From Science to Art: The Story of Leaf.

[Ben Rubinstein]

From Science to Art: The Story of Leaf. The story of how a small startup company became one of the worlds leaders in high end digital photography.

From Science to Art; The story of Leaf « thedustylenscap

Written by our very own Leaf representative Yair Shahar!

[Kerry L]

Ben, Thanks for this.

I think that contributors pointing to and posting links to these types of articles is one of the best things about LL.

[jduncan]

From Science to Art: The Story of Leaf. The story of how a small startup company became one of the worlds leaders in high end digital photography.

From Science to Art; The story of Leaf « thedustylenscap

Written by our very own Leaf representative Yair Shahar!

Thanks. I remember the old days when I read Digital Photo pro. Back then the photosites of the medium format backs were actually bigger. Dynamic range where out of the charts in comparison with the old 8 bit DSLR and prices unreachable for me.

People willing to pay for quality was the norm, and the battle between digital and analog was just starting.

Leaf have this advantage in people photography, due in part to the Dalsa sensors.
Better light was selling  this impossible high resolution (for those years) digital scanning backs.

All that experience is from the early 200x, the change has been so fast.
For the people that started in the 90s or even before this journey had to be like magic or like a bad sorcerery.

Thanks again for charing.

Best regards,

J. Duncan

[bcooter]

Yair,

Nice history.  Leaf should be proud.

I loved your story about the attempted mugging.  Way to go.  Don't mess with the Mossad.

I am sorry to hear your daughters were upset, but knowing you, it'll all work out and your family is probably already forgot about it.

All the best.

BC

[ondebanks]

Great article. Given the way that it's been bandied about between different owners, it's amazing that Leaf has managed to stick to a certain vision throughout.

One thing struck me in this passage:

"For what it’s worth, today there are several such “Valleys” around the country. In fact Israel is one of the leading countries in terms of high-tech industries; Some big names such as Intel, Microsoft, Sandisk, General Electric, Motorola, HP and more recently Apple have R&D centres and factories in Israel and many of today’s medical, pharmaceutical, software, computer hardware and environmental friendly developments come from this little country".

...you could subsitute "Ireland" for "Israel" and it fits perfectly. Except Apple has been here since 1980, their first plant outside the US...ah the old Apple II days .

Ray

[Ben Rubinstein]

How is Ireland doing these days in the crisis? Such a nice modern and high tech country, was surprised when they got into trouble.

[ondebanks]

How is Ireland doing these days in the crisis? Such a nice modern and high tech country, was surprised when they got into trouble.

Hi Ben, nice of you to be concerned about us. It was no surprise really that we got into trouble here - we had a massive construction & real estate bubble in the last decade, aided by a neo-con absence of financial regulation, greedy banks, and short-sighted government. Same story applied to the US, UK etc., but ours was just on a much larger scale as a proportion of our GDP.

Ireland is doing a little better now. It's a tale of two different economies in the same small country.

Exports are booming and basically keeping the ship afloat (we returned to overall growth last year and had a record trade surplus), and employment is rising in the tech and internationally traded sectors. This part of the economy is basically back to the "good boom" we had in the 90's (driven by creativity and productivity), as opposed to the "bad boom" we had in the 00's (driven by debt, quick-buck greed and hubris).

OTOH, domestic confidence and spending are weak, unemployment has hardly fallen at all yet (14.2%), property prices are still declining, new graduates are still emigrating to Australia and Canada. There is a sense that things have bottomed out, the worst is over and the government elected last March is doing a much better job (within the parameters allowed by the EU-IMF programme), but people are paying down debt or putting their money away in savings - it averages to something like €20k per head - and will not spend significantly until they feel certain that their jobs are safe, which may take 2 or 3 more years of recovery.

It doesn't help that just as we were getting our act together, the Greek tragedy became even worse and increased confusion in the euro-zone. That said, there's an interesting graph in the Economist this week which shows how Ireland's 2-year bond prices have fallen considerably since last summer to about 5% while Portugal's have shot up to 20% - we seem to be convincing investors while our fellow-bailees, the Portuguese, unfortunately are not.

Ray