Leica M3 Variations, 1954 to 1966
They started out with near perfection and then made improvements!
The Leica M3 made its official debut at the Photokina exposition in April 1954, garnering instant acclaim. It redefined the interchangeable lens rangefinder 35 and created a worldwide sensation, the echoes of which still reverberate today, 70 years later! The first rangefinder camera to combine a fixed bayonet lens mount and a combined, high magnification (0.91x) range/viewfinder with projected parallax-compensating, auto-indexing field frame lines covering multiple focal lengths, the M3 and its analog and digital successors have seldom been equaled, and never surpassed by any other camera manufacturer. Both the Konica Hexar RF (1999) and the Zeiss Ikon ZM (2005-2012) did incorporate projected auto-indexing, parallax compensating field frame lines, but both are long out of production, and neither of these worthy cameras had a rangefinder patch as precisely defined as a Leica M. When the M3 finally ceased production officially in 1966, a dozen years after its introduction, it is estimated that 233,209 M3’s had been produced (including 272 24x27mm-format M3-based models for the German Post Office), making it the most successful Leica M ever by a considerable margin.
To their credit, the wizards of E. Leitz Wetzlar didn’t simply bask in the glory of their monumental achievement in designing and producing the original Leica M3, (which was covertly in production by late 1953), they were constantly devising ways to improve it. For starters, early production examples of the M3 already sported self -zeroing frame counters, more elegantly contoured “frames” around the front rangefinder and viewfinder windows, and clockwise-turning rewind knobs, all features absent on the ultra-rare (around 65 made in total) Null-Series M3 pre-production test prototypes received by “friends of Leica and important users.”
