Leica M7

Leica spent decades insisting the M was a fully mechanical instrument, that batteries were a crutch, that a real photographer set the shutter speed himself. Then in 2002 they shipped the M7, the first M with electronically timed shutter speeds and aperture-priority automation, and a chunk of the faithful never forgave it. The argument made sense by then. Leica M bodies had carried a TTL meter since the M5 in 1971, and the M6 brought one back after the meterless M4 years, so the camera already knew the light. The M7 just let the camera act on that knowledge.

What that buys you is the A position on the shutter dial. Set the aperture, focus, and the camera picks the speed, stepless, anywhere across its range. The shutter is the classic horizontal-travel cloth focal-plane unit, electronically governed here, running from about 1/1000 at the top down to a genuinely useful 32 seconds in auto, with flash sync at 1/50. Two speeds, 1/60 and 1/125, stay mechanical, so the camera still fires if the batteries die, which they eventually will at the worst moment. Battery dependence is the price of admission. An M6 keeps shooting forever on a dead cell. The M7 mostly does not, and you learn to carry a spare.

The rest is pure M, and that is the whole point. The rangefinder patch is bright and high-contrast, the kind of focusing that holds up in a dim bar where autofocus hunts and gives up. The viewfinder shows you the world outside the frame lines, so you watch the subject walk into the picture before you commit. The shutter is quiet enough to shoot across a still room without anyone flinching. Build is brass and dense, around 600 grams, cool and solid in the hand. Film loads through the baseplate the same fiddly way M-series Leicas have loaded since the M3 in 1954, and the first rolls will not go smoothly.

A few electronic touches make the M7 more pleasant in daily use than the M6. The finder shows the chosen shutter speed as you half-press, and DX coding reads the film speed automatically, though you can override it by hand. The meter is the same selective cell as the M6, reading reflected light off a small white spot on the first shutter curtain that covers only a narrow central patch of the frame. It is honest in even light and easily fooled by a bright sky or a backlit face, the way a narrow selective reading is.

Who carries one. Street shooters who want one less decision, photojournalists who came up on M6 bodies and wanted aperture priority without leaving the system, and people with a shelf of M-mount glass who just want the most automated way to use it. The rivalry is always the M6. Mechanical purists buy that. People who shoot fast and trust electronics buy this. For the backlit frame the selective cell will botch, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows where you want them instead of letting the body average a face into mud. Used prices land just under the digital Ms and well above a beaten M6, which tracks for a film body that does this much without getting in your way.