No wonder the company revolutionized photography.
The machining on this camera is wonderful and very precision. And yes, this is a working camera.
Amazing. Close to 100 years old.
Just had to share.
Monday, December 29, 2025
I had lunch with an old friend recently. To say he is currently into Leicas is a supreme understatement. He picked up this one last quarter.
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3 comments:
Kirk:The machining on this camera is wonderful and very precision. And yes, this is a working camera. Amazing. Close to 100 years old.
It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which those early “miniature cameras” revolutionized “serious” photography. Kodak may have made it possible for anyone to snap pictures, but the Leica and Zeiss Contax rangefinders of the between-the-wars years offered journalists, street photographers, and advanced amateurs a tool that, with good exposure technique and a little effort in the darkroom, produced results that were reasonably comparable to photos made with the bulky larger format cameras of the era. These minicams were indeed precision instruments. They were meticulously assembled by hand from high-quality parts so they were quite sturdy, and they used a new-fangled strip film repurposed from the motion picture industry which allowed the shooter to produce a large number of images (24! 36!) without reloading.
A few years ago, I was able to find and purchase a fastidiously-restored 1937 Contax with its iconic 50mm collapsible Zeiss Sonnar lens and, like your friend’s somewhat earlier Leica, it still produces quite decent images.. My father owned one of these prewar rangefinders—it had been given to him by his father—and when I got serious about photography as a teenager, he turned it over to me. (Many years later, as a foreign service officer, he found a 1971 “Kiev” branded copy of this model during a business trip through the Soviet bloc, and brought it back with him as a novelty. It also still is in working order.)
Great looking camera.
I'd forgotten how small the original Leicas were. It's pretty amazing! Happy Holidays.
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