespread reports of freezes and even some bricking with the M11. And now they’ve admitted to a significant issue with the SL3. And there are a mountain of complaints about lengthy repair times, even faulty repairs.

As long as I avoid using the more complex settings of my current bodies, they work fine on a daily basis—in all kinds of environmental conditions, I should add. They are robust and dependable. But they won’t last forever.

Recent acquisition of a Lumix S 85mm f/1.8 lens, coupled with past experience with the 70-300mm, has been an eye-opener. The 85mm is roughly one-eighth of the street price and half the weight of the APO-Summicron-SL 90mm, but its real-life images, to my eyes, are not discernibly different from the 90. The 70-300mm, though a stop slower than the SL 90-280mm, the optical formula for which is also patented by Panasonic, is less than half the weight, about a fourth of the price, and—in real world shooting conditions—has remarkably similar image quality.

In the regional market, Lumix commands resale prices on par with other manufacturers, significant for those of us who change gear according to our changing needs. One reason I’ve mostly shied away from Sigma lenses is that I tend not to keep them for long and their resale value is hideously low in these parts.

All of this has me starting to check whether there are other options in the Lumix S line that might be useful for what I do. And eager to see the 100-500mm that was shown on their recent roadmap. And wondering when an S2R might appear and what it might be like.

Times change. And even venerable, respected brand names sometimes change, not always in a good way. Time to be prepared and ready for the future.

SL2/Lumix S 85mm f1.8 . . .