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[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
As I have said before, but maybe not recently, MX's were usually bought by serious photographers. Serious photographers tended to use the heck out of them. Unlike ME Supers most of which spent the past 20 years in a drawer or camera bag, MX's tended to spend all those years hanging around someone's neck.
Funny thing is folks will say the Nikon F3 was sturdier, but a lot of folks bought them as tokens and did not use them much. The ones used very heavily are worn out too.
Those of us who used F3s professionally used the hell out of them, just like the MXen. I bought 2 USED a decade ago and shot 20 rolls a week through them. They still work fine. They've had repair done on them, sure (most of it pretty trivial) but NOTHING like the repair load my newer F4s have seen! Mind you, I can still get my F3s repaired by the guy who
won't do MXen. He won't do a major rebuild (too many changes to the design over the years) but he'll handle lesser work.
Of course this is a bit like apples and oranges because the MX was not built to the same standard as the F3 (nor sold for the same price.) You probably have a good point that they were USED AS HARD, though, because of the sorts of
shooters who bought them. This would leave a lot of worn-out MXen, given that they were a bit less rugged than the F3s to start with.
My point being that I believe a higher percentage of serious users bought the MX than almost any other camera in history, so there are fewer low milage old MX's around than there are of most other cameras. Ask Shel, he went through several before finding good ones. I do believe that a few years back I told him here on the list just about what I am saying now. I now have a beat to death ratty looking one that I just love, but it fits with the ones you had experience with. It is not like a like new one at all.
Given that my first MX was bought in about 1990 (used, obviously) and most of my discussions of the MX with my tech were even later, our experiences could well be due to a high percentage of worn-out MXen in the availible population of cameras.
I'm curious if the LX repair gripes that I've heard on PDML stem from the same factor. Somebody once asked why Popular Photography never did a "frequency of repair" database for cameras the way they do for cars. Pop
replied that the list would not reflect actual camera reliability very well because the more durable pro cameras would actual show up as being
repaired more often--for obvious reasons.
I've long suspect that this is one of the reasons that camera companies
"get away with" low build quality in modern cameras and lenses. Most people who buy cheap equipment don't use it much and when ten years later it finally breaks they find that it makes a lot more sense to just buy new stuff anyway. The top-of-the-line stuff is still built as tough
as it ever was.
DJE
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com
"You might as well accept people as they are, you are not going to be able to change them anyway."
