The Leica S system has a leaf shutter (Central shutter) lens line running parallel with their PL (plane shutter) lenses*. I have spoken to their people in Solms - one of their most popular portrait lenses: the 120mm f/2.5 CS** easily outsell the shutterless 100mm f/2 PL (sync speed of the CS lenses is 1/1000th).
This is an elephant in the room that Pentax can choose to ignore, but by doing so they close themselves off to a large market of professionals with deep pockets.
*though there are some lenses that do not have this option, like the Vario-Elmar-S 30-90mm f/5.6.
** Personally I prefer the APO-Elmar 180mm f/3.5 CS on my Leica S. It gives my a longer working distance and It is a true Apochromat - it has no colour fringing of any kind, unlike the faster lenses which can suffer from LoCa, though by 35mm standards all the S lenses lenses are perfect - I'm just
picky,
really picky.
Last edited by Digitalis; 02-23-2015 at 09:34 PM.