Allan Yates

can anyone suggest a good place to sell a Leica? online stores and my local camera store are only offering about a third of the value. Thanks.

That's standard operating procedure: Pay the seller 1/3 of retail for a used camera or lens, then sell it at 65-70% of the price that a new one just like it would cost at retail.

If you want to get the most you can get out of your M10, you will have to find a local buyer or put it on eBay.

I'm currently looking for a new, small, high-quality camera for travel...and also kind of questioning what I actually want/need from a camera. I've never used a rangefinder but I called by the Leica store in Mayfair in London today and tried out two cameras.

The Leica Q was nice, but it isn't a rangefinder. When manual focusing, you are using an electronic viewfinder and "focus peaking/magnification" to indicate what's in focus. I wondered to myself why I would choose this over a cheaper Fujifilm or Sony body.

The Leica M-E (Typ 240) was nice, but it has no autofocus. I wondered to myself how many "decisive moments" I would miss by never having autofocus available.

 

My question now is just why Leica never implemented autofocus in any of their rangefinders? I was trying to remember if there ever even were any autofocus rangefinders, and I remembered of course the Contax G2 had it.

As I understand it, the reason Leica never incorporated autofocus into their M cameras is due to the M camera ethos. Part of that ethos is that the M camera will retain the physical dimensions of the original M camera footprint. At present, there is precious little room to cram more stuff into the M camera dimensions, and an autofocus mechanism takes up a lot more space than is available in the M camera.

The M240 was .20 of an inch thicker than the traditional M camera and M camera users raised 99 kinds of hell. Leica took the hint and returned to the original M camera size specs in the M10. That involved using a smaller battery in the M10 which had a significantly shorter power life before needing to be recharged than the M240 battery, but it was a sacrifice that the gents in Wetzlar were willing to make and M10 buyers were willing to live with.

As far as missing shots due to the absence of autofocus in M cameras, anticipating the decisive moment goes a long way in circumventing that. Autofocus is a two edged sword. It helps in some situations, but is next to useless in low light shooting. AF also struggles with low contrast and subjects with little to no texture. At the end of the day, it's a tradeoff.

Personally speaking, I am actually glad my M-P 240 is manual focus. The number of images I miss in low light shooting is drastically reduced thanks to manual focusing.