Leica: how to pay too much to do less.

Leica: how to pay too much to do less (and feel damn special doing it)

Picture a camera that costs as much as a small German car, that doesn’t autofocus, doesn’t stabilize anything, doesn’t shoot video worth a damn.
A camera that’s so far behind any modern mirrorless in raw specs it looks like a steampunk gadget built to make you suffer.

Now picture hordes of men and women, usually with fat wallets and even fatter egos, clawing to get their hands on these toys as if they contained the Holy Grail of photography.

Welcome to the glorious world of digital Leica.

Inefficiency as a luxury fetish

Leicas aren’t inefficient by accident.
They’re designed that way.
Because if they did what Fujifilm, Sony or Nikon do today, they’d stop being status symbols.
If they were just tools, they’d stop being icons.

Take a Leica M11:

• Autofocus? Nowhere to be found.
• In-body stabilization? Get real.
• Face or animal tracking? Don’t be vulgar.
• Pro video? Haha, good one.

All this for €8,500 body only, not counting the extra €4,000 Summilux lens you’ll need to complete your tortured artist cosplay.

Here’s the naked truth:
A digital Leica does less than a €1,200 entry-level mirrorless.
It shoots slower, misses more often, forgives fewer mistakes.
In any objective context—weddings, sports, fast reportage—it’s a laughably inefficient machine.

So why the hell do they buy it?

Because you don’t buy a Leica with logic.
You buy it with your ego.
With that deep, childish desire to tell the world: “I am not like you.”

The typical Leica client is a sociological marvel.
People who’ll wax poetic about manual focusing, while you browse their Instagram and notice the subject’s eyeball slightly out of focus—the same eye any cheap tracking system would have nailed instantly.

These are the same folks who laugh at tech specs, but somehow never fail to say:

“This is a Summilux 35—you can tell immediately from the bokeh.”

As if the rest of humanity were blind and only they could distinguish a Leica shot from a Sony or Nikon.
Spoiler: no normal person can.

Leica as a tribal signal

Owning a Leica is almost never about results.
It’s a symbolic act.
A tribal signal that says:

• “I can afford to pay triple to do half.”
• “I don’t need AI tracking because I’m a real photographer.”
• “I have time. Time to miss focus. Time to pretend it’s art.”

It’s the same mechanism that makes you buy a Harley Davidson when a BMW would take you further with fewer breakdowns.
Or a Rolex that never keeps time as well as a $30 Casio, but tells everyone you’re in a different class.

A Leica is the platinum card of photography: it doesn’t really add features, it only exists to tell the waiter, the client, your rival:

“I belong to another world. You don’t.”

The toxic myth of the suffering artist

The Leica crowd is often made up of failure fetishists.
They love missing focus, crushed shadows, the risk of ruining an unrepeatable moment.
Because it lets them spin stories.
They can say photography isn’t about tech, but gut, heart, instinct.

Which is true.
Too bad Leica doesn’t give you superpowers.
It just strips away your options.
And wraps you in a heavy romantic myth that sounds like:

“If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it.”

So while you, with a Fuji, Sony or Nikon, nail your kid’s eye in motion, the Leica shooter misses.
Then posts the shot and writes a thousand-word caption on the meaning of blur, life’s fleeting moments, the poetry of missed focus.

Meanwhile, everyone else laughs (though we kind of envy them)

Because it’s true: a Leica doesn’t help you make better pictures.
Does it help you make different pictures?
Not really.
It just helps you feel different, while making the same shot you could have taken with anything else—probably better.

But here’s the little secret we never say out loud.
We sort of envy those bastards.
Because it takes guts to spend that much on just a viewfinder, to give up everything else, and declare to the world:

“I shoot like this. And if it’s bad, it’s because I wanted it that way.”

The verdict

In the end, Leica is a vice.
An expensive cigar that burns too quick and leaves a bitter taste.
An elitist tattoo that doesn’t add muscle, just a drawing on your skin that screams:

“I can.”

Leica buyers don’t buy efficiency.
They buy a ticket to a private club of failed artists, half-baked poets, and status collectors.
They buy permission to screw up—and call every mistake “intentional.”

And you know what the final paradox is?
Maybe we need these bold idiots with their Leicas.
Because they keep alive the romantic legend of photography as a purely human act, even as we, behind our AI tracking and 40 fps, know most of the miracle now happens inside the camera.

Final moral

Leica is inefficient. It’s expensive. It’s irrational.
And that’s exactly why it exists.
To give meaning to your vanity, to your fear of not being special in a world taking billions of perfectly focused photos every day.

If you love Leica, I’m happy for you — I just prefer things that actually focus.