Leica’s decision to bring back its classic M6 rangefinder on 2022 looks like it was a good one: the German camera maker ended up selling 10 times as many film cameras in 2023 than it did in 2015.
Leica’s Dr Andreas Kaufmann gave an interview to the French website Phototrend in September which underlined how the recent uplift in film sales had affected Leica’s analogue film camera business.
According to Kaufmann, Leica ended up selling nearly 5,000 film rangefinders (Leica M6 and MP models) compared to the 500 they sold in 2015.
The new version of the classic Leica M6 was announced in October 2022. The original M6 had been launched in 1984 and lasted nearly 20 years until 2003, when it was superseded by the M7 launched a year earlier.
What’s more, in comparison Leica sold around 11,000 digital M-mount bodies; film cameras accounted for 30% of their rangefinder camera sales.
“In our factories, you can still see old machines dedicated to film cameras in operation. But in 2015, we thought about throwing everything away because we were only producing 500 film cameras per year. But there has been a nice rebound since then and, in 2023, we will produce nearly 5,000 M6 and MP analogue devices.”
He added: “We really appreciate the return of analogue. And we will do more. The key elements are laboratory development and management. This is the trickiest part. And we are looking into the matter.”
The German camera maker marks the 70th anniversary of the M mount this year (it was launched with the release of the M3 in 1954). There has been speculation – notably on websites such as Leica Rumors and Digital Camera World – that the anniversary may see the release of another film camera.
In March last year, Leica Rumors said: “Thanks to the success of their line of legacy lenses and the newly released Leica M6, the company is now considering new designs based on pre-M cameras but with M-mounts.”
Leica has not yet teased any news of a follow-up film model, however.
The strong sales for Leica’s revived film camera range may be good news for the Pentax brand, as Christopher J Feola wrote this week on Pentax Forums.
Kosmo Foto reported earlier this week, Ricoh Imaging (which owns the Pentax brand) has apparently shown a prototype of a long-rumoured 35mm film compact camera which the company has been working on.
As Feola notes, Pentax has followed Leica’s lead in the past with its black-and-white-only Monochrome K-3 III digital SLR, which followed the release of Leica’s M11 Monochrom digital rangefinder.
“With Leica M6 sales continuing to boom, look for The Pentax Film Project to ship compact 35mm film cameras in 2024 for much less than a quarter of the price of the $5,695 Leica M6,” he wrote.
“And if those sell as expected, look for Pentax to join Leica as the only companies offering a single interchangeable lens system that can be used on digital colour, digital monochrome and 35mm film bodies.”
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Fascinating…. but I prefer my digital Leicas because it’s easier to edit images. Having said that …. there is a quality with film that is indefinable
What would be really interesting would be to know the number of bodies that Leica sell every year for the past few decades. Just out of curiosity I guess – but I reckon that with the advent of autofocus around the mid 1980s, Leica probably took a very serious decline for the following 20+ years. Even before AF, I wonder how many Leicas were being sold every year. Because I feel like now there’s a kind of new-found appreciation for this kind of classic quality right across the camera market, whereas back in the 80s, 90s and 00s, especially, I feel like people were looking forward, to automatic technologies, and didn’t have any nostalgia at that time for the mechanical precision of the past.
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