Leica M5

Leica faithful had a choice in 1971, and most of them made the wrong one. The M4 was the camera they wanted: small, jewel-like, the shape every M had been since 1954. The M5 was the camera they needed and refused to buy. It was bigger, boxier, heavier, and it had the one thing every previous M lacked, a working light meter built right in. Buyers took one look at the lump and went back to the M4. Leica killed the M5 after four years and fewer than thirty-four thousand bodies, and for decades it was the black sheep nobody mentioned at the camera club.

They were wrong, and the used market eventually figured it out. The meter is the whole point. Leica put a CdS cell on a little arm that swings into the light path behind the lens, reads off the actual film plane area, and swings out of the way when the shutter fires. You frame, you focus, you turn the shutter dial until the needle in the finder lines up, you shoot. The reading is selective and accurate in a way the clip-on M meters never were. The finder itself is classic M glass, bright, with a long rangefinder base length that makes a fast 50mm easy to nail, and the meter needle and a shutter-speed readout live right there at the bottom so you never take your eye away.

The body is where the arguments start. It is genuinely big for an M, and the early two-lug strap setup makes it hang at a weird angle, which is why the three-lug version exists. But the thing is built like a bank vault. The shutter is the familiar quiet horizontal cloth focal-plane unit, one second up to about 1/1000, and flash syncs at 1/50. The shutter-speed dial overhangs the front edge so you can change it with the same finger you focus with, eye still pressed to the finder. Loading is bottom-load, fiddly, very Leica, and you get used to it or you do not.

The honest weakness is the meter, and it is twofold. It runs on a 1.35V mercury cell that has not been legal to sell for years, so you are either using a hearing-aid zinc-air workaround, a voltage adapter, or living with a slow drift you have to compensate for in your head. And that delicate swinging arm is the part that breaks. A bumped M5 can bend or strand the meter mechanism, and a proper repair is specialist work that costs real money. When that cell or that arm finally gives out, the camera reverts to what every other mechanical M already is, a meterless box, and an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app becomes the meter the body no longer has.

That is also exactly why people buy the M5 now instead of an M4 or M6. It is the cheapest way into a metered M with a finder this good, it is overbuilt, and the oddball reputation keeps the price honest. Shoot one for a week and the size stops mattering. What you remember is the quiet shutter and a needle that was right every time.