The Leica CL is widely celebrated as one of Leitz’s best rangefinder designs.
Produced with the help of Minolta – which sold its own version of the camera as the Minolta CL – the camera was released in 1973 as a smaller cousin to the Leitz’s prestigious range of M-mount cameras.
The CL is an M-mount rangefinder, just much smaller than the celebrated likes of the M3 and M6 but much smaller in size. It was often paired with the 40mm f/2 Summicron-C lens, for which framelines were always present in the viewfinder. It also had framing for 50mm and 90mm lenses
Much favoured by street shooters, the CL remains a more affordable M-mount option some 50 years after it was first released.
Leitz ended up making more than 65,000 CLs and Minolta another 20,000 of their version. But Photo Arsenal Worldwide, a camera store based in Austria, has a Leica CL currently for sale which is very rare indeed – possibly the only example ever made.
The camera, currently available on their site and their eBay store, is a “snapshot” version of the camera, based around a wide-angle 28mm Rokkor-M lens made by Minolta.
The camera lacks the built-in viewfinder of the Leica CL and Minolta CLE and instead has an attachment for a 28mm viewfinder.
Boris Jamchtchik, who runs the store, told Kosmo Foto he believes it is the only example of the camera to have been made.
He said: “The Leica factory sold many items from the Leitz Museum to a Thai collector named Surat Osathanugrah in 2008. Before he passed away, he sold many items from his collection to other collectors. In this case, it was sold to a collector in the EU.
“The camera works like all Leica CL models, but it does not have a viewfinder and rangefinder. It requires manual focus when using the wide-angle lens to take a picture,” Jamchtchik added.
He said the camera – which is listed on eBay for €60,000 (£51,400) – is in fully working condition and has been tested with film.
Jamchtchik said he has never seen another example of the camera: “It is likely that only one prototype was made.”
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.
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Interesting article and a fantastic looking camera/lens combo, but just a little bit more than I would like to spend!
I’m much happier with my 1981 Minolta CLE, with its 28, 40, and 90mm framelines and lenses.