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Legendary camera | Leica M3 Happy year of the Rabbit. I hope you can make great plans, make a lot of money and make your dreams come true this year after the end of the epidemic.

It is said that I can't work on the first day of the Lunar New year, and I have to work hard for a whole year, so I'll update it. Anyway, it's okay for me to update you a little more this year.

It is not difficult to do an article that interprets the performance and version of M3. Leica M3 is not a complex camera, although there are many versions, there are still traces to follow. The Japanese interpretation of the Leica M3 is so elaborate that it is broken down to every part.

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to talk to you about why this camera is so famous from the perspective of camera development. It will be exactly 70 years since the camera was launched in 2024 next year. For 70 years, I don't know how things have changed, but M3 is still working.

Let's first take a look at the birth of M3, the following figure is not common.

This is not a camera, but a metal model, made in 1948. It shows the development process of the Leica M3. At least in 1948, Leica has basically determined the basic shape and prototype of the future camera.

Since Leica was not removed as a whole as Zeiss did, in 1946, they began to resume production of the L39 screw camera, and on the other hand, they were preparing to develop an epoch-making fast photography 135 camera.

Leica engineers at the time probably didn't expect them to design a camera that was even greater than Leica 0, a camera that redefined the flow of manual cameras.

The Leica M3 was officially released and released in 1954, and this is a 1952 M3 trial camera. There was never such a pre-sale high-completion camera on the market before it was unveiled at auction in 2012.

It is basically an M3, from the outside, only the counter is different from the final version, but it is not the kind of M2 later. He and the Leica L39 camera can feel a significant difference in light from the outside, and its performance has improved so much that it is difficult to understand just by its appearance.

No matter how you look at it, it is a very new thing, completely different from the 135 cameras in the past.

This is the final product, the first Leica M3 camera on the 700000, and the real 700,000 is still a trial, so this 700000 01 is the first M3 camera, at least that's what Leica officials say.

It almost removes most of the shortcomings of the pre-war 135 camera in terms of operation and exposure, making the operation of the camera as a whole. Although M3 is still not very convenient in some aspects of design, the emergence of M3 is undoubtedly cross-era and leading the times.

Although soon, the camera has entered the era of manual SLR, but in addition to focusing, a lot of operation logic comes from the M3 camera. This is the second time Leica has defined camera operations, and the impact is much more far-reaching than the L39's first.

To understand the meaning of M3, we also have to look at the basic operation of the pre-war 135 camera.

This is Leica's own IIIf camera, launched in 1950, which is basically a summary of the Leica III series of cameras. There are very few types of cameras with interchangeable lenses before the war, and although the principles of L39 and contax cameras are not the same, they have a lot in common in operation. The impact of World War II was so great that the cameras that appeared in the first few years after World War II were basically restored to the pre-war style. It was not until the economy gradually recovered in the 1950s that a number of new cameras emerged.

Leica IIIf camera now seems to be a very tedious camera, so I will explain it to you with the help of the comparison between IIIf and M3, and will integrate some other cameras.

The first is the viewfinder system. In the viewfinder system of the old camera, the separation of focus and viewfinder is very common. The rangefinder has almost no angle, and the viewfinder needs an additional window. The same is true of the Leica IIIf, which is still separated in 1950. The square is a simple equal power viewfinder with a very simple light path, which is used by the 50mm viewfinder.

The development direction of viewfinder is to combine viewfinder and focus, and is compatible with multi-lens use. Such as IIIf viewfinder, if you change the lens, but also external to a special viewfinder, the process of light viewfinder focus is already suffocating.

The development direction of viewfinder is as follows: separate type-simple merge type-frame merge type (ALABADA type)-bright wire frame type (linkage correction parallax type)

The bright wireframe was first developed by Leica and designed an extremely complex optical path in the viewfinder, far ahead of contemporary side-axis cameras. Because of the combination of optical path and linkage ranging mechanism, it also has parallax auxiliary function. This kind of bright wireframe viewfinder could not even be built by Flenda at that time. Japanese Nikon successfully completed it on SP, but the cost was too high, so it was returned to ALABADA style.

The viewfinder of M3 realizes several important functions such as merging view, changing lens frame line prompt, parallax correction and high contrast macular focus. After that, the viewfinder of the side-axis camera is basically patched within this frame.

The following is Leica IIIf linkage focus light road, you see, just two glass.

The following is for M3. Count for yourself to see how many materials have been used.

Later, in order to increase the angle, Leica simplified the M3 viewfinder system, which was used by later M cameras.

Let's take a look at the shutter disc.

Note that there is a turntable on the front of the Leica IIIf, which is also a shutter disc. Here to explain to you why the old camera has two discs.

The focal plane shutter is not as fast as the mirror shutter, its shutter speed can be "cheated". In general, the shutter exposure is fully opened and then closed, the mirror shutter is like this, the shutter speed is the speed of opening and closing.

But the focal plane shutter can not be fully opened to achieve exposure, by not fully open, with a light sweep past the way, can improve the effect of the shutter speed.

For example, if you set the maximum speed of the shutter to 1thumb 30, but the shutter is only half open, then each part of the negative actually does not light up to 1max 30 seconds, only half of the time, which is equal to 1max 60, but the actual speed of the shutter is 1max 30.

In that case, the speed control logic before and after the actual fastest focal plane shutter is different, the former is to control the full opening time, which is essentially a delay mechanism, while the latter is to control the distance between the front and rear curtain, which is essentially a regulating mechanism.

It is not impossible to put them together, Chase Icahn's contax is not together (actually it is still separate, different from the logic of the single disk later), but the technology is very complex and the results are not very good.

Nikon is even more interesting, they imitate contax, but can not do a merger, so they also have to make two shutter discs.

Although before the Leica M3, there were already some focal plane cameras that were single disks, but the positions were strange and inconvenient to operate. The single disk merger of Leica M3, and the groundbreaking design of equidistant shutter plates with the same distance as the shutter between mirrors (in the past, the faster the shutter disc, the closer the number, because it is directly used to control the distance between the front and rear curtains, the faster the change, the smaller the change).

In addition, the basic position of the shutter disc is determined.

The shutter disc of the pre-war 135camera can be put wherever you want, and the contax I is placed on the front of the fuselage, full of personality, and the EXAKTA is on the left.

But after the M3, the merger, the right side, the small disk, become the basic operation of the future 135 camera, not only the side axis, but also the layout of many SLRs.

Even if we enter the digital age, some digital cameras that boast retro operation are still in this position and in this style when put on a shutter disk.

Just following this picture, we talked about the film below.

135 the beginning of the film system is almost entirely learned from 120, a word, twist!

At first, the 120 camera did not even have a stop mechanism, so it had to be twisted according to the prompt, and then there was a strange design that opened a small window and saw a few pictures.

This way of twisting the film is extremely slow, and the fingerprints are almost worn out, which obviously does not meet the needs of 135 cameras to take pictures quickly, which is why journalists have to use double reversals for a long time, because double reversals are fast.

As early as the 1930s, Ihage came up with the solution: the over-plate wrench they used on EXAKTA135 DSLRs.

However, the EXAKTA film is operated by the left hand, and the shutter is also on the left, so the shutter position on the front of the fuselage is easy to misoperate.

There is also a problem, that is, the over-film wrench is pulled at one time, the strength is very strong, at that time the film quality is not good, often break the situation. After World War II, this design was not popular.

Leica engineers realized the epoch-making significance of film wrenches, but in order not to break the film, they designed the logic of passing the film twice, which is much faster than twisting it.

Leica determines the classic operating design of right-hand habits, passing film, shutter, and shutter disc in one area.

In the future, it is not just the side axis, most manual SLR exposure operations will learn from the M3 mode, although Japanese cameras like to keep the shutter button separate.

There is another area that is easy to overlook. Change the lens.

For professional journalists, changing the lens is very important. In the past, the screw mouth changed the lens very slowly, but the bayonet lens was not necessarily convenient to change the lens.

Before the war, the most prominent side axis bayonet system is contax, but it is also very cumbersome to change the lens, you have to adjust the lens before you can remove it.

On the other hand, Leica set up buttons to change the lens on the M camera, which is actually one of the ways to change the lens, sometimes with a wrench, but later, almost everyone adopted this scheme, whether it was a side axis or a SLR.

The habit of manual photography in the future is directly related to the Leica M3 camera, although in terms of performance and operation, especially for journalists, the M3 is not as good as the Nikonda F, which was introduced five years later. However, except for the focus, the operation logic of Nikonda F is all transferred from the M3.

Of course, the M3 is not perfect, and there are many places where the later camera did not refer to it, or it had not been dealt with at that time.

For example, rewind, its rewind is still the traditional twist, there is no handle, rewind is very inconvenient. There is also the installation of the film, which did not learn from the mainstream big door at that time, or followed the design of the open bottom cover on the L39, which made the M3 still need to pick out the spool and tuck it back together on both sides when installing the film. This operation is not only complicated, but also difficult to stand up to complete, you have to sit down to change a little.

In fact, in addition to these operations, the Leica M3 also has a significant impact on the appearance of future generations of side-axis cameras. There are fewer and fewer full-topped side axes, so they all learn from Leica M. to make a "turning point".

Personally, I think that from the point of view of its use, M3Magi M2 is not as useful as the later M6Magi MP. Although the viewfinder of the M3 is very good, but its magnification is 0.90, it is very inconvenient to use the 35mm lens, and almost no one in later Leica uses 35mm, and even many people only use 35mm.

If you look at the value of the collection, there is nothing to preserve the value of the M3, after all, it is a camera with an output of more than 200,000.

I think if you have a lot of film camera friends, or camera enthusiasts, you can't miss it. If nothing else, take a picture of the model, let the model copy an M3, not to mention the quality of your photo, the grade will go up all of a sudden!

This article is from the official Wechat account: film fan club (ID:jiaojuanmi), author: Shanghai Old dirty Turtle

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