Last Updated on 09/18/2014 by Kevin Lee
This year’s Photokina is full of all sorts of surprises as Leica ditches digital and decides to launch a new film camera. Meet the Leica M-A (Type 127)–it’s the German camera company’s return to photography in its purest form. The camera does not have a monitor for you to check your exposure nor exposure metering to mess with your shot. It does not even run on batteries.
Instead the Leica M-A is simply a hand-built, metal camera body that leaves everything up to the users. Shooters will have to figure out the exposure on their own without a built in light meter. It’s beyond old school as a return to photography in its original form, where it’s up to the user to decide their focal length, aperture, shutter speed, and finally capture that decisive moment. Back then, photographers used the Sunny 16 rule to get exposures correct.
Due to the camera taking film, the mechanical camera is “significantly thinner” than many of its digital rivals. The Leica M-A will accept other Leica M-bayonet lenses. Meanwhile, users can pull the frame selector lever to change the framing lines to accommodate their 28mm and 90 mm, 35 and 135 mm, 50 and 75 mm lenses.
The Leica M-A will be available in chrome-accented or all black finish later this October. Leica announced the camera would cost £3100 (about $5,021) from its Leica Store Mayfair, Leica Store Burlington, and other authorized Leica dealers. Check past the jump for more images and specs.
LEICA M-A
- Lens mount: Leica M-Bayonet
- Lens system: Leica M-Lenses,16–135 mm
- Viewfinder: Large, bright, combined bright-line viewfinder with automatic parallax compensation
- Eyepiece: Adjusted to –0.5 dioptres; correction lenses available for –3 to +3
- dioptres
- Image field framing: Switch between bright-line frames for 28 and 90 mm, 35 and 135 mm, 50 and 75 mm lenses
- Frame selector
- Parallax compensation
- Magnification 0.72× (for all lenses)
- Shutter and shutter release
- Shutter speeds: From 1 s to 1/1000 s in one-stop increments, B for exposure times of arbitrary length
- Shutter release: Standard internal thread for remote-release cables
- All manual film loading, advance and rewinding
- Tripod bush: Thread A 1/4, DIN 4503 (1/4″)
- Dimensions: 138 × 38 × 77 (length × depth × height)
- Weight: 578 grams