Leica CL

This is the Leica that Leica fans love to argue about, because Minolta built half of it. The CL came out of a partnership in the early 1970s, assembled in Japan, and purists have been sniffing at it ever since for not being a "real" M. They are wrong about that. It takes M-mount glass, it focuses with a rangefinder, and it fits in a coat pocket in a way no brass M body ever will. For a lot of people it is the most M-camera you can actually afford.

The thing you notice first is the size. Pick up an M3 and then pick up a CL and the CL feels like a toy until you shoot it. The shutter is a vertical-travel cloth focal-plane unit, quiet, with speeds from about half a second up to roughly 1/1000 and flash sync at 1/60. The finder is bright enough, with frame lines for 40, 50, and 90mm, which is the catch: the camera was sold with a 40mm Summicron-C, and that oddball focal length is part of the deal. The rangefinder base is short, much shorter than a full M, so it is honest with a 40 or a 50 and starts to struggle with anything fast and long. Do not buy one expecting to nail a 90mm f/2 wide open in low light.

Loading is the usual Leica bottom-plate ritual, fiddly the first few times, second nature after a roll. The meter is the real story and the real weakness. Leica put a CdS cell on a little swing arm that drops in front of the shutter curtain when you advance the film, reading straight off the focal plane, then flips up out of the way when you fire. It is a clever match-needle system. It is also the part most likely to be dead or drifting fifty years on. The arm mechanism is delicate, the cell ages, and a proper service is not cheap because almost nobody works on them anymore.

Which is where a CL with a tired meter becomes a meterless camera in everything but name. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is the meter this body wishes it still had. You set the shutter, place your shadows where you want them, and shoot the CL purely mechanically. The shutter does not need the battery, so a dead cell costs you nothing but the metering you were going to do externally anyway.

People shoot the CL for travel and street, for exactly the reason it was built: M rendering in a body you forget you are carrying. Cross-shop it against a Bessa R or a screw-mount Canon and the CL wins on size and lens compatibility, loses on rangefinder accuracy and parts support. The 40mm Summicron-C that came with it is quietly one of the best lens bargains Leica ever made, and half the people buying CL bodies are really buying the lens. Treat the meter as a bonus that may or may not work, bring your own light reading, and it is a genuinely lovely little camera.