The M6 was arguably Leica's best camera in terms of usability and just being a practical movie camera. And now it might be coming back—sort of.
Leica M6: The best 35mm film camera ever?
A second round of credible rumors points to a new, cheaper film camera from Leica. These days, Leica is the camera equivalent of the Birkin bag: it may be a great tool, but it comes with an absurd price tag that, while part of its appeal, has very little to do with its practical value. But Leica used to be a workhorse brand, no less affordable than today's top-tier professional cameras. And this may be a welcome throwback to those days.
"The idea behind a Leica was that it would always work because it was well designed and built. No mangled film, no stuck levers, no unresponsive shutter buttons, no dead batteries. The M6 really embodies everything that makes a Leica great, in terms of reliability and style," Shawn Kenessey, professional photographer and senior editor at Learn Photography Skills, told Lifewire via email.
Like all of Leica's M-series film cameras up to that point, the M6 (made from 1984-2002) was fully manual. Manual focus, manual exposure, and manual film advance. It had LED arrows in the viewfinder that connected to the light meter so you could set the exposure correctly, and a later variant, the M6 TTL, reversed the direction of the shutter speed dial to match those arrows.
