Leica’s latest rangefinder offering, the M7, is radical in a funny sort of way. For the first time a full-blown electronic shutter has been employed in what has traditionally been a purely mechanical 35mm camera. For dyed-in-the-wool Leica nuts, the decision to employ an electronic shutter is an act of treason is comparable to the day Bob Dylan strolled on stage at the Isle of Wright and plugged in an electric guitar. The “purists” in the audience went rabid. It’s funny how the embracing of cutting edge 1970’s technology can, to this day, get certain “traditional” folks all up in a tizzy. For better or worse, we seem to have survived it all and should have the strength to continue to do so.

The truth is, by stepping up to electronics the Leica M7 actually performs in a manor that is true to the Leica’s philosophy of intuitive and spontaneous picture taking. The use of aperture priority metering enables you to keep shooting despite any lighting changes that may occur as you work. With prior Leica Ms you had to meter (or eye-ball) the light and make mid-course corrections to your shutter speeds and/or f-stops as you shot. This can be both distracting and time consuming. With the M7 you set the working aperture and spend the rest of you time concentrating on taking photographs. The correct shutter speed automatically adjusts in a step-less manner to match the selected aperture. Exposure information is displayed via LED in the viewfinder. The brightness of the LED varies in intensity to match the ambient light. If you should experience battery failure the Leica M7 still maintains mechanical shutter speeds of 1/60th and 1/125th of a second to get you through the day. Shutter trigger delay is estimated at about 12 milliseconds, which beats just about any camera you are likely to use.

Despite the new electronics and about 350 other improvements over it’s predecessor, Leica’s M7 retains the same no-nonsense feel that has long set it apart from the rest of the kids in the pool. The body is compact with rounded corners that easily conform to the palm of your hand. Brass and aluminum give the camera a solid feel not found on many of today’s polycarbonate techno-wonders.

Leicas by nature are cameras that you quickly learn to use by instinct. By using the finger rest found on the focusing ring on many Leica M lenses, you quickly learn to focus the lens based on the position of your finger on the focusing ring. By observing the correlation between the position of your finger on the lens barrel and the distance scale you can basically focus the lens by “pointing”. If this sort of mindset gets you nervous you can always fall back on the camera’s rangefinder, which is the most accurate in the business.

The qualities of Leica optics are as good as it gets in 35mm and the reputation they carry is much deserved. German glass as a whole remains the hands-down winner when it comes to resolving power, tonal gradations, and color fidelity. As good as Japanese lenses are (and most Japanese lenses are darn good) they just can’t touch their German counterparts. Aside from the glass issue, German lenses tend to utilize a higher number of diaphragm blades that result in photographs that appear, for lack of a better description, more natural. If you look at the out of focus highlights of many photographs you will notice they take on an octagonal shape. This is because they mirror the shape of the diaphragm opening, which is formed by the overlapping diaphragm blades. German lenses, such as those used by Leica and Hasselblad, utilize more diaphragm blades that result in rounder apertures, which in turn result in rounder highlights. This is how the human eye perceives the world around us. We “see” out-of-focus objects as circular forms, not hexagons. The Japanese, many of whom are Leica nuts to begin with, have a name for this phenomenon. The word is “bok-eh”, which essentially means “the quality of what is not in focus”. Every manufacturer makes sharp lenses, but not all lenses produce images that appear the way we see them in our minds eye.