Small, handy and accurate.

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In my first outing last weekend with the ‘new’ Leica M3 I had to resort to using an app on the iPhone to measure exposure. Not a big deal but hardly as handy as using a coupled Leicameter attached to the accessory shoe of the camera.

The Leicameter MR4.

There were three major versions of the coupling Leicameter, introduced with the Leica M3 in 1954. Each coupled with the rather too small shutter speed dial on the camera’s top plate, reversing the direction of speed setting to clockwise for shorter shutter speeds and conferring shutter speed changes on a much larger and easier to use knurled knob, which you can see at the lower right, above.

The first two versions used selenium cells which require no battery. The Leicameter M had a mechanical flap to switch between low and high sensitivity. Its successor, the Leicameter MC, dropped the flap in favor of a two position switch, visible at top left in the picture above. Much more elegant. Both of these accepted a rather clunky external booster cell which increased the sensitivity by 2.5 stops from EV6 to EV3.5. The latter corresponds to 1/60 at f/3.5 with ISO100 film.

The MC stuck with the selenium cell and I used one for decades. You had to be sure to point the camera, with meter attached, down to avoid large sky areas as the meter’s angle of acceptance was large, probably about 65 degrees. And the needle did not lock so you noted the aperture reading in that down tilted position, transferring it to the aperture ring on the lens. It was fast and efficient, but sadly finding an MC in working condition is an exercise in futility. It was last made in 1966 and all seem to come with a dead cell, with no replacement parts to be found. Selenium is a poison and its use in exposure enters was banned years ago. The only model variations in the MC, introduced in 1957 when the Leica migrated to standard shutter speed setting (1/4, 1/8, 1/15, etc.) is that the maximum marked aperture started at f/1.5 and changed to f/1.4. Otherwise the meter was unchanged during its 9 or so year life and the MC and its booster came with clip on matte white incident light screens for incident light readings, which were all the rage back then. Instead of measuring the light reflected from a subject you measured the light falling on it. A bit Rube Goldberg but it worked for Hollywood (check all those old Sekonic light meters with the translucent white domes).

The Sekonic L-398A, much loved in film era Hollywood.

The MC was replaced by the MR in the early 1960s and enjoyed a long life, with MR production ending in 1987. Like all Leicameters it was manufactured by Metrawatt in Nuremberg but unlike its predecessors the CdS cell in the MR dictated the use of a PX13 or PX625 1.35 volt battery. There were three significant benefits to the switch from selenium to Cadmium Sulphide light sensitive cells.

• First, sensitivity jumped 1.5 stops to EV2 (1/60th at f/2 with ISO100 film) without the need for a clip on booster cell.
• Second, depressing the black tab at the top left took the meter reading and, when released, locked the needle in place, making for a much more robust light measurement process.
• But maybe the best enhancement was that the light sensitive sensor measured a 27 degree distended angle, equivalent to that of the 90mm lens. So the M3 user (and also the M2 fan) could use the 90mm viewfinder frame to select the area of light measurement. Clever.

And to check battery voltage the black tab at top left, viewed from the front, was pressed towards the camera’s rewind knob and if the needle swung to cover the white dot in the display the battery was deemed to be good.

When the Leica M4 came along in 1967 it replaced the knob rewind of the M2 and M3 (their single worst feature) with an angled, fold-out rewind crank which would interfere with the protruding metering switch at the top left, so the switch was shortened and redesigned in the Leicameter MR4 to the design you can see below. This allows the rewind crank on the M4 to clear the meter so that the film can be rewound with the meter in place. No other changes were made from the MR to the MR4. Because I have fitted an aftermarket rewind crank to my M3 I need that extra clearance just as much as the M4 user, so I opted for the MR4, over the MR, for my M3. So there!

The rewind crank just clears the MR4 meter.

Search long and hard and you can find an MR or MR4 in decent working order, but there’s a snag. It’s always something, right? The mercury battery cells used to power the meter have long been discontinued for the same reason the selenium cell for the M and MC predecessor Leicameters was discontinued. Mercury is poisonous and all that recycled battery waste is probably not a good thing. However, there are three options for powering your Leicameter MR or MR4.

• You can use modern PX625A non-mercury batteries but these deliver 1.5 volts instead of the required 1.35 volts, meaning your meter will read too high a light level. You can compensate for this by setting a higher-than-actual ASA (ISO in modern terms) film speed setting on the meter’s dial, but it’s not exactly an elegant solution. Further the discharge curve of the PX625A differs from that of the old PX625/PX13 so as the voltage falls your light readings may go further askew.
• Secondly you can use a Wein EPX625 air cell which delivers the correct 1.35 volts but lasts only 3-6 months once activated. Not great.
• The seemingly perfect solution is to use a voltage dropping adapter named the ‘Kanto Camera MR-9 Mercury Battery Adapter’ which claims to drop the voltage of a stock 1.55 volts SR43 silver oxide button battery – which fits inside the adapter – to the required 1.35 volts. You can pay Amazon $52 for one or $33 shipped from the far east on eBay, where many are listed. This adapter is somewhat controversial as the adapter appears only to work with a load resistance under 10k ohm. So before investing in one – it’s a one-off lifetime purchase – use a multimeter to check the load resistance of your Leicameter or old camera to see if it comes in under the 10k ohm figure.

The Kanto Camera MR-9 Mercury Battery Adapter.

All Leicameter M and most Leicameter MC/MR/MR4 models came in lovely satin chrome finishes to match that of the chrome Leica body. There were black version for the polyester set to match their equally tasteless black finish M bodies and, as they are rare, these command collector prices. They double in ugliness when the black paint wears off revealing the bare metal (zinc, not brass) underneath. Ugh!

The black finish Leicameter MR4.

The Leicameter MR4 is an effective and accurate light measuring tool if you can find a good one. I was lucky to find one which was overhauled and calibrated, after a long search. Reckon on paying $200 for a good one. The foot which goes in the Leica’s accessory shoe has no fewer than five screws holding it in place. The three large ones attach the foot to the body of the meter while the two small ones adjust tilt. Make sure that, after loosening the three large ones, the tilt is correctly set for parallelism with the camera’s top plate, which will ensure that the coupling pin on the meter’s knurled knob will engage properly with the related cut-out in the camera’s shutter speed dial. Leave those two tilt-adjusting screws too exposed or tilt the shoe too much and you will scratch the top plate of your Leica when inserting the meter.

The accessory shoe screws and the battery compartment
door. The coupling pin for the camera’s shutter speed
dial is visible. The zero adjusting screw is
at the far right.

The only known issue, apart from the battery headaches just described, is that the small swinging door for the battery compartment, which engages the base of the meter along rather slim and fragile rails, has been known to break, so take it easy when replacing the battery.

Can you use the Leicameter MR4 on an early Leica M3 with the 1/5, 1/10, 1/25, etc. non-geometric shutter speed progression? Absolutely. The arc distended by the range of shutter speeds on the camera’s dial on the older M3 models is identical to that where the geometric shutter speed progression (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.) was adopted. The placement of the coupling notch in the shutter speed dial at the ‘B’ setting is also identical. So while the Leicameter MR/MR4 will couple correctly with the old dial, the engraved geometric speeds atop will not respect the clicks of the camera’s dial. When you set the shutter speed to, say, 1/50th, the indicator arrow on the top dial of the Leicameter will fall between 1/30th and 1/60th, as that’s where 1/50th is. But the meter will still measure light correctly.

The included arc of shutter speeds is
identical on the old version and the
new geometric one, as is the placement
of the coupling notch.

For an inexpensive and elegant non-coupling accessory shoe mounted option, take a look at the Reflx meter, reviewed here. It will work with any camera with an accessory shoe, or handheld.

Update March 8, 2025: Well, wouldn’t you know it? The Taiwanese company Keks has just released a digital version of the Leicameter which couples with the shutter speed dial of the Leica M. Priced attractively at $120 it uses an OLED display for aperture, shutter speed and ISO. You can read all about it here.

There’s one born every minute.

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I extolled the many virtues of the 1954 Leica M3, compared with its predecessors, here. However one failing I did not mention was the poor design of the film rewind knob on the top left, because it’s still a knob, is still small in diameter and is still sharply knurled. This means that rewinding an exposed film back into its cassette is a slow and painful procedure. In the 35 years I used an M3 I avoided this issue by fitting an aftermarket rewind crank and these remain abundantly available today, typically selling for some $55 from the Commies in China.

The aftermarket crank extended and ready for action.

But there are at least 2 alternatives. The first comes from a vendor named Popflash whose products are frequently listed on eBay. The advantage of their design is the inclusion of a small plastic nub on the tip of the retaining Allen screw which means that your precious rewind knob will not be marred by metal-to-metal contact. (Popflash also lists imitation 1960s era Leica lens clones under the ‘Light Lens Lab’ brand, if that’s your thing).

The smart design of the Popflash retaining screw.

As a precaution against marring, I also stick a small piece of Scotch tape to the top left side of the top plate of the M3 in case the base of the crank should come into contact with it when in use.

Mine ran me $79 and right after I bought it the price shot up to $138. This is verging on silly pricing for stupid people. But if you are really dumb, and I mean really, really dumb, why not go for the real thing from Leica, including free marring of your knob, if you know what I mean, something Leica warns about in its promotional materials:

A crank for cranks.

DUH!

Leitz actually added a built in crank with the M4 and most later film cameras. This was angled at 45 degrees to the top plate to clear the optional MR4 Leicameter exposure meter and some reports suggest that the device was on the fragile side. Certainly the massive center shaft of the earlier and simpler knurled knob design was not known to fail, as there was less to go wrong. My M6 had the sloped crank and I did not find it preferable to the stock knob plus aftermarket crank on the M3.

The angled crank on an M4.

Rewind time for a 36 exposure roll? I generally average 9-10 seconds without going crazy. 10 seconds if you push me.

A reunion.

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I have been patiently building a small collection of classic photography hardware in my home theater, the emphasis being on cameras which were revolutionary in the way they changed the medium. Further, electronics are anathema to this collection which focuses on the great machines of the mechanical age.

If there is one 20th century camera which rules it has to be the Nikon F, the first bullet proof single lens reflex camera which, incidentally, can claim to have ended the Viet Nam war. Most of the searing images from the front lines of that conflict were made on the Nikon F which became de rigeur hardware for any aspiring photojournalist. The Nikon came along in 1959 along with a large range of fine lenses, but 5 years earlier 1954 saw an introduction almost as significant, in the guise of the Leica M3.

The screw mount Leicas with their poor ergonomics, unchanged since the 1930s, were suddenly a thing of the past.

Clunky with poor ergonomics –
the Leica IIIF predecessor to the M3.

Gone were the dual shutter speed dials, replaced with a single dial with equally spaced click stops. Gone was the slow and fussy screw mount for lenses, replaced with a robust and long wearing bayonet mount. Gone was the slow and clumsy knob used to advance the film, replaced with a beautifully ergonomically engineered advance lever. Gone was the antediluvian film loading system which dictated a long leader on your emulsion of choice to allow insertion from the baseplate past the twin sprockets. An opening film back made things far easier. Gone was the need to manually reset the film counter for every new roll, for the M3’s counter reset automatically to minus 2 when the take-up spool was removed.

The opening film back greatly simplified reloading.

But, most importantly, the masterstroke of the Leica M3 was the superb combined rangefinder/viewfinder. No more did the user have to focus through one peephole and compose through another. And the latter really was a peephole, one of the worst viewfinders in any camera. Now the generously sized rangefinder patch appeared in the center of the large and very bright viewfinder and, unlike the contemporary Zeiss Ikon Contax IIa, the edges of the rangefinder patch were perfectly sharp allowing for alignment focusing as well as coincident use. A masterstroke, and still to be found on today’s ridiculously priced digital Leica M11 and variants. 80 years and counting testify to the exceptional design. And not only was that combined rangefinder/viewfinder big and bright, it would automatically show the correct frame lines for 90mm and 135mm lenses when they were fitted. And the icing on the cake was that the finder was automatically parallax compensated, the frames moving diagonally down to the right as the lens was racked out.

A masterstroke – the fine M3 finder.
In this snap the 135mm frame appears inside the 50mm one.

As there was no built in light meter Leitz provided a coupling selenium cell version which slid into the accessory shoe and coupled with the shutter speed dial. All you had to do was note the aperture reading indicated by the needle and transfer that to the lens, which was as fast as exposure measurement got before the days of automation. It worked well and I used that slip on selenium meter, which needed no battery, for 35 years. It never let me down.

The Leicameter MC.

You can read more about Leicameters here.

Above all, along with all these functional improvements, the Leica M3 was – and remains to this day – beautiful to behold. And to hold and operate it was a dream, everything in the right place with a wonderful feel of solidity. The M3 was reliable as long as you sent it for a good cleaning and lubrication every decade or so. This, after all, was no Nikon F when it came to brute robustness, but it was no shrinking violet either, being tough and dependable. Whack the body and the rangefinder might go out of alignment but even the home klutz can realign things with two provided screws. Ask me how I know. During its 12 year run Leitz made almost a quarter million M3 bodies. Compare that with the Nikon’s 15 year run through 1974, during which time Nippon Kogaku churned out 4 times as many Nikon Fs. No, the F did not need service every decade.

The M3 was my first ‘serious’ camera bought after three years of scrimping and saving in 1971 when I was 20, and was my ‘go to’ camera for the next 35 years. It was finally sold in 2006 when the Canon 5D full frame DSLR came along. Yet, truth be told, I never quite got over that sale, which bowed to my vow not to own anything I was not using. Well, that vow has been broken with the arrival of my home theater collection and finally a Leica M3, the last addition, has joined the other classics on display.

These include:

• The Minox B spy camera of the 007 Cold War generation
• The Contax IIa similar to the one Capa took to Omaha Beach on D Day
• A Nikon F of course
• The Rolleiflex 2.8D which every fashion maven was using in the 1950s
• A Bolex H16 movie camera on which Spielberg cut his teeth
• A Calumet/Cambo monorail studio camera which takes 5″ x 4″ sheet film, much loved by the Hollywood glamor photographers of the early days of the talkies
• Classic Leitz, Linhof and Gandolfi tripods, the latter over a century old

Not a microchip, sensor or battery to be found in the lot.

The Leica M3 had a long life, being made through 1966, and while there were minor variations, it was largely unchanged during those 12 years of production. Early models had a two stroke lever wind as Leitz wrongly believed that a rapid single stroke would tear the film’s sprockets, or maybe cause electrostatic sparking and fogging. Choose which version you like, but I tend to the sparking story as early models had a glass pressure plate, eventually replaced by a conventional – and conductive – metal one, which worked every bit as well. Or better. Somewhere in early production the film transport gears were switched from soft brass to steel, conferring harder wearing properties. Some nuts claim that the earlier brass gears were smoother to which all I can say is …. nuts. About the same time the strap eyelets were moved from the side of the top plate to the front of the body, making for a better balanced whole with a more elegant design.

Early shutter speed progression was the non-linear 1/2, 1/5, 1/10, 1/25 etc. one, later replaced by that in use by every other maker, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30 and so on. Sometime around 1958 the rangefinder rectangle sprouted two protruding rectangles top and bottom which approximated the depth of field at f/16 and f/5.6 with the 50mm lens if the misaligned coincident images fell within their breadth. Hmmm. A solution looking for a problem.

While all M3s appeared to come with the front panel self timer lever, early models did not include the frame preview lever which allowed previewing of the 90mm and 135mm fields of view if neither of those lenses was fitted. The thicker 50mm frame lines were visible regardless of the lens fitted and if a 35mm optic was your thing Leitz provided one with auxiliary ‘goggles’ which made the 50mm frame show the wider field of view. A tad clunky but it worked for me for over three decades.

The 35mm Summaron with goggles for the M3.
These were easily removable on the early f/3.5 version.

And when my first Leica M3 arrived on August 2, 1971, with a modest 50mm collapsible Elmar lens, I was ready to hit the streets, having spent the scrimping and saving years boning up on Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau. These were two great if humorless French street workers, whose work I was determined to emulate with an added soupçon of humor. I eventually added two more modest lenses, a 35mm Summaron and a 90mm Elmar, sufficient for most tasks for which the camera was designed. And while my trinity of lenses represented the bottom of the line Leitz options their resolving power was just fine for big prints.

That Leica M3 was simply made for me and represented as fine a street snapper as was available, before auto everything and zoom lenses rendered it and its many derivatives obsolete.

As fine and humorous a street snapper
as was available.
Crufts Dog show, 1972. Leica M3,
90mm Elmar, TriX.

And now it’s in my collection and, yes, the serial number is almost identical to that of my first one, making it August 1958 vintage.

The Leica M3.

Now all I have to do is find a lens for it. I rather fancy that 35mm Summaron with goggles which was used for most of the pictures in my book ‘Street Smarts‘.

Want to buy one? Either make sure it has had a recent documented CLA (Cleaning, Lubrication and Adjustment) or budget up to $500 to have it brought up to snuff. Even the youngest M3 is almost 60 years old and those lubricants, if original, are probably dried up. Cosmetic appearance and function are unrelated.