Leica M11 Rumours: Q2-style battery and bottom plate, 50MP resolution, new backwards-compatible Visoflex

Dear Tony,

I think that the problem with the M5 was not that the camera looked a bit different – it sold well when first launched – but that Leitz/Leica then shot themselves in the foot by subsequently launching the original ‘Compact Leica’ – the CL – which had the same groundbreaking (..for a Leica!..) through-the-lens metering system, was about two thirds the size, and two thirds the weight – and price! – of the M5 ..and sales of the CL were huge.

Thus, death of the M5.

The easy-open-bottom-plate Kickstarter campaign didn’t get anywhere, did it? ..Only two backers. But with a tripod plate – or anything except a little screw – on the bottom of the camera, the battery and card slot STILL wouldn’t have been accessible with that new easy-open bottom-plate. And – unlike the actual M10 bottom plate – the tripod socket for the easy-open plate isn’t directly beneath the lens, is it?

That new bottom plate had only a 30-day Funding Period ..clearly not long enough to get out sufficient word-of-mouth and other PR splashes so that potential customers would know about it. So I think the developer wasn’t too publicity-savvy.

Ideas like that only work if people get to know about them, and if the developer wasn’t adept at getting PR, then what chance was there for the product?

.
Hi Bertil. I think you DO have to turn on the M240 to take photos ..it’s only the mechanical Leicas which don’t need to be turned on ..or maybe I’ve misunderstood your point. It would be great if digital cameras could be used without having to turn them ‘On’ first ..but there would need to be some kind of, er, ‘lock’ to stop the camera being accidentally turned on ..in a bag, for example.

(As far as I remember, you didn’t have to ‘turn on’ the Olympus OM-2 ..turning it On activated the needle display in the viewfinder to give a preview of the shutter speed it would use, but the actual shutter speed was set when the shutter opened – when you pressed the shutter button – and it would still give an accurate exposure without first turning the camera On. Maybe Don can correct me if I’m wrong.)

Those little Pentax Q cameras are great, aren’t they?!

Hi Dunk,

Yes, the M9 “‘saved Leica’s bacon’ at a time when Leica camera /lens sales were in the doldrums”. (My interest, though, is ‘photography’, rather than business management. Other photography-related companies needed their bacon saving, too – Polaroid, Hasselblad, Kodak – but they didn’t escape the abbatoir, because they’d stagnated.)

Times move on ..and M cameras are no longer “the smallest full frame digital camera available” ..The Sony A7 cameras, and then the Sigma ‘fp’, took away that crown.

“Buy a bullet proof s/h M8 or M9 now and you’ll likely not lose much in depreciation compared to buying e.g. a ‘less fun’ new ICL camera costing the same £$€”. “Less fun” ..in whose opinion?

I’m not really interested in ‘investment’ or ‘depreciation’ or even ‘appreciation’; I’m interested in ‘photography’ ..making photos.

Some things do appreciate ..people do pay high prices for old equipment. Look at old sports cars, look at old ‘tube’ (with a valve inside) microphones or some tape recorders, look at old – or even new – mechanical watches, or old fountain pens.

..But that’s ‘nostalgia’, not usefulness. What people pay for is often ‘rarity’, or exclusivity, not ‘capability’.

The latest Leitz Photographica Auction? €102,000 for a Leica 1 ..not because it’s a really useful camera, but because it belonged to Leitz Junior. €264,000 for a Leica model 1 covered with lizard skin. I don’t expect that either of those devices takes ‘better’ photos or takes them more easily than other old cameras of that era. But people buy old hardware to fondle or show-off, for ‘pride of ownership’ or as investments.

None of that has much to do with actually taking pictures. It’s about history, or scarcity, or monetary accretion.

“Now almost 12 years later, the M9 with a Mk II sensor, still commands a s/h price c. £1900”. And some people – often outside the UK – pay £500 for an old Reslo microphone from the late fifties or early sixties just because there are photos of John Lennon in the Cavern singing into one. But I’d say they’re worth – and some sell for – just £30. I won’t say they were ‘common as muck’ in the 60s, but almost every hall had a Reslo or two as a Public Address mic, and even BBC TV bought a few (modified ones) for ‘Grandstand’ (..the sports programme). People do pay, though, for that ‘history’, for the ‘association’ of some artifact with a person or event. It’s like art ..people pay all kinds of prices because they believe, or are led to believe, that an item is ‘worth’, say, £2m.

Value is always, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and what ‘the market’ will stand.

Leica – the firm – hasn’t moved on much, though. They’re still making the same style M cameras like the M3 of 1954 ..but with electronics inside instead of film and clockwork.

And how do the ‘modern’ M cameras behave? Well, the M9 was really sluggish; it takes almost three seconds to display a photo on its screen (depending on the complexity of the detail in the picture), and was really noisy. (Contemporary instructions tell you to keep your finger pressed on the shutter release if you want it to be quiet, and then shove the camera under your coat or jacket before releasing the button if you don’t want the shutter-cocking ‘grind’ to be heard ..this from the company – we-ell, approximately the company – which once prized itself on ‘whisper quiet’ cameras!)

They make those massive, heavy SL cameras, but have utterly lost their way with – what? – the T cameras and the assorted APS cameras, and the Q ..rather like Apple’s sorry standstill since Steve Jobs died: where are the innovative items, not just the re-hashes of existing products?

Despite people paying £1900 for a used M9, I do think that M cameras are dinosaurs. What the Ms need is (a) a lighter-weight body, (b) a sliding auto-focus mount, (c) the Visoflex ‘wart’ fitted inside to show what each lens sees, and (d) assorted colours. (Remember what the ‘candy-coloured’ iMacs did for Apple?)

Lighter, auto-focusier, friendlier-finder, jollier, current generation cameras, not stuck-in-the-past miniature heavyweight coffins-with-a-lens-on.

It wouldn’t be hard to do: use lighter-weight alloy, buy the Techart mechanism and put it inside the lens mount, move the EVF into the body and dispense with the mechanical RF linkage, and use pretty paint. I’d buy one of those! Especially if an enterprising optics company – Sigma? – made a few small (autofocus-not-necessary) zooms for it, like a 21-95mm in pretty colours.

For those who still want a miniature heavyweight coffin-with-a-lens-on, there’s the 2nd-hand market – always buoyant for Leicas, it seems – or old stock.

Polaroid; dead. Kodak; dead. Hasselblad; a Chinese drone-maker. Leica only just escaped being sold off to Best Buy, and there are only so many higher and higher pixel-count coffins-with-a-lens-on that it’s possible to sell ..in my humble opinion.

Oh, I preferred the ‘Gen 1’ bodies ..before they were beefed up with the IBIS inside, and before the release button was moved further forwards, onto the top of the battery chamber. (That short battery life annoyance was really ..well; annoying! I now have a collection of (at least) eight quick-swappable Sony batteries for when the existing batt’s about to run out!)

Even with the (Sony) camera(s) turned off, I found that battery life was awful: run down in just a few days with everything (except the constantly-running internal clock) turned off. Nikon circuitry doesn’t seem to drain anything, ever, unless the camera’s really being used; pick up a Df after a year, and there’s been no drain whatsoever!

Maybe I have small hands (..no-one’s ever mentioned it!..) but I find the A7S (especially) /A7R2 bodies just right – Goldilocks size. Oddly, picking up the A7S just now, with a Techart adaptor on (and Contax G2 21mm lens attached) I see that the batt is still 51% full ..after not having used it for a week. Could it be a drain, I wonder, through the Sony-fit lenses when the camera’s off? This Techart has all the various contacts (for driving its internal motor) ..but maybe some of those aren’t internally attached to anything, and so don’t make any circuit which might drain a battery when the camera’s (supposedly) ‘off’ ..?

(On 3rd thoughts, though, the batts don’t seem to last all that long even when out of a camera, and just sitting for a week or two: maybe a combination of internal batt circuitry and camera-to-lens circuitry runs them down. Still, with this big pile of them here – including 1950mAh Sony ‘lookalike’ spares (beefier than Sony’s own 1080mAh) from unspecified makers – which seem to last longer! – I’m not so bothered.

For anyone still reading, or still interested; weight of the Sony A7S body, strap and battery, no lens: 515 grams. (Just weighed it.) Weight of the Leica M10-P body, strap and battery, no lens: (ditto) 690 grams. So the Leica is one third heavier, and is also larger (except for the top ‘bump’ on the Sony) ..check on camerasize.com ..it’s the unnecessary weight of the Leica which is really so annoying. It’s like the old Nimslo ‘3D'(-ish) lightweight cameras which had (junk) lumps of steel inside to make you feel you were getting ‘heft’ and ‘real value’ for your money. Humbug!

Cheers,

David.

That’s what I thought too. It would possibly be construed as insensitive, but that’s what the rumours say and it is a need marriage of 11/11 and 9/9. Although, come to think of it, combining the two produces 9/11. That’s another one to be avoided. Mind you, I still stick to a late Autumn release.

Did you experience a one month turn around on calibration?

“..I yearn for an M with IBIS to complement my tortured wrists. If the M11 does that, I’m in.”

Ever heard of a ‘Techart’ M-lens-to-Sony adaptor, Bob?

That lets you fit an M lens onto a Sony A7 series ‘full-frame’ camera (which, optionally) has IBIS, and (with its own teeny motor inside) it will autofocus any M lens on the Sony camera.

So you get M lens quality – though I can’t see much or any difference between an M 50mm f2 APO and the brilliant Sony 55mm f1.8 – along with autofocus (no wrist- or finger-twisting) AND stabilisation. Which is what you want, isn’t it?

Having owned an M8.2 and an M9 – and presently owning an M10-P – I can tell you all about the “..special joy, advantage, photographic mystique, technical superiority..” of a rangefinder camera: none.

Special joy: none. They’re unnecessarily heavy. They’re made of heavy metal, to attempt convincing you that you’re holding something of great merit, of great historical significance, with plenty of ‘substance’ to reflect the high price of it, and to try convincing you that you’ve got great ‘value’ for a great deal of money.

Advantage: none. Rangefinder apologists explain that the ‘finder – which always shows the view seen by a 28mm lens, instead of adapting to whichever lens you’re using – shows an area ‘outside’ what the lens sees, so that you’ll see “what is about to enter the frame”. But that’s not true for any lens wider than 28mm ..so – unless you guess (like using a camera from the 1920s) or you use an additional, supplementary, costly, wide-angle viewfinder (which doesn’t show whether you’re in focus or not) – you can’t see all of what’s going to be (or not) in your 24mm – or wider – photograph. Nor can you reliably use a lens longer than 135mm; nor use a zoom lens.

Photographic mystique: all Kiddology. The original Leitz company is long gone. That was bought by Wild-Heerbrugg in 1974 ..nearly fifty years ago! And that entity was almost bought by the US Best Buy company (equivalent to the UK’s Dixons cheap’n’cheerful electronic ‘box shifters’) ..and was then, in 2006, bought by the Austrian Kaufmann brothers. ‘Leica’ has traded for years on the idea that the most recognisable or iconic photos of the 20th Century – that’s last century – were shot with Leicas. But that’s not sports pictures, because Leica rangefinders are pretty useless with lenses longer than 135mm. And they don’t work with zooms.

Technical Superiority: none ..though the manual-only-focus lenses are very good and small, and – mainly – lightweight. But that’s the lenses. The cameras themselves are – technically speaking – dinosaurs. The current (2021) rangefinders use a focusing mechanism originally fitted in 1925, and brought – slightly – “up-to-date” in 1954. Almost seventy years ago. The M8.2 and M9 have a sensor which is less sensitive than some of the films you could buy when those cameras were first sold (in 2008 and 2009 respectively), as they have a maximum sensitivity of ISO 2500. Fuji made faster colour film in 2008 / 2009. (Polaroid, for heaven’s sake, was selling super-fine-grain ISO 3000 black and white negative film – for making as many prints as you wanted from the negs – in 1977 ..that’s 30 years before the M8.2 or M9.

So why do people buy Leica rangefinders? ..It’s ‘aspirational’ ..like aspiring to buy an old 1950s American car ..or a Harley-Davidson ..or an old Austin Atlantic ..it’s not practical ..it’s for imagining yourself to be a great photographer.

So why do I own an M9 and an M10-P..? (..I sold the M8.2 in disgust almost as soon as I got it, as it was so silly and clunky; I ‘upgraded’ to an M9 because – by then – I’d bought a few lenses for the 8.2, and had bought some for my father-in-law’s old M3 before that, and wanted a camera which I thought might do those lenses justice. I bought the M10-P as that was the camera which the M8 or M9 should have been: silent like the old 1954 M3, but with a built-in light meter and – optionally – automatic shutter speeds. (The M8, M8.2 and M9 had the noisy, clunky, hear-it-coming-down-the-street shutter of Leitz’ / Leica’s old R8 clunky, abandoned, SLR.)

Others here may beg to differ, of course. But don’t be taken in by all the talk of “wanting to ‘slow down'” ..because you can take photos slowly and thoughtfully with any camera, if that’s what you want. Just as you can drive slowly with any car; you don’t have to drive a Model T Ford in order to go slowly.

Technically, any Nikon, Canon, Panasonic (and several Leicas are Panasonics with just a different logo on the front), or any Pentax, Olympus, etc, is way ahead of any Leica M.

It’s all in the marketing.

Look at any photo ..in a newspaper, online, in a glossy magazine: can you tell (without looking at the EXIF data) if it was taken with a Leica or not? ..Or taken with a smartphone?
Or taken with an M8.2? (..possibly, as blacks in a colour photo taken with an M8 or M8.2 may look purple ..or in a black-&-white photo some foliage may look whiter, and faces may look a little odder than with other cameras’ images ..due to poor infra-red filtration on the 8-series cameras).

Do I have anything tempting to say about an M8.2 or M9? (Some people say that the colours are very nice and saturated, due to the CCD used in those cameras ..but you can just slide the ‘Saturation’ adjustment a bit to the right in any photo program on any computer and get the same result.)

But you do have to beware of the CCDs which were used in those cameras ..the M9 CCDs began to need replacing after three years, as they started to delaminate (came to bits!) and Leica won’t replace them under warranty any more, so you may get black or white spots at the same place in every picture once the sensor starts to ‘rot’.

They are both, essentially, old, nineteen-fities film cameras, but they let you take umpteen shots – until their electronic card is full, or their battery runs out – instead of your having to stop and rewind the film every 36 shots.

Treat them like unlimited-shot film cameras, but without the messy processing, as that’s what they – essentially – are. But costing silly money for what you get.

I bought a M 240 and it was not my favourite m camera or any camera. It was not properly calibrated when I bought it. Luckily I had the evf as Leica stores your camera for 6 months for calibration back then. I eventually got tired of the camera freezing and needing battery removal to fix. I finally sent it to Leica to be calibrated so I had a certificate when I sold it. Thanks to the price increases and ongoing camera waitlists I did not lose money when I sold it. Thank goodness for the price increases 😆. Sorry for my juvenile sense of humour, but it keeps me happy instead of depressed.

But there is practical side to price increases. Every other brand starts discounting their cameras and lenses shortly after release. Leica rarely does that during the whole product cycle. They did screw me on the Q-P but that was an anomaly and I have forgiven them.
As for rangefinders, one must be able to afford two. It is a mechanical device that needs recalibration at some point. Hence, you need an alternate camera while your camera is at the Leica spa. To be fair to Leica, they believed me when I said it came uncalibrated and did not charge me to calibrate it, clean the sensor, or store it for six months. What other manufacturer would do that – especially the six months…

I agree on that. I’m hoping it will use the Q/SL battery (of which I have a stock) but I’m not holding my breath. It could be just a little too big for the M body.