Leica II (Model D)

Leica II (Model D)

If you shoot a rangefinder today, you have the Leica II (Model D) to thank for the blueprint. Before this camera came along, photographers literally had to guess the distance to their subject and hope for the best. Ernst Leitz fixed this by engineering a precision rangefinder right into the camera body.

Focusing the Leica II is a unique, two-step dance. You look through the first tiny window on the back - the rangefinder - which gives you a zoomed-in 1.5x view. As you turn the lens, two overlapping ghost images of your subject slide together. Once they align perfectly, your focus is locked. Then, you physically shift your eye over to the second window - the viewfinder - to actually frame your shot. This second window is permanently set to match the field of view of a standard 50mm lens.

Beyond the viewfinder, the Leica II made the M39 LTM (Leica Thread Mount) a universal standard. Starting with this model, the distance from the lens mount to the film (the flange distance) was strictly locked at exactly 28.8mm. Suddenly, you could buy a 35mm, 50mm, and 135mm lens and just screw them onto the body, knowing they would work perfectly right out of the box. Under the hood, it still relied on Oskar Barnack's legendary mechanical cloth shutter, firing reliably at speeds from 1/20s up to 1/500s.

History

When it hit the market in 1932, the Leica II was an absolute sensation that cemented Leica as the undisputed king of 35mm photography.

The Interchangeable Revolution (1932) While the earlier Leica I (Model C) from 1930 technically had a screw mount, those early lenses and bodies were essentially "married" to each other at the factory. The Leica II finally broke that bond. Photojournalists could now carry one compact body and a handful of lenses in their coat pockets, making them incredibly fast and versatile in the field.

The Ultimate Factory Upgrade Leica's customer service back then was wild by today's standards. If you owned an older, fixed-lens Leica I, you could simply mail it back to the factory in Wetzlar. For a fee, technicians would remove the fixed lens, thread on the new LTM mount, and physically bolt the new rangefinder housing right onto your old camera. Because of this, a lot of the "Leica II" cameras floating around the used market today actually started their lives as older models!

Legacy Leica built the Model D in massive numbers all the way into the late 1940s. That classic twin-window design stuck around as the industry standard until Leica finally combined the rangefinder and viewfinder into a single window with the M3 in 1954. Today, it stands as the true grandfather of the modern interchangeable-lens rangefinder system [1].

Sources

• [1] CameraQuest. Leica Screw Mount Camera Guide. https://www.cameraquest.com
• [2] Ken Rockwell. Leica History and Timeline. https://www.kenrockwell.com
• [3] Macfilos. The Barnack Leicas: A user's guide to the LTM cameras. https://www.macfilos.com
• [4] Leica Wiki. Leica II (Model D). https://wiki.l-camera-forum.com
• [5] 35mmc. Shooting a 1932 Leica II (Model D). https://www.35mmc.com