Some Time With The Leica CL

As an obvious and long standing Leica aficionado, I must admit that I fell for the promise of the Leica CL:

“Dream Big. Pack Small.”

With its iconic design, its mechanical precision and compact construction made in Germany, it felt like the perfect candidate as an everyday camera and light-weight companion. It offered fancy new features such as WiFi, an outstanding EVF, 24 megapixels, the Maestro II processor and all kinds of bells and whistles. It even supported the Leica Photos iOS companion app. With Leica’s latest L-Mount bayonet it also allowed access to newer (and also considerably more affordable) Leica lenses as well as to nearly all lenses ever made by Leica with adapters to M- or R-mount. I was intrigued. And so I got the Leica CL Vario Kit with an Vario-Elmar-TL 18–56mm f/3.5–5.6 ASPH lens.

Compact Companion

The Leica CL is very compact indeed and this felt amazing. The build quality was outstanding, the EVF worked fine (despite my hesitance to ever embrace an electronic viewfinder) and everything turned out as one would expect. The simplicity of the interface made the camera operation very enjoyable and I fully…