Leica CLE (Minolta-built)

Leica put its name on this camera, but Minolta built it, and for years that made people sniff at it. They were wrong. The CLE gave you real aperture-priority autoexposure two decades before an M body would (the M7 finally caught up in 2002), off-the-film metering that read light bouncing off the film plane during the exposure, and a 28mm frameline paired with that automation. In 1980 the CLE was the most modern thing wearing a Leica badge, and the factory in Wetzlar was in no hurry to say so.

In the hand it feels small after a real M. Lighter, thinner, almost toy-like until you fire it and the electronic focal-plane shutter runs from a long four seconds up to about 1/1000. The finder is bright and shows projected frames for 28, 40, and 90mm, a slightly odd set until you mount the 40mm Rokkor it shipped with and realize the whole kit was designed as one thing. Loading is the easy swing-back door, not the M's bottom-plate ritual, so you reload fast on the street. Focusing is true Leica M rangefinder, the patch crisp, the baselength workable for normal and wide glass though tight for a fast 90.

The metering is where it gets clever and where it bites. A silicon photodiode reads through the lens, and in aperture-priority auto the camera meters off the film itself while the shutter is open, adjusting on the fly. It nails ambient and TTL flash. Set the speed dial to A and it just works. Here is the catch. Switch to a manual shutter speed and the meter goes dark. There is no readout in manual at all. You either trust the auto mode or you fly blind, a strange decision on a camera otherwise built to think for you.

That quirk is exactly where a handheld reading earns its place. When you want to lock a shutter speed for motion, or you are shooting a backlit subject and the off-the-film auto wants to blow out the face, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, and dial the body to manual with confidence. You get the precision the manual mode refuses to give you, and the auto mode for everything else.

It runs on a pair of small button cells and it is dead without them. This is not a mechanical fallback camera, so carry spares. Light seals in the door age, and the meter electronics, once gone, are not casually repaired. A clean working CLE costs less than an M6 and a fraction of an M7, which is the whole argument for it. People who want a compact M-mount body with autoexposure and do not want to pay M7 money buy this one. The honest tradeoff is fragility against features. For street work with a 28 or 40 it remains one of the smartest small rangefinders ever made, and the steady stream of people hunting clean copies tells you the reputation finally caught up with the camera.