Konica Hexar RF

This is the M-mount rangefinder Leica never built, and a fair number of Leica purists have never forgiven Konica for it. Take an M body, give it a real meter, aperture-priority autoexposure, a motor that loads and advances and rewinds your film for you, and a shutter that runs to about 1/4000. Then sell it for a fraction of what an M7 would eventually cost. That was the Hexar RF in 1999, and on paper it embarrassed everything Wetzlar was making at the time.

The mount is Konica's own KM bayonet, a copy of the Leica M throat, so your Summicrons and Voigtlanders drop right on. The viewfinder is bright with illuminated, parallax-corrected brightlines, and the rangefinder patch is a proper split and double-image type that snaps into focus the way a coupled rangefinder should. Where Leica makes you thumb a wind lever and crank a rewind knob, the Hexar just whirs. Load the cassette, close the back, the motor takes it to frame one. Shoot, and it advances itself. For street work this matters more than the spec sheet suggests, because your eye never leaves the finder between frames.

The meter is center-weighted and genuinely good, feeding an aperture-priority mode that picks shutter speeds continuously down to sixteen seconds. Set the lens, watch the readout, press. Manual mode gives you discrete steps from one second up to that 1/4000 top end, with flash sync at 1/120. It handles like a modern camera wearing a classic body, which is exactly the point.

Now the weakness, and it is a real one. Around 2001 Erwin Puts measured his Hexar's flange distance at roughly 28mm against the Leica M standard of 27.8, and the internet caught fire over back-focus. The consensus that eventually settled is that it was mostly tolerance stacking and measurement method, and most people shoot Leica glass on these bodies with no trouble. But the doubt never fully died, and that is before you remember this is an electronic camera with no manufacturer support left. When the circuit board in a Hexar RF dies, it is dead. There is no CLA that brings the electronics back, and parts are gone. You are buying an orphan.

For the tricky frames where the center-weighted pattern gets fooled, a backlit subject against a bright sky, a face in a dark doorway, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you actually want instead of trusting the body to average its way to a guess. Today the Hexar RF trades well under an M7 and pulls buyers who want autoexposure and a motor in an M-mount package and refuse to pay Leica money for it. The catch is permanent: when it stops, it stops for good.