Leica CL with Wetzlar Sumicron-C 40mm f/2 Lens

This Leica CL is in near Mint condition. It has been taken care of very well and there are no problems with functionality. Everything works as it should and anybody would be lucky to have a piece of history in their collection.

The Leica CL is a 35mm compact rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses in the Leica M-mount. It was developed in collaboration with Minolta who manufactured it. It first appeared in April 1973 and was released in the Japanese market in November 1973 as the Leitz Minolta CL. Both the Leica CL and Leitz Minolta CL were manufactured in a new Minolta factory in Osaka.

The Leica CL has a vertical-running focal plane shutter, with cloth curtains, giving ½ to 1/1000 speeds. There are a through-the-lens CdS exposure meter mounted on a pivoting arm just in front of the shutter, like the Leica M5. The exposure is manual and the shutter is mechanical. The shutter speeds are visible in the finder. The finder's frame lines are for a 40mm, 50mm, or 90mm lens. The 40mm and 50mm frame lines are always present and the 90mm frame line is automatically selected upon mounting of the appropriate lens.

Today the CL is a superbly compact and quite cheap camera on which to mount M-mount lenses, but it does not have a rangefinder as precise as that of any Leica M body. The rangefinder base of the CL is 31.5 mm and the viewfinder magnification is 0.60, leading to a small effective rangefinder base of 18.9 mm. This is too short for accurate focusing with lenses longer than 90mm and fast lenses used at full aperture. Some users report the camera is rather fragile, especially the rangefinder alignment and meter mechanism.