The M8 was Leica's first digital rangefinder. Smooth, sleek, but distinctly rough effectually the edges, information technology nevertheless laid downward the bones pattern for the cameras that came after it, while remaining truthful to its motion picture roots.

I share an anniversary with the Leica M8 - sort of. The M8 was appear in the same week that I started my career as a camera reviewer - September 2006. We were both very light-green, both a little unsteady on our feet and both decidedly unpolished.

Upward to that bespeak, Leica'due south experiments with digital had been unconvincing. The clunky Digital Modul R was allegorical of the company's lack of conviction when it came to digital. Designed to clip onto the back of R8 and R9 film SLR bodies and in consequence convert them into digital cameras, the Digital Modul R was a proficient idea merely a bad production. Information technology took two years to actually ship, and when it did, it was extremely pricey, costing more than than $5000 (and that's without a camera trunk on which to mount it).

In the mid 2000s, whether or not Leica would ever bother to risk an digital Yard-series rangefinder was even so an open up question. Later the much-maligned M51, Leica's approach to upgrading the M-series in subsequent decades might charitably be described as 'conservative.'

When it finally arrived, the M8 was a mixture of new technology and traditional rangefinder operation. It featured a 10MP APS-H format CCD sensor, a decent-ish LCD screen and a modern-ish menu system, but information technology retained the pure rangefinder focusing organization and (more often than not) the same ergonomics as previous Chiliad-series flick bodies. And it was not, as Leica'south representatives were at pains to bespeak out, definitely not intended to replace the M7.

Compared to Leica's long-serving flagship picture rangefinder (M7, left) the M8 was slightly bigger, heavier and noticeably cleaner in terms of design, thanks to the omission of the motion picture wind and rewind levers.

For a lot of people, rangefinder shooting is a pain, but if you dear information technology, you lot love it. While the rangefindery parts of the M8 were for the well-nigh part nice and mature, Leica was new to digital, and information technology showed. The first M8 I used personally, in late 2006, was a buggy mess. Its frame counter was basically just a random number generator, and its battery level indicator wasn't much better. It besides crashed frequently, and had a nasty habit of getting worryingly hot when it was turned off and placed inside a camera bag. These days, Sony trolls like to shout and scream nearly the a7-series overheating, but you lot could have fried an egg on that particular M8. 2

And and then there was the shutter. Leica'southward M-series film bodies accept rubberized fabric shutters which operate with an almost apologetically quiet 'snick' sound. I withal shoot with an even older IIIC from fourth dimension to time and unless you're continuing right next to the camera, its shutter is almost inaudible. By comparison, the M8'south shutter fired with a loud whirring 'ker-cloink' which I could never quite become used to. Very un Leica-like.

Non a neat pic, but a good illustration of the M8's power to render particular. The lack of an AA filter meant that pixel-level output at depression ISO sensitivity settings was very crisp.

Another matter I struggled to get used to was the M8'due south one.33X crop. When yous look through the viewfinder of a crop-sensor DSLR, the increase in magnification is effectively invisible. You lot don't demand to mentally convert the field-of-view of an 18mm lens to 28mm equivalent in order to frame your shot accurately, because what y'all run into through the finder is what yous get.

Things aren't so elementary with a rangefinder. In a rangefinder, framing is guess to begin with, and the limits of the frame are indicated by bright lines in the finder, which change depending on the lens you have mounted. Adding a crop cistron makes things even more than complicated.

Since the 1980s, in that location have typically been three sets of framelines built in to Leica's rangefinders, which change to show indicators for pairs of focal lengths: 28mm and 90mm, 35mm and 135mm and 50mm and 75mm, depending on the lens you have mounted. Uncomplicated, right?

A rough illustration of the scene through an M8's viewfinder with a 35mm lens attached. The inner framelines stand for the guess coverage of the 35mm lens (~50mm equivalent on the cropped-sensor M8) and the outer framelines represent 24mm (~30mm equivalent).

Nearly all of Leica's moving picture rangefinders since the 1960s have featured 0.72X magnification finders, which are well-suited to shooting at the 35mm focal length, with 28mm lines (where nowadays) indicated at the extremes of the finder. Of class on an M8, 35mm = 46mm, and then Leica had to change the framelines.

But just this is where information technology gets confusing, because the magnification of the M8's viewfinder was really reduced compared to film (i.e., full-frame) cameras, to compensate for the increase in effective focal lengths resulting from the cropped sensor. 3 When y'all attach a 35mm lens, y'all see framelines covering ~50mm and ~30mm equivalent fields of view. That's all well and good, merely of course rather than the 35mm lens field-of-view being represented by the outer set up of lines, equally would exist the case on a non-cropped motion picture torso, they're the inner fix of framelines considering of the crop. The outer set of lines is actually for 24mm and the two sets are pretty close together in the finder (meet illustration above).

The end issue is that with a 24mm or 35mm lens attached, the view through the M8's finder looks a bit like a deconstructed zebra crossing. Faced with unfamiliar framelines, some experienced Thousand-series users also plant themselves 2nd-guessing their effective focal lengths quite a lot when first using the camera. The M8'southward framelines were optimized for accurateness at 0.7m, becoming increasingly inaccurate beyond that, which didn't assistance matters either.

One of the weirder features of the M8 (and subsequent digital rangefinders) is the blueprint of its retentivity menu / battery compartment. Like the older film models, the entire baseplate must be removed if you want to swap either the battery or memory bill of fare. Sure - why not?

Permit'south assume though that you've familiarized yourself with the unique framelines, you've grown used to the gray-on-black-on-gray menu organisation, yous don't heed removing the unabridged base of the camera to swap batteries and your M8 isn't one of the ones that cocky-immolates. What kind of pictures tin information technology produce? Really nice ones, actually - on the whole.

Although there were definitely amend sensors on the market in 2006, the M8 was reasonably competitive in terms of item and noise levels at depression / medium ISO sensitivities, and the lack of an anti-aliasing filter means that images are really, really sharp. Automobile white residual has never been a Leica strength, and JPEGs from the M8 tended to wait a bit murky, but it was like shooting fish in a barrel enough to get acceptable results from converted Raw files.

Equally far equally image quality was concerned, there was 1 major gotcha though, which inexplicably made it past Leica's experten: infra-blood-red sensitivity. Too much of it, to be specific. The M8 was very sensitive to IR light, which isn't major upshot virtually of the time, simply when it's a problem, it can be a real evidence-stopper. As reviewers found out, yous'll by and large see it when shooting green foliage (which sometimes comes out looking too yellowish) and black manmade fabrics (which ofttimes come up out looking distinctly magenta).

Leica's solution - shipping 2 spiral-in IR filters to all M8 owners for free - was really more of a goodwill gesture, and wasn't until the introduction of the M9, several years afterwards, that the trouble was actually solved.

The M8 was superseded pretty quickly, by the M8.2 in 2008. The M8.2 introduced a quieter shutter, a more discreet blackness dot, a nicer body covering (the fluffy plastic finish of the M8 was cheap-feeling and disgusting), more than authentic framelines and a badly-needed scratch-resistant blanket on the rear LCD.

Partly considering information technology was so quickly superseded, 2d-hand M8s can be picked upwardly relatively cheaply these days, at least by the absolutely insane standards of previously-owned Leica digital rangefinders. But if yous're actually curious about trying one, my advice would be to salve a little extra and take hold of yourself an M8.two instead.

Read about Leica's electric current flagship digital rangefinder, the M10

1. The M5 was a highly advanced and eminently applied camera when it was released in 1971, but an utter commercial failure, and is widely (and probably unfairly) talked about equally The Camera That Almost Ruined Leica.

At any charge per unit, the M5 served as an early lesson (it would not exist the last) to Leica'southward product planners that while a lot of photographers might balk at weird film loading, external lite metering, limited close focus capability and centre-wateringly loftier pricing, simply well-nigh the only thing that Leicaphiles won't put up with is alter.

ii. Author is a professional exaggerator. Do not endeavour.

three. This might sound odd, merely makes complete sense. Effective focal lengths are increased by the sensor's ingather, and then Leica reduced the magnification of the M8's finder considering inevitably, M8 users would exist mounting wider lenses to reach similar fields of view to the 'classic' 28/35/50 primes. Hence the addition of 24mm framelines which really testify a 30mm field-of-view (etc.).