Project insight

How did the R-D1 idea start and where is it going?

Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.



So why on earth did Epson decide to make such a strange camera as the R-D1? The motivation came from a couple of directions. First of all, a senior engineer within Epson proposed the project. The argument was that the concept of a rangefinder camera was being left behind by the rush digital. There is something rather special about using a rangefinder camera and the viewfinder of the R-D1, with its big, bright and natural view, underlines this.

Corporate statement
What is clear is that the R-D1 is being positioned as a limited edition statement of corporate kudos. Epson is saying – ‘look, we can do this’! Sure, 10,000 R-D1s at £2,000 each adds up to £20 million (nearly $40 million) but the R-D1 is not really a primary revenue centre for Epson. This kind of thing happens a lot in other industries, like the automotive world, for example.



Even though the R-D1 can hardly be called a product that is close to Epson’s core competencies in the digital printing world, the company has close links with camera maker, Cosina and the go-ahead was given for the two companies to develop the R-D1 as a camera that ‘epitomises photographic history’.

Faithful to traditional film camera concept
The R-D1 was deliberately designed to be as faithful as possible to the traditional concept of a film-based rangefinder camera, which is why the controls and gauges are all analogue and why there aren’t even basic digital camera features like a camera to PC connection.

Concessions to digital technology do exist – the large 2 inch 235,000 pixel colour LCD monitor is one but, just like digital SLRs, it’s not possible to use it as a live previewer. A nice touch is that when the screen is stowed face-in, you’d be hard-pressed to realise it was there in the first place. Unless the screen is actually displayed, the R-D1 hardly betrays it’s a digital camera at all.

For digital technophobes
Epson says the R-D1 design was also conceived to make the camera as comfortable as possible for existing, maybe technophobic, rangefinder camera users to handle. This even extends to retaining the film advance lever and though there is no film to advance any more, the lever does manually cock the vertical metal focal plane shutter. You can forget about continuous shooting on the R-D1!



Technical image quality compromise concerns?
But even so, the R-D1 is very much a digital camera and its use of Leica-fit lenses does raise some serious technical questions. The rear elements of many of these lenses lie relatively close to the focal plane. Undoubtedly, the relatively acute angles of incidence that image-forming rays meet the 6MP APS-C digital sensor at towards the corner of the frame will produce noticeable corner shading.

Although unconfirmed by Epson to date, it’s possible that corner-shading compensation may have been implemented for the R-D1. It’s not new – even some compact consumer cameras are now featuring it. The Olympus DSLR E-System manages the issue of corner shading elegantly because when you change the lens on your camera the lens mounted tells the body digitally how much compensation is required. But with the R-D1, this is not possible. I’d guess that the RAW processor plug-ins Epson will provide for Adobe Photoshop 7 and later, including Photoshop Elements 2.0 and later, would have some kind of manually variable corner-shading compensation built in, but I’m really only guessing. Epson did, however, say that the plug-ins would include a batch-processing mode and that the official file extension for R-D1 raw files is .ERF.

There is another question that currently remains un-answered. How quiet is the camera? One of the key assets of a Leica M-series camera, for example, is its quiet operation, especially compared to a mirror-thwacking SLR. The R-D1 shown to us was not working.

Who would buy such a beast?
So who is going to buy an R-D1? For £2,000 you don’t even get a lens – or even an SD card, so we are told! I don’t have any doubt that the R-D1 will sell-out and, indeed, it may even be sold out before it reaches any shops. The limited production run of 10,000 units, half of which will probably be swallowed up by the Japanese home market, should guarantee that. It’s likely that if Epson limit the production run to that 10,000 units, the R-D1 will become a collectors’ item – maybe all the concerns about corners shading and practicality will be secondary in the end!

If you are interested in the potential for Leica-fit digital rangefinder cameras, take a look at Andrew Nemeth’s interesting FAQ.

Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.