Leica M6

A dim cafe, one hanging bulb, somebody laughing across the table, and you want the frame before the laugh ends. An SLR blacks out at the exact instant you press, and the mirror announces you to the whole room. The M6 does neither. You watch the moment straight through the finder while the shutter fires, and the cloth curtains are far quieter than any mirror slap, a soft whisper instead of a clack. That is what the camera is for, and it is why the people who shoot it tend to keep shooting it.

Most of that comes down to the viewfinder. It is bright, it floats projected frame lines for the lens you have mounted (the common 0.72x finder runs 28mm out to 90mm), and the rangefinder patch sits dead center as a small bright rectangle. You line up the double image, the patch snaps together, you are in focus. There is no focus screen to hunt across, no microprism shimmer, just two pictures becoming one. In low light this beats any ground glass, which is the second reason the M6 lives in bars and on night streets.

What set the M6 apart from the meterless M bodies before it was a meter that finally lived inside the camera without bulking it out. A single cell reads reflected light off a white-painted spot on the first shutter curtain, center weighted, and two red arrows in the finder tell you which way to turn the dial. Match them and you are exposed. Because it reads that curtain spot, the meter works the moment the shutter is cocked, empty camera or full roll, no need to wind anything on first. It runs on two tiny button cells, the only battery in the body. The cells die, the shutter does not care; every speed from a full second to about 1/1000 is mechanical and fires whether the battery is alive or flat. Flash syncs at 1/50. Load from the bottom like every M since 1954, fiddly the first few rolls, automatic after that.

The honest weakness is that built-in meter. It is a blunt center-weighted instrument with no spot mode, and it gets fooled by exactly the high-contrast scenes this camera is built to shoot: a bright window behind a dark face, a stage lit against black. The white spot only samples the middle of the frame, so it leans hard on whatever sits in the central area and weighs the edges very little. When the light is tricky, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, dial that in by hand, and ignore the arrows. The camera will happily do what you tell it.

Today the M6 is the M that working photographers actually buy rather than the one collectors lock in a cabinet, though clean classic and TTL examples have climbed enough that the price gap to an M7 or MP is no longer the easy argument it once was. What still holds is the mechanics: the M6 is as simple inside as the largely mechanical MP and simpler than the electronically timed M7, so there is very little to fail. It cross-shops against a Voigtlander Bessa for people who want the look without the cost. A worn one still needs a rangefinder calibration and fresh light seals from a good tech before it earns its keep, so buy it serviced and meter the light yourself.