This is a story about a camera.

I won’t call it a review, but you could if you’d like. Mostly it’s a love letter. A love letter to one of the greatest artistic tools I’ve ever laid my hands on.

I.

I bought my first Leica in 2012. It was a heavily used M8.2 (which was a 4-year old camera that point) with a Zeiss 35mm f/2 lens. I couldn’t really afford it and it wasn’t very good.

One of the first images I took with my beloved Leica M8.2

That’s a little disingenuous actually — it was great, but by modern standards it fell short in most ways. You couldn’t shoot above ISO 640, you couldn’t really shoot without an IR cut filter, it was a weird sensor size, and the rear display was absolute dog shit. Even with its myriad of shortcomings, I still fell in love with it. Less so the images (although I’m often still impressed by what that camera pumped out), but more so by the process.

Fast forward to today and I’m on my fifth Leica... it’s a tough bug to shake once you’ve got it. This one though, the Leica M10, this one is special.

II.

I don’t have any desire to go on and on about sensor performance and “film-like” noise patterns. I won’t even talk too much about how Leica M lenses are simultaneously some of the greatest photography glass ever created and also some of the smallest and lightest.

I will, however, happily waste your time talking about the stuff that’s difficult to quantify. For instance, Leica made the M10 body thinner than any other digital M in existence. In fact, it’s pretty much the same form factor as the legendary M3.

Who cares though, right? After all, we’re all guilty of throwing tomatoes at Apple for making devices thinner at the expense of battery life or reliability. Indeed, that’s exactly what’s happening here — the battery life on the M10 is worse than its predecessor by a pretty substantial margin, and it's far from the only concession you need to make to shoot a Leica M. It doesn’t matter at all though, none of it does, I promise you.

III.

There have always only been a few key selling points for a digital Leica M camera. It’s undeniable that they’re drastically more expensive than almost anything else on the market so these advantages are pretty important:

The Leica M works with all M-mount glass produced since the 1950s — most of which are absolutely incredible. If you’ve been shooting with film Leicas, then your entire lens collection works, and works phenomenally well.
The Leica M is smaller and lighter than equivalent full-frame camera bodies. This is a tiny bit less true these days, thanks to the excellent Sony A7 series of cameras, but the Leica still wins in size particularly when it comes to its lenses. This means that it’s also an unassuming camera and doesn’t draw attention to itself — a strong advantage when using it for things like street photography.
The experience of shooting a rangefinder camera is unlike anything else out there. Additionally, no other company manufactures a digital rangefinder camera (one company tried and failed), so if rangefinder shooting is your cup of tea, this is truly your only option.

These are all good, perhaps great, reasons to drop the suitcase of cash off at the Leica boutique and come home with one of these things. I’m going to add one more though.. and it’s one that’s near and dear to my heart:

The Leica M is a near flawless blend of digital and mechanical mastery — something very few companies have been able to nail quite as well. It’s like a fine mechanical watch, but with the convenience of your Apple Watch.

As an engineer myself, this is what hits closest to home. I love the size, I love the lenses, and I love shooting a rangefinder, but I mostly love the fact that every time I pick it up and press the shutter release, I am reminded by how beautifully constructed it is. The attention, the care, the precision — all absolutely world class.

IV.

So all of that shit is great, but what’s it actually like to shoot with? Well, two things:

Fucking frustrating
Fucking amazing

Why would you spend $7,000 on a camera that frustrates the fuck out of you? Because you need friction to create something smooth, and that friction makes you a better artist.

Autofocus? Nope. Face detection? Nope. Eye detection? Nope. Electronic shutter? Nope. Auto aperture? Nope. Accurate autoexposure? Nope. The damn the thing doesn’t have any of that stuff, and the lack of those tools means that you have to do the work that those things would’ve normally done for you.

To say that today’s incredibly advanced cameras have made it easy for photographers is slightly unfair — while it removes a lot of the technical finger movements from the art, you obviously do still need to have an eye for composition and understand what it is you’re trying to capture. But when you bring all that legwork back to photography, you end up with something akin to driving a stick-shift car. More difficult, and often frustrating, but intensely rewarding when you get it right.

Photography then becomes as much about the process of capturing as it does about actually getting the image — something that many professional photographers don’t have the luxury of being able to enjoy. If you’re a wedding photographer for instance, your primary goal is to get the shot, and if the process gets in the way of that, you’re toast. I'd be lying if I said that the technical movements required to take a photo with a Leica M have never prevented me from actually getting the shot — this happened a lot in the beginning.

So it may not be the right tool for a professional photographer, but instead perhaps it's for someone that wants to be returned to days before cell phones had incredible cameras and before Sony created a computer with a lens attached to it. It's a camera that so clearly reminds me of why I got into photography in the first place — loving the practice of taking photographs.

Tweak the settings, get your focus, take the shot. Did it work? Nope. Try it again.

V.

Everything I’ve written up to this point has been true about every Leica M to date, so let me get into what makes this particular one special.

For starters, as I mentioned above, they’ve shrunk it. It’s now as thin as an original M3 film camera and while the difference is mere millimeters, the result is striking. It fits in the hand so much better than previous digital M cameras and does such a better job of conveying what is special about this thing. It no longer feels like they’ve simply grafted some electronics onto the back of a film M — it feels like a properly "finished" product.

Like all Leica Ms, It’s built like a tank, and it feels like an actual tool. You still have to, rather charmingly, remove the bottom plate to change the SD card or the battery, but now they’ve added an ISO dial. Sure, it’s a little finicky but it’s a physical dial for a setting that used to only exist virtually in menus. That’s a win from any angle, as far as I’m concerned.

The image quality from Leica’s custom 24 megapixel sensor is brilliant. There are no longer massive compromises when shooting a digital Leica M. In many past models you were sacrificing proper IR filtering or high ISO performance for the M experience (and admittedly fantastic color output). Not any longer though — the sensor is competitive with many of the fine cameras out today and the images it produces are simply stunning.

Battery life, as I mentioned before, is worse than it was with the excellent M240 that preceded it. Quite a bit worse, actually. Whereas I could pull about 900 shots on the previous camera, I’m only yielding around 500 on this one. But that, in my mind, is a compromise I’m more than willing to make to have a camera that is this thin and lovely to hold. You’re going to carry another battery anyway... it’s just not a big deal, at least to me.

The screen? Fantastic. Live View? Sure, cool. Continuous shooting? I don’t know.. probably slow. Viewfinder? 0.73x magnification! It’s big, beautiful, bright, and crystal clear. Better than any digital M to date by a substantial margin.

VI.

In the end, I guess either this kind of shit matters to you or it doesn’t. Either you care about having a camera as unassuming and invisible as the Leica M10 or you don’t. Either you love to shoot fully manual or you don’t. To be honest, if you don’t, I absolutely understand. You have to be okay with the concept of paying more for less in some ways, and that’s a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people. You can get perfectly fine images from a camera 1/10th the price.

There’s undeniably a market for this kind of thing though. A thing for people that love mechanical watches because they're fascinated by watchmaking. A thing for people that drive manual transmissions because they like feeling attached to the car. A thing for the person that shaves with a safety razor because even though it takes longer, they get a better shave.

Sometimes things in life can be as much about the process as they are about the result. The Leica M10 is built for that world.