Name: Leica M9 Digital Rangefinder Camera Body, 18mp with 24x36mm Format Sensor - Black Paint
Brand: Leica
SKU: LCM9B
Price: 6495.00 USD
Availability: Discontinued
Rating: 4.55 (11 reviews)

Leica M9 Digital Rangefinder Camera Body, 18mp with 24x36mm Format Sensor - Black Paint

Leica M9

Leica

Leica 10704 Digital Rangefinder Camera Body, Black

Adorama

Photography

Cameras

Film Cameras

Leica Film Cameras

Leica M9 

16% Off: Leica M9 Digital Rangefinder Camera Body, 18mp with 24x36mm Format Sensor - Black Paint Buy now & save $1255.

This camera makes you work hard to get your picture right, but the results are right where you want them. 
It's manual. Aperture priority is as far as it goes when it comes to automation. Framing, Focus and composition require leg work, eye work and brain work, and that, probably is the essence of this camera. 
And the lenses that come with it... Well, they don't really "come with it". You sill have to buy them, and they come with a hefty price tag as well, but they're a charm: small, well built, great optics even on the widest aperture.

Bad things about this camera? Well, on wider angles than 28mm you'll have to use an external viewfinder. On wider angles than 21mm there's a shift in colors as you come closer to the right and left edges of the frame (the image processor fixes most of it). Anything wider than 18 mm is a no go except for the wide tri-elmar at 16mm. If you like wider angles and still want a Leice, get one of the film models such as the M6 or M7.
ISO performance at 400 or above leaves a lot to be desired. This is not a low-light camera. Hopefully future digital Ms will be equipped with sensors offering better ISO performance without sacrifice in color quality.

Expensive but enjoyable

This camera brings you back to step one , operating a mechanical camera. You find yourself concentrating , framing , selecting exposure adjustments , & shooting slower. 
I love what owning this Leica kit has renewed my lifelong passion in photography..
Btw, you can shoot this camera in the middle of main & 1st street ( any town USA) & nobody could care less , try doing that with your dslr &  a 70-200 attached .

On a daily basis I shoot Nikon D3s ( a brilliant camera) a true work camera FYI.

Best camera ever !

I use for weddings and travel photography.

Excellent

I use the M9 mainly for landscape photography. The quality is unsurpassed. Unfortunately, the extreme quality also comes at a extreme price..

AMAZING!

A couple of weeks ago I got a new Leica M9. All excited, I put in the best SD card on the market, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB. It took only a few hours of taking pictures before the card crashed and the camera become unresponsive until I removed the card. I wasn't worried at the beginning. I was in love.

A few days after, I had a high profile portrait photo shoot for an important client. Of course I took the M9 and my beloved Leica 90mm with me, together with a new SanDisk SD card, not before installing the newest firmware update. It was a very long photo shoot with heavy production, a tight schedule and sweaty assistants. It was just before that end of the photo shoot that the other new SanDisk SD card Extreme crashed inside the M9, making the camera dead and the card unreadable in any device. With all the embarrassment, I had to reshoot everything all over again with my backup equipment.

SanDisk were kind enough to replace the card immediately. "Bad batch" is was I was told. I got new SanDisk extreme pro cards from another batch. The same problem came back after one day. Both cards died again, erasing all of the images I created for my clients while shooting, causing me an enormous loss.

This time, I decided to replace not only the kind of cards but the camera itself and to get another M9.

I opened the new M9 Box, took the camera out, charged the battery, put a SanDisk Ultra card this time and went out to check the new one. The first issue I noticed was how slow the camera was writing to the card, but I was ready to live with that for the reliability. And by slow, I mean ridiculously slow. Much slower then the M8.

Today, 5 days later, the camera started to behave very strangely with. I could see the pictures that I had just shot on the screen but then after few moments it disappeared from the card. Occasionally the camera got stuck stating "writing" indefinitely. I waited up to 20-30 minutes after shooting just one frame before removing the battery to fix it. Other times it said "no sd card". The card was formatted in the camera minutes before used.

When I got back and downloaded the files, most of them were "written" but as 0 KByte files. Tried both DNG and Jpeg.

After too long, as I approached Popular photography magazine Leica admitted that the M9/M9P suffers from malfunction causing files deleting and memory card corruption. Leica still selling the cameras while knowing about this malfunction

More details available on my Blog

Don't get this camera

Coming from a long line of canons including a 1Ds MkIII, this camera is by far the best camera I've ever owned, in resolution and IQ terms it is equal or better (in some cases) but, it's lite enough to carry all day including backpacking,it's discreet so that it does not scare people when you point it at them and it does not draw attention as an expensive "PRO" DSLR does.  I was worried about the rangefinder learning curve, but what I really found in the process was that I was thinking more about my pictures and that turned out as better results.

Best camera I've owned

The Camera is an M. If you like or love using Leica M, you will enjoy this camera, if not, nothing has greatly changed. It took years but I finally got back to the M system with full frame digital.

M9,. . . Love it. .

i mostly shoot with AWB or if i am out -cloudy or shade. i decide the shutter speed and than   i usually play with the aperture until the arrow is on the left side of the circle. I also use the Kelvin . Pics are as sharp as can be.  I love the 35 lux and the 50 cron.

I've used the Leica M9 professionally since September 11, 2009 and it's the real deal. It's the digital M4 or M6 with the same reliability and simplicity and great lenses.It does what pro dSLR does, within the range of 15-135 mm, and it does it silent and compact. Especially when traveling with airplanes these days, a small Leica M9 with a few lenses is easy to work with (instead of the big Pelicase with the dSLR)I've written and blogged a lot about using this camera professionally in my article here:[@]

The real camera

[...]Love the M9 with Summilux 50 and Summicron 35. Fantastic image quality. I don't miss my Olympus 520 nor my EP-1. I still have the Lumix GF1 as a back-up, but the M9 is clearly superior to anything I have even owned. The body is not too big, but not small either - I will likely buy a handgrip. [...]

Love it

Great little travel camera. Gives images almost as good as dslr and even Hasselbald H3D 31. Very light weight and ability to use all great Leica lenses with full format coverage. Tack sharp images even with large prints.