After nearly fifty years in photography, I have a Leica! It is a wonderful little Screw mount Leica IIIa with Summitar 5 cm lens and Elmar 9cm f4 lens. Haven't yet used the Elmar, but have run a roll of tri-x with moderate success. Love the quiet shutter and the small size of this thing. It fits my hand so well, is like a feather compared to the old Topcon RE Super I carried for so many years.
Having bought a Leica III with f2.0 Summitar at about the same time as Michael, I finally managed to find the time (and weather) to put it through its paces. These (for better or worse) are my thoughts after the first roll:
1) Film Loading - I'd read about this issue long before I even considered getting a Leica. There's so much advice about loading on the web, yet I thought "how hard can it be to stick a film in a camera?" Pretty hard, it turns out. Despite having cut the extra long leader, this was an operation akin to keyhole surgery, though I succeeded on the fourth attempt. In trying, I noted that some previous owner had opened the shutter and tried to tease the film down with a sharp object, thereby scratching the pressure plate. I awarded 0/10 to Herr Barnack for his film loading system and 10/10 to Robert Capa for changing films under fire in the Spanish Civil War.
2) Focussing - Very positive, especially with the 1.5X magnified image. No problem shifting from the focus finder to the viewfinder, as few subjects of my photos ever move! Only tiny niggle was the distance at almost infinity, where the infinity lock assembly becomes an issue, though perhaps at that distance "almost infinity" is close enough to "infinity" not to matter under most circumstances.
3) Film Advance - Knob wind not an issue, again because I rarely need to rattle off photos quickly and even then the knob advance can be surprisingly quick and done at eye level with a stroke of a finger (a tip I picked up from a recent episode of Poirot!)
4) Shutter - Though the Leica was reknowned for its quietness in its day, my Pentax MX isn't that much more noisy. Perhaps the difference becomes more discernable where it matters, such as in live music performances.
5) Lens - Easy to use, silky smooth focussing, aperture ring a little loose on mine and easy to change accidentally. The post-war lens is coated, and produced a very nice-looking set of negs, though I've yet to print them and enjoy all those intermediate tones.
I've now sent the camera off to Malcolm Taylor to cure a slight roughness on the 1/30th, 40th and 60th speeds, tighten the aperture ring and to investigate a small fungal growth on one of the lens elements.
Have a good weekend,
Steve