Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Before you get a Leica, you have to ask yourself why. You'll be giving up automatic focus. You'll be giving up seeing the picture before you take it. You'll be spending a lot of money. Look at the price here, and note that it comes with no lens. Likely, you will want a lens. It's eye-blinkingly daft to get a camera like this and put cheap lenses on it. And heck, even the cheap lenses are going to cost more than most other cameras do. Heck, the flash gun I bought cost more than my wife's Canon. Suck it up now, you're going to be spending $10K and more like $15K by the time you're done. You're either rich, a pro, or crazy and possibly all three. I know lots of pros who sneer at the price on this. You're going to have to learn how to use the camera. You won't just take it out of the box and start shooting. It took me a couple thousand shots to decide that hey, maybe I know how to use it -- and that was with a single lens. I also know I'm getting better with each few hundred pictures I take. But let's also remind ourselves that Cartier-Bresson only ever used a 50mm lens, too. You're going to learn what they mean by "f8 and be there." So why the heck would you want this camera? It's small. If you compare size and weight against any camera that would come close for sheer quality, you have it beat hands down. Your kit is smaller, your bags are lighter. Your back will thank you. You can get into places you can't get into before. I've been to places where they have said "No DSLRs" and this isn't an SLR. I've been to places where they say "no removable lens cameras" and they let me through anyway. It isn't off-putting like a mondo DSLR with bazooka-sized lens and a boom mic that looks like it belongs under a stallion. You're someone with an old-timey camera; it is a relic and therefore harmless. You can use, with very few exceptions, any lens that Leica made back to 1952. With an adapter, you can use any lens back to the 1930s, too. To be fair, you can also use these lenses on a Four Thirds camera, too, but it's still true. It's a Leica. There's a mystique to a Leica, and yeah, after you take five thousand pictures, after you learn brightlines and framing and when to go manual, and practice, practice, practice, your shots will look like Leica shots. There's nothing in the world that looks like a Leica shot except a Leica shot and yours will start looking like that. One of those five thousand will be good enough that your spouse will say, "You ought to enter that into a contest." Many, many of the iconic shots of the last hundred years were shot with a Leica and that Leica look will rub off a little. But it isn't the camera, it's you. It's the devotion. It's because you made the commitment (which is the polite way to say cash) to having a real camera and learning not to be a poseur with it. The biggest reason *not* to get this camera is that it's a better camera than you are photographer and that will be painfully obvious when you get it. You're going to have to get better at being a photographer because this camera doesn't cover for you, it laughs at you in front of you. You will get better because you have to to maintain face. You'll become a better photographer because the alternative is for everyone to know that the best digital camera in the world is being wasted on the likes of you. That is what it is. It happens to be the best digital camera in the world. The only rivals to it that are non-digital are film Leicas, or really esoteric things like Hasselblads or view cameras. And let's face it, film is dead. It's sad that film is dead, but film is dead. One-horse shays are also dead. There is also a joy to putting a 32MB card in this thing and shooting a thousand-plus shots. No changing film every thirty-six. Wow. That's worth kissing film goodbye right there. So anyway, think long and hard before buying it. If you make the plunge, like I did, and go to the trouble of learning to take pictures again, it's a joy. It's amazing. It's the best thing that ever happened to me on the back side of the viewfinder. There are things that were better on the front side of the viewfinder, but no camera can do that.