Leica CL: The Volkskamera

The early 1970's were not kind to Ernst Leitz GmbH. They had missed the boat on the SLR revolution, and then they released two cameras, one of which was not good enough for what it was, and another which was too good. Together they came close to sinking the company, and Leica never were quite the same since.

The camera that was not quite good enough was the Leica M5. It was Leica's attempt at answering the SLR challenge. It added some highly advanced features for the time: a longer-baselength rangefinder and improved viewfinder, making it the most precise-to-focus Leica ever, and through-the-lens metering with a needle indicator. However, it also ditched the clean, elegant lines of previous M's in favor of a more angular "brutalist" look, and it was significantly larger than previous models. Even if it is a lot better regarded nowadays, it tanked in the marketplace, and left Leica on the ropes.

The Leica CL I bought. It's a fairly low serial number, meaning it was manufactured around 1973. It has seen some use, but is working as well as the day it rolled off the assembly line in Japan.

The camera that was too good for its station was the Leica CL, paired with two lenses, the Summicron-C 2/40 and Summicron-C 4/90. It was designed by Leica but manufactured under contract in Japan by Minolta. Later, Minolta sold it under its own brand name, and even took the design further with the Minolta CLE -- the first M-mount body to offer aperture-priority auto-exposure until the Konica Hexar RF. Leica intended the CL as a relatively inexpensive way to get people into the M-system, but ended up cannibalizing its own market. Despite their unique strengths, rangefinders were in a shrinking niche, and a best-selling low-end body left no room for Leica's higher-margin models.

In retrospect, this isn't very surprising. The fact is that the Leica CL has most of the desirable characteristics of the M5 in a package that's smaller, better looking, arguably more comfortable to handle, and much cheaper. It has a bright, big, very sharp viewfinder with parallax-corrected framelines, a bright, crisp rangefinder spot permitting both split-image and merge focusing, a true spot meter with a needle indicator, a quiet, reliable, all-mechanical cloth shutter, simple "no battery-no problem" operation, and looks that are almost as clean as those on the M4. The shorter-baselength rangefinder and not-quite-as-armor-plated construction that differentiate it from the M5 turned out not to be enough to push enough people to the more expensive camera. It has been calculated that during its short production run, the Leica CL outsold all other M's by more than 2:1.

"Don't Say You Weren't Warned." Summicron-C 40/2.0 on Fujichrome Provia 400F.