The following text about the Leica M11-D is not for those who approach photography from a purely rational perspective. After all, there are dozens of cameras on the market that offer better value for money than a Leica rangefinder. And this body doesn’t even have a display. I’ve been shooting with Leica for over ten years and haven’t grown tired of it. There are three main reasons for this:
- Taking photos helps me focus
- The quality of the result is unrivalled in this form factor
- Leica lenses combine visual style with quality
The Leica M11-D is Leica’s most authentic rangefinder camera: with no display, it comes closest to the feel of analogue photography, yet still offers many of the benefits of digital cameras.
My opinion
As luck would have it, the Leica M11-D arrived on the morning of a short private trip to Helsinki. I had the pleasure of being the first person in Hamburg to pick up a brand-new Leica model in-store. Ideal, then, for an initial test. I’d been taking photos with the Leica M11 for some time. So I wasn’t expecting any surprises when it came to image quality. Rather, I was curious to see how the lack of a display would change the way I take photos.
And indeed: although I’d always thought I didn’t look at the display very often, I soon found myself glancing at the back of the camera. Yet there’s nothing there but an ISO dial.
The operating concept of the Leica M11-D
As soon as you’ve unpacked it, you can start taking photos as with any other M. You adjust all the necessary settings directly on the camera: aperture on the lens, shutter speed on the top dial, and ISO on the back of the camera. As with all Leica M cameras featuring exposure metering, arrows and a dot in the viewfinder show you how the camera assesses the exposure based on the settings you’ve chosen. You can also shoot in aperture priority mode. In this mode, you select the aperture on the lens. The shutter speed and/or ISO are automatically selected by the camera accordingly. You can set exposure compensation by turning the thumb wheel. The compensation display is shown in the viewfinder.
The M11’s sensor and firmware are so well-developed that you won’t encounter any surprises. Nothing unexpected there. However, the lack of a display means that a few adjustments are needed to the operating concept, which Leica’s user interface team has largely handled with ease.
Function button instead of a display
To help you keep track of the settings on the Leica M11-D even without a display, the rangefinder shows you additional information compared to other Leica bodies. To do this, press the function button in the top right-hand corner. Each time you press the button, the following information cycles through the viewfinder:
- – Estimated number of remaining photos – unfortunately, only a three-digit figure, which is pointless most of the time, given the 256 GB of internal storage alone.
- – Battery percentage – and the battery life is sensational. After two days of heavy use, I still had 40% battery left
- – USB mode (Apple MFi – for communication between the camera and iOS devices – or PTP – for data transfer to a PC or Mac). You can switch between modes by pressing the thumb wheel and turning the camera off
- – Display of the storage mode, i.e. which data is saved to the SD card or to the internal memory. This can only be set in the Leica Fotos app on your smartphone.
- – Indicates whether connectivity mode is active or not (Con)
- – Indicates whether Leica Content Credentials are active or not (Cr)
- – Display of the frequency band used by the Wi-Fi mode (5 GHz/2.4 GHz – Con5 or Con24). I haven’t been able to find a way to switch this.
- – Shutter speed in automatic mode or exposure compensation mode when a speed is selected on the speed dial
Functions on the thumb wheel
The thumbwheel also offers useful functions not found on other models. When you press the thumbwheel, you can switch between the following information displayed in the viewfinder:
- – Shutter speed when the mode dial is set to Auto
- – Exposure compensation value
- – ISO value
Turning the thumbwheel to the left or right allows you to set the following values.
- – Exposure compensation values
- – ISO values (when the ISO dial is set to M)
- – Shutter speed (when the shutter speed dial is set to B)
Leica Photos app
You can use the app to adjust further settings and download photos from your Leica M11-D to your smartphone. This makes it easy to share them quickly with your friends or online. Nothing new there either. More useful than it might sound: with the M11-D, your smartphone doubles as an external display. This is how I managed to take the following picture on a cramped flight. I checked the framing and focus on the iPhone on my lap whilst waving the camera about over the seats with my arm outstretched.
As I hadn’t taken my laptop with me over the long weekend, the Leica Photos app began to struggle to reliably display the camera gallery on my iPhone, let alone download the images I wanted. Once there are around 500 images on the camera, the connection becomes unstable. With more than 700 images on the Leica M11-D, downloading becomes virtually impossible. However, the app is constantly being updated, and perhaps this aspect will be improved. Furthermore, it is of course possible to transfer data from the SD card to your smartphone using an SD card reader. For images stored in the internal memory, you’ll need to use a PC or Mac and a PTP-compatible programme for data transfer.
Leica Content Credentials
One of the reasons I decided to switch from the Leica M11 to the screenless M11-D was Leica Content Credentials. Leica first introduced this new standard in the M11-P camera. I would therefore like to refer you to the relevant press release from Adobe at the time. The key feature of Content Credentials is that every image is immediately assigned a digital signature in the camera, enabling its authenticity to be verified.
This initiative is very welcome, as it makes it easy to verify not only an image’s authenticity but also its copyright status. In an age when images are shared in the blink of an eye online, but photographers’ names are not, and when AI from various providers is becoming increasingly adept at generating images, none of this is trivial.
Unfortunately, there are currently very few programmes that can process the embedded data. To get around this, I save small JPEGs to the Leica M11-D’s internal memory alongside the large DNG files on the SD card. I then transfer these to the Photos app on my Mac using a USB-C cable. Photos on the Mac can’t read the content credentials either, but this way I have a backup containing all the verifiable data to hand – should I ever need it.
I do, of course, hope that in the future more image-processing programmes will be able to read the Leica M11-D’s content credentials – and that other cameras will also incorporate this feature.
Areas for improvement
There are also a few other points you need to pay close attention to if you want to avoid any unpleasant surprises with the Leica M11-D. For instance, after several failed attempts to connect the camera to your smartphone, the app displays a message instructing you to press the thumb wheel for 12 seconds and then check – or adjust – the connection settings in the viewfinder. If, however, you press the function button on top of the camera instead, you reset the date and delete the content credentials settings. Don’t ask me how I know 😉 However, the user manual merely states that this is how the date is set – you won’t find any mention of content credentials there.
Incidentally, I find the date setting completely unnecessary. The camera seamlessly imports the date, time, and, if desired, GPS coordinates from your smartphone when the smartphone is near the camera. This works even if data transfer to the smartphone isn’t working. Perhaps it would have been more practical to assign a formatting option to the function button. Once the function is activated, you can use the thumb wheel to select the storage medium to be formatted, and pressing the thumb wheel would confirm the selection. Just an idea, Leica…
Charger not included
It’s annoying that the Leica M11-D doesn’t come with a charger. That was also the case with the M11-P. Many manufacturers now do this to protect the environment. I can understand why with smartphones. People replace them relatively often; chargers aren’t expensive, and there’s a wide range of USB-C charging options available. However, you don’t buy a Leica all that often, so you’re forced to buy the Leica charger. The charging cradle costs €150, which is at least €25 cheaper than a spare battery. Now, getting worked up about the price of a spare battery for a Leica makes about as much sense as driving a Porsche and complaining about the high cost of tyres.
At least charging the Leica using an iPhone charger via USB-C works reliably. But be careful: the M11-D must be switched off whilst doing so. Otherwise, the battery won’t charge, and the camera may overheat. Checking the status LED on the bottom of the camera will help you avoid any unpleasant surprises.
What do I find lacking in the Leica M11-D?
Leica promotes the camera with the slogan “Digital heart. Analogue soul.” I can see the logic in that, which is why I don’t understand why the Leica M11-D doesn’t offer more refined options for fine-tuning the JPEGs. In my view, Leica has missed an opportunity here to make the experience of shooting with the camera feel “even more analogue”. I’d be delighted if I could get the JPEGs out of the body with a look that I find even more appealing. Unfortunately, the film looks provided by Leica are reserved for the SL3 and Q3, even though the sensor is the same in all three cameras. Incidentally, I think Panasonic does the best job with JPEG customisation on the S5II(x) and newer models with Real-Time LUTs. Even the little Sigma fp from 2018 is a marvel when it comes to JPEG settings. But that’s just a side note…
The photography experience with the Leica M11-D
So what’s it like taking photos without a display? When assessing this question, it’s naturally helpful that I’ve already been using the M11 for three years. That’s why I know the camera is reliable. Exposure metering is reliable with the slightly misleadingly named ‘Highlight-Priority’ metering mode, and the 60-megapixel sensor can be easily corrected even with slight overexposure. So I shot with confidence.
In fact, I quickly got used to the lack of a display. I know the camera well enough to recognise when an error might occur, and I then quickly check using the Leica Photos app to see if and how I need to intervene.
I can rely on the image quality of my Leica lenses and simply enjoy the moment playing out in front of me. After three years with the M11, I wasn’t expecting the M11-D to change much about the way I shoot. It did – quietly, without fanfare, and entirely for the better. For a camera without a display, it has a remarkable talent for getting out of its own way.
Photos from Helsinki taken with the Leica M11-D
So, what was Helsinki like?
Two full days are nowhere near enough to really experience the city. We felt very much at home. With the Helsinki Card, you can visit many museums at a reduced rate or even for free. If you have a reasonable command of English, getting by in Helsinki is no problem at all. If you like good food, you’ll be spoilt for choice in the city. It feels as though there are more Michelin stars here than in Hamburg. You can easily explore the touristy, yet very beautiful part of Helsinki on foot. The city, with roughly a third of Hamburg’s population, has plenty of places to slow down. You don’t notice that the population density is higher than in Hamburg. What’s striking is how few cars there are. Overall, we also felt that the city was quieter. I’d return without hesitation. We preferred Helsinki to Oslo.
Another example of Leica’s quality
Right at the start of this article, I mentioned the quality of Leica’s optics, which really comes into its own with the Leica M11-D. That’s why I’d like to share a fitting photo here, even though it has nothing to do with Helsinki. Oladapo Afolayan leaves the pitch after FC St. Pauli’s match against Leipzig. The photo was taken with the Summilux-M 75 mm at a maximum aperture of f/1.4. This lens has not been manufactured for almost 20 years.
The lens was designed by Dr Walter Mandler in 1980 and was therefore not intended for digital camera systems or high-resolution sensors at all. Yet it still works perfectly well. Incidentally, the Summilux-M 75 mm isn’t my oldest lens. I also own a Summicron-M 35 mm from 1963. All the images in the gallery above, taken at night, were captured with this beautiful 35 mm lens with eight elements.
The ability to use older lenses on modern camera bodies is one of the reasons why I enjoy shooting with Leica. The incredible range of high-quality lenses covers a wide variety of applications and image styles. If you’re interested in seeing more pictures with older lenses, have a look at my article about Amsterdam.
With the Leica M11-D, you won’t be distracted from the fun either.
