Leica Minilux

Press the button and the lens motors out of the body with a soft whir, a barrel of glass unfurling from a titanium brick that fits in a coat pocket. That little gesture is the whole story of the Minilux, the best part and the eventual death of it. Leica built this in 1995 to fight Contax and the Japanese premium compacts of the bubble years, and it carried one of the most respected lenses ever fitted to a point-and-shoot.

The reason people still hunt these down is the 40mm f/2.4 Summarit, six elements in four groups. Wide open it is already biting sharp in the center, and it holds contrast into the corners better than most compacts of its day. You aim, the autofocus locks, the leaf shutter fires somewhere up to about 1/400, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed. That last part matters more than it sounds. There is no mirror, no slap, just a quiet metallic blink, so you can shoot a quiet room and nobody flinches.

Handling is a mixed bag once you get past the lens. The viewfinder is small and squinty, fine for a frame line and a focus confirmation but not a thing you fall in love with looking through. Controls live partly on a top LCD and partly under thumb, and the logic is fiddly. Exposure compensation takes a couple of presses you will forget how to do between rolls. It runs on a single CR123A battery and does nothing without it. This is not a camera you reach for blind. It rewards a photographer who knows exactly what they want and has learned its quirks.

Now the honest part, and it is a big one. The Minilux has a famous failure mode, the E02 error. A flex ribbon cable runs from the mainboard into the lens, and every power cycle unfurls it with the barrel. After twenty-some years of that, the printed traces crack, the body loses contact with the lens, and it throws E02 and stops. Some can be repaired by the handful of shops that still do it. Many cannot, cheaply. Buy one that is currently working and budget for it to need a CLA, or buy one already serviced and pay the premium.

It sits in an odd spot today. People cross-shop it against the Contax T2 and the T3, and the Minilux usually loses on reliability and finder but often wins on the glass and the price, since the E02 scare keeps values from going fully insane. Buyers tend to be people who care more about what the negative looks like than about whether the camera will outlive them.

The metering is competent center-weighted auto, and in flat light you can trust it. In hard contrast, or for daylight fill, do not. Take an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, and because that leaf shutter syncs flash at any speed, you can balance a fill flash against a bright sky at whatever shutter speed the reading hands you, no sync ceiling fighting you.