Minolta CLE

Minolta and Leitz had been partners for years, and the Leica CL that came out of that partnership in the early seventies was a compact M-mount rangefinder Leica eventually got nervous about, because it sold for less and worked nearly as well. When the collaboration wound down, Minolta kept going alone. In 1980 they shipped the CLE, and it did something no Leica could do yet: it metered through the lens, off the film, and ran aperture-priority automatic. The Leica M6, which finally put a meter in the body, did not arrive until 1984. For a few years Minolta simply had the smarter M-mount camera.

The meter is the clever part. A silicon photodiode sits in the floor of the film chamber and reads light bouncing off a striped pattern printed on the shutter curtain, so it measures the actual scene the film will see. Set the aperture on the lens, and the electronic focal-plane shutter picks the speed continuously, anywhere from a long four seconds up to about 1/1000. Flash sync is 1/100. With the dedicated CLE flash it even does the flash exposure off the film. In 1980 that was genuinely ahead of the room.

In the hand it is tiny, a hair smaller than a Leica M, with a light alloy body that feels more delicate than a brass M and is. The finder shows projected frame lines for 28, 40, and 90, which is the whole reason people buy the trio of M-Rokkor lenses Minolta built for it: a 28mm f/2.8, a 40mm f/2, and a 90mm f/4. The 40 is the one that lives on the camera. The rangefinder patch is decent, not Leica-bright, and the base length is short, so the 90 is right at the edge of what it focuses confidently.

Here is the honest part. The CLE is married to its batteries, completely. No power means no camera at all, no meter, no auto, no shutter. There is no mechanical backup speed of any kind, and even the bulb setting is electronically timed, so a dead cell is a dead camera. That total dependence is the CLE's defining weakness next to the older CL, which fires happily without a battery. The electronics are forty-odd years old and effectively unrepairable when the meter board dies, since nobody makes the parts. A working one is a treasure; a dead one is a paperweight with a nice lens on it. Light seals rot, the 28 and 40 lenses are famous for a whitish coating haze, and a good copy now costs real money because Leica shooters figured out it is the cheap way into the M system that also happens to autoexpose.

That auto meter is center-weighted and averages, which is exactly where the Zone Light Meter app earns its keep. Point the CLE into a backlit doorway or a snowbank and the body wants to protect the highlights and bury everything else. Take a spot reading off the shadow you care about, place it on the zone you want, set that aperture, and let the camera's shutter do the rest. You keep the convenience and lose the guessing. For street and travel, with a 40 screwed on and a roll of HP5 inside, there is still nothing quite this small that does this much.