The Leica Q3 43

As you know the Leica "Q" series is a sequence of fixed-lens 24x36mm-sensor compact cameras that punch above their weight; they get more attention, love, and customer satisfaction from photographers than their sales numbers and spec sheets would predict. Most if not all (sorry, not going to go research it) have had 28mm lenses, because that's the most popular focal length for a prime lens in Japan.

What's normal?
Another longtime custom in normal lenses is to equate "normal" to the diagonal of the format, which for 24x36mm is ~42mm. Normals around this focal length are treasured by those peculiar people such as moi who love normal normals. Well, now Leica has introduced a desirable variant of the current Q3 that will have a 43mm lens. The only other 43mm lens I can personally remember is one of the Pentax Limiteds (which were never limited, but let's move on), the Pentax HD Pentax-FA 43mm ƒ/1.9 Limited. It's a very sharp lens, at least to my eye*.

A "normal lens," by the way, is one with a neutral angle of view, neither telephoto nor wide angle. Oskar Barnack's prototype Ur-Leica had a 40mm lens. This was proved by Malcolm Taylor when he was entrusted by Wetzlar to service the ultra-valuable Ur-Leica. (That name itself is a bit of a back-formation, since the word "Leica" wasn't used by Leitz until 1925 or so.) But early Leicas thereafter had 50mm lenses, which some people in those early days considered relatively wide. 55mm and 58mm normals persisted through the 1960s. But let's move on.

Price: in keeping with Leica's service to photographers, you will not be forced to pay as little for the Q3 43 as you would for a common garden variety Q3: you get to pay $600 more. Although not a large premium, the little dab of added exclusivity is much appreciated and Leica is to be commended for offering this courtesy.

It has gray leatherette making it look perfect. It is just about a perfect camera**; the lens speed is ƒ/2 (perfect); the size and weight are perfect; the focal length is perfect; the Leica brand is perfect; we could go on. This is not tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic—we are perfectly sincere.

Cameras you can not-get
A little more background. A "fixed-lens camera" means a camera with one lens permanently attached to it, whether the lens is a zoom or a prime and regardless of whether conversion lenses are available for it. "Fixed-lens" or -lensed is the opposite of "interchangeable lens" or -lensed. An example of a conversion lens is this tele adapter for the upcoming Fuji X100VI that will be not-available soon (the Fuji X100 series keeps being advanced but is never actually available for purchase. For instance you can not-get the Fuji X100V right now. You used to be able to get a Fuji X100[x], but now you can only not-get them, making them that much more desirable.)

Ansel Adams's onetime assistant Ted Orland is the co-author of the book Art & Fear which everyone should not only get but read. His work is represented by the Ansel Adams Gallery, and he is a man with a sense of humor. I love his "Half Car," a twist on Half Dome. Ted sold a poster starting in 1981 called "Photographic Truths," one of which hangs in my downstairs powder room. One of the truths listed was: "Owning more than one lens assures that you will always have the wrong lens on the camera for any given picture." True dat. Owning a camera with just one lens, if the lens is a prime (a semi-incorrect term meaning a single-focal-length lens), will gradually teach you to "crop" the world in your mind's eye just like your camera frames it with its viewfinder. This is a nice effect, and an aid to visualizing which, I have long asserted, helps some people take better and more fluent pictures; YMMV.

Primes
Time was when lots of advanced kinds of cameras took single-focal-length prime lenses. For example, most medium-format film cameras either had no zooms available for them or had just one extremely impractical, gigantic, and expensive zoom as proof of concept. Leica M rangefinders, due to the type of viewfinders used, took only one prime at a time. The break-out-of-the-mold proof of zoom-concept in that case was a goofy lens called a Tri-Elmar that allowed you to switch back and forth on a dial between any of three single focal lengths; the expense, size, and slow speed of the Tri-Elmar of course made it worse than any of the three single focal-length lenses it replaced, thus making its owners more passionate about it and more committed to defending its virtues; everyone's interest was thus served and all were happy. View cameras that used sheet film of 4x5 inches in size and up, of course, used interchangeable single prime lenses-in-shutter as long as they fit the camera's lensboards. The proof of no-we-don't-have-to in their case were called convertible lenses, which allowed you to screw different front or back cells onto the shutter that changed the focal length, happily making them much more difficult and fiddly to use than simply changing out one lens for another like a sensible person. Most people never bought medium-format zooms or Tri-Elmars, but some, including Ansel, did own convertible VC lenses.

But for the most part, classic Leica rangefinders, film medium format cameras, and view cameras all used prime lenses. This was why all photographers were better in the film era! It actually had nothing to do with film. You too can be just as good by using primes exclusively or a fixed primes in particular; the Q3 43 will make you a better photographer and I guarantee that. See if it isn't true. Okay, a little tongue-in-cheek here.

And a great many amateur cameras, from 1930s folders to 1970s compact rangefinders and lots else, had fixed prime lenses.

None of the foregoing means that Q3 owners will not immediately begin searching obsessively for conversion add-ons to change the focal length of their fixed-focal-length fixed lenses, because the primate brain makes us want whatever we have not got.

Speaking of which, if you wish for a Monochrom version of the Q3 43, then one will never come out. If you don't care, then it will be available promptly.

Mike

*I don't "test," I just look. Phil Davis used to dismissively call me an "eyeballer." I plead guilty. Phil, R.I.P, a good friend and the author of the scientifically formidable Beyond the Zone System, was a measurer, par excellence.

**One way of looking at camera history is that all innovative cameras are attempts to make the perfect camera. No matter where the starting point is, everybody always seems to have ideas about how they'd make any camera better.

P.S. This started out as an "Around the Web on a Thursday" but I got carried away!

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Tom Stermitz]

For me "normal" is the One-Lens I've become accustomed to, namely the 35mm perspective. Yes, f/2.0 is preferable.

I trusted and followed your One Lens One Year advice starting a few years ago, and I happily shoot with 35mm pretty much all the time. The benefit of this practice snuck up on me unsuspected. When I got my Leica M4 with 50mm CLA'd, I found I was always placing myself in the wrong position to make the shot. Now I have to go pay the Leica tax for a 35mm Summicron, or more realistically a Voightlander.

[Robert Roaldi]

I may have mentioned this before but I used to own an Olympus Stylus Epic that had a fixed 35/2.8 lens. At that time I thought that they should have made a version with a 50 mm lens, keeping the tiny body. Those two cameras might have taken up less room in a camera bag than an SLR with two lenses. The Epic did actually fit in a shirt pocket.

Years later I thought that someone should do this in digital, and Ricoh did just that with their GRs, although the focal lengths are slightly different. Now I see that Leica is following suit. Soon it will be Fuji's turn.

But you know, I could buy two Olympus PL7s along with the Panasonic 14 and 20 mm pancakes and be playing the same game.

[Yonatan Katznelson]

The 43 f/1.9 ltd is my favorite lens. Unfortunately, I use Fuji cameras now, so...

[Josh Hawkins]

I refuse to get one till I can get a Q3 43 monochrome without the pointless screen in the back for an extra $1000. (I actually would really like that. Sadly being a photographer means I’ll never have any version of it.)

[Johan Grahn]

A perfect example of what you don't not-get at this blog!
Mike at his best.

[Gary]

Loved the "review." If you give me $7,000 I'l test the camera for you.

[Allan Graham]

Ah, yes! My Olympus 35 RD of treasured memory achieved practical perfection in that vein.

[Andrew Lamb]

A quick mention of the Olympus 35 SP, which had a lovely, seven-element, 42mm (or 43mm?) f1.7. Terrific camera with a nice quiet shutter.

The Q3 43 looks lovely.

[Ilkka]

Excellent write up. Thank you. Made my day.

[David Brown]

Enjoyed the post! One of your best of late IMHO. In the old days, I was a 50/55mm guy (depended on the camera). Then I went through a 28mm phase. Using the iPhone a lot lately, and its “main” lens is a 26mme. There’s also the ridiculous ultra-wide 13mme. The “telephoto” on my aging 12 Pro is a 52mme. I use it more than the others, and when I have to upgrade, that lens is now a 120! No 50 except by cropping. It’s enough to make one go back to real cameras! Gotta get that 25mm prime for the Lumix …

[MikeR]

A little more formal than eyeballer is the TLAR system: That Looks About Right.

[Stan B.]

How do those last two sentences relate to quantum entanglement?

[Ray Hunter]

I would love to own one of these but couldn't possibly buy one covered in grey leatherette. When the "safari" version, clad in diamond-encrusted sharkskin is available, then maybe I could be seen holding one. The diamonds will assist with gripping the camera and will only add $10K to the price (they will be diamonds of modest size/weight).

[Dave Fultz]

A spectacular essay, Mike.

Dave

[hugh crawford]

Seemingly as an illustration of tha availability of what you want being inversely proportional to how badly you want it...

Much to my surprise, a box containing a Fuji X100VI appeared in my driveway the day before yesterday. Much like peacocks and feral cats do around here. I had pre-ordered it before it started shipping way back in March.

Seems like a nice camera if I can only figure out how it works. It comes without a manual but there is a 344-page pdf of a manual online.

The camera has over 20 buttons knobs and switches, but the (missing) manual doesn't have a list of what most of them do because most of them do about 5 completely different things depending on context. In the software user interface biz, we would say that it was very "modal" and if it was software we would make the color of the screen change or put up a picture to indicate what you were doing, or maybe have a nested menu. The camera violates so many rules of design with buttons that twist, knobs that you push with no design language. It's like the hardware designers put a bunch of switches and multifunction knob/dial/button/joystick things on the camera and told the software people to figure out what they did. But the software people gave up and let, make really, the user design the camera so you can repurpose most of the controls to do something else, often without explicitly meaning to as a consequence of changing some other setting or mode

Sometimes the ring around the lens changes the cropping like a virtual zoom, sometimes it changes the focus, sometimes it changes the film emulation, and there are a couple of other things it can do but I can't look them up because they are "user configurable", documented in random sections of the manual.

I have learned to use hundreds of cameras and this is the first one that wasn't obvious. Deckel-mount lenses are super obvious compared to this.

It seems to be a nice camera but it's like James Bond's DB5, where I feel like I'm going to activate the ejection seat or an oil slick instead or the left turn signal. BB5s are very nice cars otherwise.

Haven't decided if I'm going to keep it or what. the pictures look great, and the high speed flash synch is the main reason I ordered it. and that's still true.

[Dan B.]

It’s certainly interesting to watch how in a declining camera market that Leica is able to keep introducing new, increasingly expensive products that are in such demand that you can’t really get them - Seeing the D-Lux8 introduced early July I thought I’d pick up one for an October European vacation, but, nope, still made of Unobtainium and none to be found anywhere so apparently the $400 increase over the DL7 wasn’t enough of an increase so I bought a used Olympus Pen-F that is essentially the same size & weight with the pancake power zoom (which I hate P-Z’s but such it is the DL8 as well, and they killed the somewhat redeeming step-zoom feature making it worse…)

Still also amazes me that Canon hasn’t done a “premium” compact (digital QL17), Olympus a digital XA-D, someone a Yashica Electro-D, and Nikon a SP-D - oh wait, they tried in a way with a “Coolpix-A”, that bombed). You have to hand it to Leica that they know how to aim properly and execute…

[Rick Neibel]

Don't know if the quote is accurate, but if so: What Ted Orland presumably meant was "Owning more than one lens ENSURES that..."

[J. Paul Thomas]

The mentioning of the 43mm lens reminds me of my first SLR kit. It was a Nikkormat body with a Nikkor 45mm f2.8 GN lens. The “”GN” stood for “Guide Number”. You could set the flash guide number for the film speed on a scale on the lens, and as you focused the aperture setting would change as required. I
I used that setup exxclosively until a business trip to Japan where I purchased a 50mm f1.4 lens for a bit under $100.00. Those were the days.

[Bear.]

I’ve been saving up for a M11 to replace my Q2. But given the Q3 43 has everything I want, including my favourite focal length, I guess I’m through life without ever owning an M rangefinder…. First world problems.

[Kodachromeguy]

A 43 mm lens? Nice. I wish Leica could have designed a shorter pancake-style lens to make the unit thinner.

[Nick Reith]

I particularly like the MACRO capability of the lens, something not mentioned in the article.