Inexpensive protection.

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These inexpensive leather protectors for the top plate of your camera prevent scratches from your camera’s strap or from the D rings used to attach the strap.

Note that one of the two non-cut thirds
of the D-ring is in contact with the strap.
A piece of Scotch tape finishes the job.

The ring must first be removed to install the protector.

To install you have to remove your strap and D-ring, place these small leather patches over the strap lug using the center hole then install the D-ring (some garage language may be called for) followed by the strap. It takes a while. The hole in the protector is perfectly sized for the Leica’s strap lug – M film or M digital. (If you are unlucky enough to have bought an M5 no rings are needed; the strap material threads through the rectangular lugs on that misbegotten camera).

The D-rings these come with seem too flimsy, so I transplanted those from my Nikon D800 studio camera which are robust. I have yet to find a reliable source for these. One possible source for round rings is Simplr, but I have not used these. They are sized for 3/8″ (10mm) straps which is what the Upstrap uses, and are made in the USA. Hooray! Amazon also lists suitably shaped protectors for round rings. One disadvantage of circular rings is that they will rotate, eventually exposing the strap material to the sharp cut ends. That’s why I prefer triangular rings on a $5,000 camera.

Be sure that your strap is not in contact with the split in the D-ring as that is invariably sharp cut and will eventually wear through the strap. These patches also prevent the D ring from rotating, so the sharp third can no longer come in contact with the strap if correctly installed in the first place.

The instructive images at Amazon are clear and at $7 the pair what is there to complain about?

No more gauche exhibitionism.

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I’m not sure when the geniuses at Leica decided to emblazon their products with that loud red dot, an embellishment which announces to the world that you probably have more money than sense while simultaneously screaming “Steal me now”. It may have been with the Canadian Leica M4-2, but it was a long time ago. Why, they even have a gigantic one on their headquarters building in Wetzlar. There’s branding for you.

And Leica M users stuck with this execrable excrescence have been taping over the red dot ever since, in an effort to remain discreet and unembarrassed.

As my previous M bodies have been M3s, the M2 and an M6 I have been spared this pain but when the Leica M10 came along I immediately found a suitably sized washer in the garage and crafted a chrome sticker from flue tape, to cover The Red Dot.

Silver tape temporary disguise.

The red dot covers the rangefinder vertical adjustment screw, as I further explained in Part II.

When Leica introduced the M10-P, an M10 with a quieter shutter and the gorgeous script restored to the M10’s sadly barren expanse of top plate, they replaced the red dot with a color matching screw to respect the stealth preferences of users. Around that time Grant at AGS Supply realized that this was an elegant solution and while the M10’s red dot opening is not tapped for a screw, the recess will neatly retain a replacement imitation screw with two-sided adhesive.

There are all sorts of varieties of replacement faux screws. The M10’s is 10mm in diameter. That for the porker M240 is appropriately larger at 12mm. And of course there are color variations – satin chrome (yes!), black chrome and black paint. You can see the full range on the AGS site.

While the first screw shipped to me was the wrong size, a call to Grant not only found him profoundly apologetic but also disclosed an interesting person, a Leica aficionado and a great back story. He had crafted a handful of the stick-on screws for himself and friends and before you know it was inundated with demand, suggesting a commercial opportunity. And while the imitation screw is not cheap I regard it as nothing less than insurance cost mitigating theft risk and, equally importantly, saving the M owner embarrassment.

Grant overnighted the correctly sized replacement and I set to removing the red dot without trashing the top plate.

Here are the instructions, which I followed to the letter, allowing a drop or two of isopropyl alcohol, applied with a Q-tip, to soak in for a few minutes before attacking that wretched dot with a couple of plastic spudgers. To provide working room for the spudgers I replaced the lens on the camera with a body cap.

Use metal anything to try and twist the original red dot and you will trash your camera. The raised ‘Leica’ lettering on the red dot, which you use to torque the dot this way and that until it yields, is shallow and your tool will almost certainly slip a time or two. And the thought of inserting a sharp metal point to try and pry up the red dot makes me shudder. You have been warned. But as the images below show, the effort is well repaid. I’ll bet that Wetzlar has a million dollar heated twisting tool which applies the right temperature to the nearest one hundredth of a degree Celsius, and can do this in a trice. It took me a few minutes with a somewhat cheaper tool kit, at a steady 72 Fahrenheit. I preferred to avoid the use of heat for fear of damage to the underlying innards.

Instructions.

Spudgers at the ready. I have already started the twisting process, as you can see.

You do not want to touch the adhesive on the replacement with greasy fingers. I used a pair of miniature tweezers to place the replacement in position, carefully removing it from the greaseproof paper on which it ships.

The miniature tweezers used to place the new dot in place are from a Swiss Army knife.
As is obvious the fit is perfect and the color is very close.

Ah!, you ask, what is the right angle for that screw slot? Well, needless to say, Grant has studied this carefully and the answer is that …. there’s no right answer. Check Leica’s US or German web sites and the angles of the screw-in screws on the M11-P, M11-Monochrom and M11-D (and their M10-P, M10 Monochrom and M10-D predecessors) are all over the place, suggesting that Leica is hand tapping the thread with no consistent starting point for the tap. I immediately dismissed the idea of horizontal orientation for the slot (boring) or vertical (too aggressive) and after much deep thinking decided on a jaunty ‘up and to the right’ placement, consistent with the behavior I wish for my investment portfolio.

All done, and a great color match. Now I can sleep at night.

Thank you for a fine product, Grant.

In use.

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In Part II I addressed 6-bit lens coding and related matters of interest in the Leica M10. Here are my first impressions after freeing the M10 from its copious packaging and setting it up just so:

As received. Heart rate? 125.

The camera came with two batteries, both dead, so job one was to recharge them. Once installed I set about learning the menu system:

The LCD screen in Menu mode.

Firmware: With a charged battery inserted, the first step is to check that the latest version of the M10’s firmware is installed. That is version 3.22.23.38. It was. The installed version is found in the Main Menu under ‘Camera Information’. I would not expect many updates, if any, as the camera was discontinued in 2021.

Just three buttons: Given that most of these choices will be ‘set and forget’ the Leica approach of just three physical buttons and the five part pointer at top right is inspired. Hit Menu once and you get your Favorites. Hit it again and you get the whole megillah. Go to ‘Customize Control’ and you can edit those favorites. I have it bare bones but you can have two screens’ worth if that’s your thing:

Menu favorites.

As the three lenses in my outfit (35mm and 50mm LTM Canons and the 90mm Tele-Elmarit) are all 6-bit coded, I will remove the ‘Lens Detection’ choice from Favorites. The coding sees to it that each lens is automatically recognized for optimum performance. See Part II for everything there is to know about 6-bit coding.

Clock drift: While you would think ‘Date & Time’ are set and forget, in practice the camera’s clock drifts from Apple Time and I want the two close to properly apply geotagging. I have owned $25 Timexes which keep better time than the M10. I make it a habit to check the clock against my iPhone before each photo session, which is why I have added the menu choice to Favorites. The instruction book states that to save the time and date setting you have to “Turn the thumbwheel or press up or down on the direction pad” (p.147). This did not work for me until I figured out that the current version of firmware requires a double push on the central button in the direction pad to save changes.

File format and Lightroom Classic: Next I set the file format to DNG + JPG Large. After some results I concluded that DNG was considerably superior to JPG so changed that setting to DNG only. To see both file types in Lightroom, if you opt for the DNG + JPG option, make sure that in Lightroom Preferences->General you have this box checked. Otherwise LR will only display the DNG file. Be sure to restart LR for this change to take effect:

This box must be check in LR/LRc to see both file formats.

Thumbwheel programming: Finally I programed the thumbwheel, top right, to EV correction on the rare occasions I would want to override the camera’s aperture priority auto exposure.

Weight: My instant reaction to the weight of the M10 was that it’s identical to that of the M3 film body. Here are the data:

• M3 with film cassette, rewind crank, Upstrap and Leicameter MR4 fitted: 725 grams/25.6 ozs
• M10 with battery installed and Upstrap: 700 grams/24.7 ozs

So the M10, ready for action, is actually about an ounce lighter than the M3. The heft in the hand is just perfect, one solid mass of magnificent German engineering. Until you have experienced it you cannot begin to understand how special this feeling is. Like a Porsche 911 compared with anything else on four wheels.

All the various M10 models use brass top and bottom plates which increase weight over the zinc top plate used in black versions of the M11. (The chrome M11 retains a brass top plate). A black M11 weighs 130 grams (20%) less than a chrome one. That may be significant to you or you need to work out more if a silver body is your choice. The greater weight of the M10 works for me because of the many years of muscle memory using a like weight M3.

The most important accessory – the carrying strap: The following assumes that you carry the camera with the strap slung over your left shoulder, not around your neck.

I strongly recommend the Upstrap.

It can be stated with certainty that two of our greatest companies share a basic fault. In the case of Apple, the purported UI king, they seem incapable of designing a good mouse. For Leica it’s the same with the carrying strap. My M10 came with the original black leather carrying strap and it’s an abomination, just waiting to slip off your shoulder like every one of their earlier efforts. Stiff, ugly and slippery, with just one side coated with ineffectual anti-slip material. The best thing about the Leica strap is the two very robust hard steel key rings which I transplanted when installing the Upstrap.

Upstrap has gone out of business but they crop up on eBay now and then. A used one ran me $27. They come with a narrow (RF/DC) or wide (SR/LT) rubber shoulder pad, the latter spreading the weight better, but either works. For a heavy DSLR you really want the wide one. That’s a cheap insurance policy for a $5000 camera + more for the lens.

In many years of use I have never had an Upstrap slip off my shoulder (I carry the camera with the strap over my left shoulder, ready for action). The only thing I have against it is the installation process but that fiddly event – see the link – is truly a one-off. I strongly urge you to get one and forget the factory one or any number of crazy priced chi-chi alternatives. Perhaps the very worst are the ones that look like a rope. Made to slip off your shoulder. Forget fashionable leather straps. The key is that the strap has a large two-sided grippy rubber pad which will not slip.

Right thumb rest: There a right thumb rest in the rear of the camera where the thumbwheel resides. I like it as it adds a natural resting place for the right thumb. Some swear by after market thumb rests which slide into the accessory shoe. These strike me as redundant but whatever works for you. After decades with the M3, M2 and M6 which had no thumb rest at all, I think I can live without this add-on.

Auto ISO: I set the ISO on Auto using the top knob, set the ISO limit to 3200 in the Menu and told the camera to use a shutter speed no slower than 1/4l, where l is the focal length in mm. So with a 35mm lens the slowest shutter speed will be 1/140th second, and so on. This sounds conservative, I know, but that digital sensor will disclose any instance of camera shake. Of course, this assumes you have a 6-bit coded lens or have manually dialed in the focal length in the Lens Detection setting, otherwise the camera has no way of knowing which focal length is in use. These are nice features.

Geotagging: I then started up the GPS Tracks app in my iPhone and set off on my daily walk. I would later use the GPX tracks file, emailed to myself, to import GPS data to the images once they are safely in Lightroom. It works perfectly. By the time Leica released the M11 they added low power Bluetooth to the existing WiFi in the M10. Along with that addition the M11 can record GPS data using the related iOS FOTOS app, but the feature is not available in the M10. But the GPS Tracks method works perfectly and import of locations from the exported GPX file into LRc is almost instantaneous, using Jeffrey Friedl’s ‘Geoencoding‘ plugin.

Use with Lightroom Classic: And how do you get the images into Lightroom? Leica has retained, for nostalgia’s sake I assume, the removable baseplate which has to be removed to access the battery and the SD card. I used an old 64gb SDHC card found in my desk drawer which sports a less than stellar 60mb/s read/write speed and it works fine, offering capacity for some 2,000 30gb images. More than I will take in a year …. The card is inserted into a reader attached to the Mac Mini M4 and import to LRc commences. But there’s another way. You can download a free application named Leica Sync which, once you have the Mac dialed in to the M10 created network (invoke FOTOS on the M10 to do this), allows download of the images on the SD card – still in the camera – to your Downloads folder. The 42 images, each around 30mb from my walkabout, took a pokey 6.5 minutes to download, with the small rear panel red LED flashing away to announce the download is proceeding. It’s an option, I suppose, but it’s far faster to simply insert the card in an SD card reader when importing images to LRc.

Shutter count: But there’s a real surprise waiting for users of this cool app. The one thing Leica does not want you knowing about – who knows how the German mind works? – is your camera’s shutter count. And Leica Sync displays that in the Information screen. Here is mine:

My M10’s shutter count.

Yup, the camera is basically brand new! And it came from a nice authorized Leica dealer at that, with a 12 month warranty. I checked that the count was incremented correctly when I had added a few dozen exposures, and it was.

That removable baseplate: All film rangefinder Leicas, screw or M-bayonet, have a removable baseplate for film loading and unloading. Leica has retained this poor piece of design in the M10 and the baseplate has to be removed to access both the battery and the SD card. Poor ergonomics. And if you think the M11 finally got it right by deleting the removable baseplate, think again. You now have to remove the battery to access the SD card. Hardly an improvement. This is one of those ‘grin and bear it’ situations.

Some snaps: Images? Here are some favorites from that 90 minute ramble, with particular focus on color rendering. I had created an M10 import in LRc which has an M10 camera profile among the many available, so absent the monochrome one, converted in Silver Efex Pro, these are pretty much SOOC. After import I changed the EXIF data to correctly show ’35mm Canon’ not ’35mm Summicron’ in the EXIF ‘lens’ field and imported the GPX file with the GPS coordinates for each image. It takes less time to do this than to write about it.

Farm machinery.

Colorful recycling.

International Harvester. The Caution writing is pin sharp in the original DNG file.

Rest spot.

Small Deere.

Blue house.

Flower display.

Fake Canadian geese. I added the vignette.

Ergonomics and finder content: The camera handles like a dream. If you have never handled any Leica M body, prepare your wallet for serious damage in the event you do, because there’s no unlearning the experience. The only thing I miss from my M3, M2 and M6 is that lovely film advance lever. While the finder magnification of 0.73x is less than the stellar 0.91x of the M3, the exit pupil has been significantly widened making for much easier use with glasses, and the LED illuminated frame lines are far brighter in poor light. The range/viewfinder in the M range has always been the marque’s crowning glory and Leica has surpassed itself here. Magnificent. In addition to the frames and rangefinder patch there’s a large shutter speed display at the base of the finder and a small red dot to the top left of this display says you have locked exposure with a first pressure on the sublime shutter release. A second red dot at lower left reminds you that you have EV compensation engaged but there’s no missing that as the amount of compensation is shown large and bold as you take a first pressure on the release. Perfection, and everything you need to know.

Shutter noise and battery life: The shutter is just a tad quieter than in my M3 and you can bang away at five frames per second if you are clueless. I have the LCD turned off as I never chimp, and the sleep timer set at 2 minutes. Once the M10 sleeps a touch on the shutter button wakes it (I wish it woke just a tad faster) and the LED illuminated frame lines once again become visible. In the 90 minutes, with the camera on at all times, the battery charge fell from 100% to 90%, suggesting that if you do not chimp – this is a street snapper, remember? – that a charge should be good for 400 snaps or so. For me that’s a lot. You may want to carry a spare battery and Leica will be happy to hose you down brutally for one. There are no aftermarket cheaper ones at this time. Luckily my M10 came with a spare.

You can turn off the power saving feature which keeps the finder frames and shutter display on at all times, meaning the camera is always ready for action without that irritating 1.5 second delay while it wakes from sleep. To test how much battery drain this causes I left the camera on for 60 minutes with Power Saving ‘Off’ and the resulting battery drain was 25%. Not at all bad. However with this power setting it really makes sense to carry a spare battery. Two batteries should give you a day’s action.

The 35mm lens – what the Leica M was designed for: This is the perfect focal length for street snapping and forget aftermarket gargantua with huge apertures to match their bulk. These are anathema to the Leica concept of ‘small camera, small lens’. The 35mm f/2 Canon LTM is fully the equal of the old 8-element f/2 Summicron. Practically, I would place its resolution north of that old Summicron but just short of the clinical rendering of the current ASPH version. I have owned and used both. Compared with film, the files from the M10 are vastly superior as there’s no mediocre film scanner involved in digitizing them and even at ISO3200 the images are grain free at 100% magnification in LRc. An extraordinary sensor and fine lens. Wanna save $3700? Forget that Leica Summicron and track down a good used 35mm f/2 Canon LTM. It’s as if it was made for the M10. Optics have not come that far from 1971 when that little charmer was made. Computers do not always improve on slide rules. I graduated with the latter so there’s an element of bias here!

Compared with the 35mm f/3.5 Summaron RF – the only affordable wide angle Leitz lens at $550 or so – the Canon gains 1.5 stops. At f/3.5 the Canon is considerably sharper at the edge of the frame, modestly so in the center. By f/8 the Summaron has caught up with images from both lenses sharp across the frame. Both are fine performers and large prints at full aperture are no issue.

The FOTOS app: The free Leica FOTOS app for iOS and Android allows you to remotely control the camera from your cell phone or tablet. I’m not too sure why you would want to do this but it also gives you access to the Main Menu selections and permits download of images to Lightroom CC, the mobile version. Frankly, I prefer processing on a large display attached to my desktop Mac but for those in the mobile set FOTOS may be just the ticket.

Conclusion: Otherwise what’s not to like? Handling is very much like a film Leica, you don’t have to wait an age to see your files on your computer, the definition of the files is an order of magnitude better and the whole package inspires mightily through its ergonomics and quality. Now I’m feeling a tad better about blowing the kid’s milk money on mine. A good used M10 depreciates 5% or so annually, so after 5 years you should still be able to realize 75% of what you paid, on resale.