Leica Leicaflex SL2

Heft first. The SL2 weighs more than a body this size should, a brass and steel block that sits in the hand like a tool meant to outlast you. Wind the lever and the stroke is short, dense, faintly oiled, and the mirror returns with a precise thunk that sounds nothing like a Nikon F. Leica was answering Japan with overbuild rather than features, and the SL2 is where that argument peaked, just before electronics rewrote the rules for everybody.

The finder is why people who own one hang on to it. Bright, big, with a fixed screen built around a central microprism focusing spot ringed by a fine ground-glass field. No split-image wedge. You snap the microprism into focus on the eye or the edge and the rest of the frame reads clean. The meter is a match-needle CdS system through the lens, and it does something unusual for its day: it reads selectively, weighted to a small central patch rather than averaging the whole frame. For a 1970s SLR that lands close to spot metering, which makes the camera genuinely good in contrasty light if you know what the cell is actually looking at.

Mechanically it runs from a full second up to about 1/2000, all gear-driven, flash sync near 1/100. The shutter is fully mechanical, so the battery feeds only the meter cell. Pull the cell and every speed still fires. That independence is why working photographers trusted it on cold assignments, where a dying button cell turns an electronic body into a brick.

System context matters here. The SL2 anchors the early Leica R bayonet, the mount that carried Leica's reflex line for decades, and the glass cut for it (the 50 Summicron-R, the 90 Elmarit-R) is the real reason a lot of people buy the body at all. The camera is partly an entry ticket to that lens line.

The honest weakness is money. The SL2 was sold below cost when new, the meter mechanism is intricate, and a dead cell or corroded contacts means a specialist CLA that costs real money. Fewer techs will open one every year. The selective meter is also easy to fool if you forget how narrow its pattern is. For backlit or high-contrast work, a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app placed against the body's selective pattern keeps your shadows where you want them instead of chasing the needle. Cross-shopped against a Nikon F2, the SL2 loses on lens variety and service network and wins on finder, build feel, and that tight central meter. Most of them live in cabinets now. The ones that still meter are the ones to chase.