Leica M10 – Looking Back to Move Forward
Contemporary sensor technology has facilitated a digital M that looks exceedingly like its analogue predecessors: lean and slender, the new M10 represents an M entirely geared towards digital rangefinder photography. To achieve this, a number of technical challenges had to be mastered.
Whenever Leica M customers were asked what they would like to see in a new model, a slimmer body was among the most frequently cited requests. From the M8 through to the M (Typ 240) and its sister models, digital M cameras have always been a few millimetres deeper than their analogue predecessors. And so the new M10 fulfils an ardent wish among M photographers, with dimensions that once again equal those of an analogue M. The previous discrepancies in size were borne out of technological limitations: in the M system the flange focal depth (the distance between mounting flange and image plane) is predetermined – and consequently, so is the position of the sensor. The latter requires a certain amount of space, as do the circuit boards and the display. An analogue M, by contrast, only has to accommodate the comparatively thin film, a pressure plate and the rear panel.
