The Leica M3 is one of the most fabled cameras in the film community. It was the first camera I bought once I started shooting film again in the summer of 2018. I bought both the body and lens I have on eBay for pretty cheap, but ended up sending them off to be fully serviced so they would be in good working order.

A little over a year and a half later, I finally have the camera back, and have put four rolls of film through it so far. I’ll go over some of the generic details of the camera and lens and a little bit about my specific ones.

The Basics

The Leica M3 was manufactured from 1954, all the way to 1966. There were two different variations, a Double Stroke (DS) and a Single Stroke (SS). All that means is you either need to crank the film advance once or twice to get to the next frame of film. My version (serial number 854 256) is one of the later DS variations. They started producing the SS versions around the serial number 915xxx. Looking it up, my specific M3 was built in 1957, so is about 63 years old!

I’m not sure when or by who, but some dingle dick decided to carve another serial number into the back of the M3, below the film advance, Y932534. Probably why I got it so much cheaper than they usually sell for.

The Leica Elmarit 90mm f/2.8 was made from 1959 to 1974. It’s not great optically wide open at f/2.8, but gets better and better as you stop it down to f/5.6 or f/8. According to my serial number (1879958), my particular lens was made in 1961. It’s in pretty great condition for it’s age, and was definitely taken care of much better than my M3.

All of the following images were shot with Ilford HP5+, developed at home with Ilford HC-110 (dilution B) and scanned with an Epson V750.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed using this set up so far, but I’m not really sure it’s the camera for me in the long run. It’s an absolute marvel of German engineering so very beautiful thing to look at, but in day to day use, it’s not very practical for my needs and how I shoot. I’ll take it on some more hikes in the coming months with some color film and really try and put it through its paces. Fully manual cameras really do shine when you have static objects to shoot.

We’ll see if I can get some more shots I’m proud of down the road, and hopefully some portraits that aren’t of Miah. I’ll end this mini review with a shot I somehow got of Miah running towards me with one of her toys.

If you’re looking at a bunch of different film cameras to purchase, I also have reviews of the Canon Sure Shot/Autoboy here and the Olympus XA2 here. They are vastly different cameras than the Leica M3 but at the end of the day, they serve the purpose of capturing moments on film.