Leica at 101: What Does It Have Beyond Nostalgia?

Once a camera legend, Leica now seems to be showing its age: it has lost its knack for innovation and been slow to spot new trends.

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Leica is 101 years old. It has been around for more than half of the camera’s 175-year history.

Before Leica, large box cameras were the norm. They were much smaller than the 19th-century equipment that required a horse-drawn carriage to take on a shoot, but they were hardly portable. The first Leica, the Ur-Leica, was built in 1913 at the Ernst Leitz optical works in Germany by a mechanical engineer named Oskar Barnack. The 35 mm film Barnack designed made it the world’s first small, portable camera and brought photography outdoors.

The years from then until the 1960s were Leica’s heyday. It released one technically groundbreaking product after another. Many standards and techniques still used in cameras today came from Leica. Most cameras that followed, for example, adopted the 35 mm format, and it remained a standard into the digital era.

By the 1930s, Japanese manufacturers were making Leica copies, while Kodak, Hasselblad and others competed with it. Still, Leica’s inventiveness and steady stream of improved products kept it at the forefront of the camera market. It was seen as a legend.

By the late 1950s, Japanese makers’ single-lens reflex cameras were challenging Leica and other European rangefinder makers. They offered a wider view through the finder, autofocus and greater lens compatibility. As SLRs gradually displaced rangefinders as the dominant professional camera, Leica paid too little attention to the shift and held fast to rangefinders.

In the 1990s, digital cameras entered the consumer market and spread, again led by Japanese manufacturers. The success and prestige of Leica’s film rangefinders became a burden. Once more, Leica lost its way during a market shift.

In fiscal 2004/2005, Leica lost 18.1 million euros. Losses continued until 2009, when the company gradually returned to profit.

Even today, no one doubts Leica’s place in camera history. Its name stands for camera culture and, along with cars, for the quality of German industry. Yet Leica has become a niche brand. A company that was once highly profitable must now find a way to survive and prosper again.

Several things brought Leica to this point: a halt in innovation, a fixation on its past and a decision to run itself as a luxury brand…

What Leica did to make cameras what they are today

In its early years, Leica released a new model only once every year or two. That seems slow beside today’s pace, but each model marked a substantial advance. The Leica II, released in 1932, was the first camera with a rangefinder coupled to its lens. In 1933, the Leica III extended shutter speeds down to one second; in 1935, the IIIa raised the upper limit to 1/1,000 of a second.

The M3, launched in 1953, began Leica’s M series. One of the company’s most significant cameras, it was the first Leica to use a bayonet lens mount and combined the previously separate rangefinder and viewfinder. Other companies later based cameras on its design, among them Canon, the Soviet FED, the American Kardon and Shanghai.

The M3 was simple inside, easy to use and remarkably sturdy. Photographer and Leica collector Zhang Yueshi owns one made between the late 1950s and early 1960s. “I once asked a camera repairman about it. Of all the cameras he had repaired, he said the M3 was the best built. The oldest M3s must be about 60 years old, and they’ve hardly ever really broken down,” Zhang told QDaily.

The M series became Leica’s signature line. It had its missteps, including a model that drew terrible reviews, but was successful overall. Rangefinders were Leica’s specialty, and the company put many of its innovations into the series. The M2, introduced in 1958, and the M6, introduced in 1984, were both landmarks.

Leica recorded many moments in history

Even if you have no particular interest in photography, you have almost certainly seen the photographs above. Leica’s small size made it easy for photojournalists to carry one to battlefields and celebrations and capture events as they happened. Pictures can stir feelings in a way words sometimes cannot. Photographs of war, in particular, let people far from the battlefield see its cruelty.

During the Vietnam War in 1972, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut used a Leica M2 to photograph a naked South Vietnamese child running down a road toward his camera. She had just been burned by napalm; her arms were outstretched and she was screaming in pain. The photograph appeared on the front page of The New York Times and intensified opposition to the war, which ended not long afterward. In 1973, The Terror of War won a Pulitzer Prize. It changed the lives of Vietnamese people, Ut and the girl in the photograph, Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

In 2013, Leica released a promotional film, 100 Years of Leica, recreating 35 of the previous century’s best-known images: The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, John Lennon embracing Yoko Ono, Che Guevara and others. The originals were not all shot on Leicas. But Leica had taken photography outdoors, giving it some connection to every one of them. The film showed how confident the company was in its past achievements.

Why does Leica cost so much?

Four factors help explain why the cheapest Leica M-series rangefinder costs around 13,000 yuan, while one of its SLRs can sell for more than 200,000 yuan.

First, materials. Leica lenses are heavy because their glass contains lead and other heavy metals; some even contain radioactive elements to make the lenses faster. Canon, Nikon and other brands commonly use resin lenses to reduce weight, though their image quality falls short of glass.

Second, labor. Leica’s M-series cameras and SLRs are still assembled entirely by hand in German factories. Numbers marking aperture settings and other specifications are engraved and colored by hand, and each M-series camera comes with the technician’s signature. In Germany, skilled camera technicians’ wages are a substantial cost.

Third, a luxury strategy. In 2000, Hermès bought a one-third stake in Leica, reinforcing its image as a high-end camera maker and luxury brand. That gave Leica room to charge a premium.

Finally, limited editions. In 2010, Leica released a titanium M9, limited to 500 cameras worldwide. Titanium is expensive, and its use in Leicas has generally produced cameras regarded as classics. Leica has also released a Hermès edition, a collaboration with French outerwear brand Moncler and a special edition designed by Apple’s Jonathan Ive. These collectible versions have more elaborate packaging and higher prices than standard models. The Hermès M9-P, for example, had an official price of 230,000 yuan in China.

They used Leicas

Many royals and heads of state have been Leica fans, among them Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. A set of stamps issued in April 1986 to mark her 70th birthday included an image of her holding a Leica M3. Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was another fan; Leica gave him a camera in 1960.

Leica likes to put such famous admirers to work in its marketing. Besides giving cameras to leading photographers, politicians and scientists, it releases limited editions with celebrities to attract their fans and broaden its customer base. British fashion designer Paul Smith is a keen photographer who shoots the advertising images for his namesake label himself. In 2012, Leica released a Paul Smith edition of its X2 camera. Videos of Smith holding a Leica played repeatedly in the brand’s authorized stores.

Leica is an elite camera, used by elites; owning one signals taste. Superior engineering and recognition in the market may have first put it in that position, but Leica eventually adopted the same view of itself. That helps explain how it became increasingly confined to a niche.

Leica arrived late to the next waves of camera buying

Leica’s heyday lasted into the 1960s, when the rise of SLRs challenged the rangefinders in which it took such pride. In 1952, Pentax produced Japan’s first SLR. Five years later, Nikon introduced the F, the first SLR with interchangeable lenses. Japanese industry grew rapidly after World War II, and camera makers sprang up. Their SLRs were relatively affordable and, compared with rangefinders, offered a wider view through the finder, autofocus and greater lens compatibility. Together, those advantages helped turn cameras from professional tools into household consumer products.

The success of Japanese manufacturers and SLRs reshaped competition in the camera market. Leica, meanwhile, hesitated over whether to enter the SLR market. Rangefinders had made the company’s name, and they still had advantages for professionals. An SLR’s mirror lifts when it takes a picture, making a noticeable sound each time the shutter is pressed. A rangefinder’s construction makes it much quieter, useful when a photographer does not want to draw a subject’s attention.

Leica released its first SLR in 1964, compelled to follow Nikon’s hugely successful F.

The next shift in the consumer camera market was digital. In 1975, Kodak’s laboratories developed the first digital camera.

Japanese companies again did much to bring the technology to consumers. In 1995, Casio released a digital camera with an LCD screen, which became a defining feature of later models. Olympus, Canon and Leica all released digital cameras in 1996. But while Olympus and Canon aimed theirs at ordinary consumers, Leica’s first digital camera, the S1—a machine that looked like a steering wheel—was intended for libraries and research institutions. Over the past 20 years, Japanese manufacturers have more often led changes in camera features and design: Canon brought video recording to SLRs, and Sony developed mirrorless cameras.

Digital cameras had a far greater impact than SLRs. Today, they account for more than 90% of camera sales worldwide. Leica, however, revered mechanical cameras and for a long time had no interest in changing its “glorious tradition.”

So when did Leica release its first digital camera? The answer is 2001, with a rebadged model from Panasonic’s Lumix line—26 years after the invention of the digital camera.

Leica’s financial crisis

Leica’s focus on a narrow range of products pushed it into a niche and hurt its finances. In 2004, it posted a net loss of 18.1 million euros. The following year’s loss narrowed but still reached 9.24 million euros. The losses prompted seven financial institutions, including Commerzbank and HSBC, to shorten Leica’s repayment terms. As Leica struggled, Canon’s and Nikon’s camera businesses thrived. Canon had become the world’s largest camera maker.

Could an acquisition change Leica’s fortunes?

In 2005, Austrian private equity firm ACM began buying a stake in Leica. Its owner, Austrian businessman Andreas Kaufmann, was himself a Leica enthusiast. After investing, Kaufmann set out to overhaul the company’s troubled finances and product strategy.

In 2006, Leica finally released its first digital rangefinder, the M8. Changing the all-important M series showed that it wanted to move forward. But the camera disappointed: it cost 40,000 yuan, and its images did not live up to the price. Leica’s CEO at the time, Steven Lee, signed more than 4,000 apology letters.

In 2007, ACM bought Hermès’s 36.2% stake and took full ownership of Leica. Kaufmann became CEO. Under him, Leica began courting younger buyers with money to spend and expanded its lineup, from Japanese-made compact cameras to German-made SLRs, across a range of prices. In 2014, it introduced the T, a new mirrorless camera whose all-aluminum body carried on Leica’s attention to how a camera looks and feels.

Leica is changing.

Cover image: Ken Rockwell