I also read that the Leica is better built because weather sealed. But some time ago, I opened a thread about the use of MF backs in harsh conditions and MF users where
talkinbg about their experiences. It appeared that those MF backs are extremelly capable of handling extremes conditions, and they don't claim weather seals.
But those where informations from many years users in desert, moutain, ice etc... not for a few days testing that maybe or if.
Weather sealing and ability to handle adverse conditions are not the same. I would NEVER pour a bucket of water on a Phase One system, but that doesn't mean I don't trust it 100% to work consistently and with consistent image quality through a huge variety of heat, cold, spray, humidity, and other "crap" weather.
Many such "claims" need to be proven by the real world usage over many years that you refer to. My senior thesis in college was on time lapse and involved several streaks of thousands of images in the middle of the cold Ohio night (I know there are colder places, but several thousand images in a row in that weather is a pretty harsh test). I had two dSLRs which made similar claims about weather sealing but one performed consistently and the other performed erratically) - I would not even try to make a general conclusion from one such data point (hence I won't tell you the models/brands) but it was a nice early experience for me to realize construction quality, design tolerances, design intentions, manufacturing cost, all come into play and not just phrases like "partially" or "fully" weather sealed.
This is not meant as a slam on any product. The idea that Leica and Pentax can demo their units with glasses of water poured over them is in the very least "really cool" and likely very reassuring for photographers who work in rainy or water-spray-filled areas that don't want to put their camera away after anything more than a moderate drizzle.
Another quick example since they came to mind...
I spent an entire day on location last month troubleshooting a computer/camera/digital-back issue with a client. He is a location architectural shooter. The problem was the system would not connect to the computer when he was on a shoot (so he had to shoot to CF card), but every time he came back from the shoot it worked perfectly (even when we did things "not perfectly" to try to get it to fail). So after some frustrating troubleshooting I was able to pass through his city and troubleshoot with him in person. We found the problem was heat - he sets up his laptop on a stand in the sun and uses a viewing-screen-shade which covers the monitor, but not the rest of the laptop and the sun was hitting the laptop directly for several hours in the hot summer of the South. The phase one back kept trucking the entire time, but the laptop's firewire port would become non-responsive (even to other firewire devices like FW hard drives) after the internal laptop temperature got too high. This was the first generation MacBookPro 17" and it was known for unusually poor heat management (for an Apple laptop). For the troubleshooting we had brought along another (newer) 15" MBP which worked perfectly even as the internal laptop temperature got very high (indicating to me that Apple significantly increased their heat-sinking). It would be impossible to read this from specs as specs like "operating temperature range" don't distinguish between being in direct sunlight or shaded (the "ambient temperature" is the same) and the laptop DID turn on and "worked" - only the FW port was a problem. Needless to say he bought a new laptop and has been happy since.
Doug Peterson
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