An Analog Leica M6 Photographer Tries a Digital Leica M9

by Johnny Martyr

I’m pretty committed to film photography.

Not because I think film photography is superior to digital photography – on a technical level, it’s just not. And on an artistic level, there is no such thing as “superior,” there’s only how things feel and how they make you think.

I am not committed to film because I’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand how digital photography works. I have to understand it in order to scan, edit and distribute my film photography digitally. (Feel free to argue in the comments about “the point” of shooting film if only to digitize it.)

It’s also not a cost thing. For as much as I spend on film and chemistry, I could buy a few Leica VLUXs in a normal year or an SL2 on a busy one.

But I don’t want to.

I just prefer working with film and film cameras and I appreciate the character of the images.

Admittedly, I also enjoy being a little contrarian and not following the crowd. I don’t believe that all change and technological innovation is necessarily for the better. And I think it provides some balance in the world for a few hold-outs like me to exist.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Have you ever seen the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy? It’s about a South African tribe who discover a glass Coca-Cola bottle that was dropped from a passing airplane. Tribespeople find ingenious uses for the Coke bottle but its presence introduces conflict and unhappiness that did not exist previously.

That’s kind of what I envisioned happening when a colleague bequeathed his digital camera to me, a Leica M9.

I sometimes use my wife’s Nikon D810 to digitize my film and I think I still have a D200 in the cupboard. The M9 is different though because I can use a wider age range of lenses on it and the M9 handles very similarly to my 35mm film M6 TTL cameras. Thus making it much more appealing to someone whose partial problem with most modern cameras is that they look as though someone sneezed the controls across their surfaces, emphasizing automation over muscle memory and forethought.

Cautiously, I began exploring the estranged M9 with a 1940’s 5cm 1.5 Leitz Summarit mounted. I enjoyed the familiarity of this digital camera immediately, for all the same reasons that I enjoy using my M6s.

Leica M6 vs. Leica M9

The Leica M9 debuted in 2009 and was the eccentric German camera manufacturer’s first full frame digital camera. Today, though thoroughly outdated, the M9 remains beloved for its unique Kodak CCD sensor and distinctly non-CMOS colors and buffering noise that is reminiscent of the film transport of a Polaroid SX-70.

Around the time when the M9 was introduced, I was moving from my Nikon 35mm SLR’s and cheap fixed lens rangefinders to my first Leica; a used M6 TTL 0.85 that was about ten years old at the time. Unbeknownst to one another, I was burning film in this time period while my future colleague was clicking away on his brand new M9.

Then, circa 2014 Leica conceded that that magic M9 sensor was a major point of failure because of pre-mature corrosion that is also tied to processor failure. The very costly Leica M9 became a schadenfreude icon for “NikCanon photographers” who view Leica as an example of the lunacy of wealth.

All the while, my M6 functioned as well as it did new and continues to, hundreds of rolls of film and shutter actuations later.

An Analog Leica M6 Photographer Tries a Digital Leica M9

When I fired up the M9, it didn’t take but a few snapshots to see that it suffered not only from a corroded sensor. The corrosion is plain to see in the form of little “amoebas” on the sensor surface with the M9 in Bulb mode. But additionally, the processor was also bad and underexposed the right half of every frame by varying degrees. Sometimes by just a stop, sometimes by about four. And with a purple sheen.

The M9 probably sat in a state of disuse for the past few years while its fate was decided by relatives of my friend. This span of time fell just outside of Leica’s generous repair program window that ended in 2020. Today’s options are for me to trade in the M9 to Leica for up to $2k off an $8k M11 or pay a third party $2.5k to replace the full sensor stack.

Spending this money on the equivalent of a glass Coca-Cola bottle tossed from a passing airplane was a formidable proposition.

I decided to find some creative ways to work with the defective M9’s organic qualities and just have fun with the gift.

I shot in b&w mode both to alleviate the purple right half of each frame but also because I shoot film in b&w primarily anyway and it’s just how I see the world.

Initially I tried to hide the line through the center of the frame with my subject matter and composition. But then I worked the split frame into my images.

I admire abstract photography but often don’t feel able to experiment with film, perhaps due to the criticality with which I tend to treat each frame. So I started to take the M9 and my seemingly endless number of shots down that path.

I love night photography and the effects of dragging the shutter. I began to combine the corrosion artifacts and split frame into increasingly abstract scenes.

I was really having fun with this old, broken digital Leica and felt like I was beginning to hit my stride with this unlikely companion.

The Final Death of the Leica M9?

But the processor issue worsened over the week that I carried the M9 with me. I could no longer find any combinations of settings that did what I wanted them to do. Until suddenly the only image that the M9 would put out was this single, high contrast binary graphic that I like to think was its basic computer 1’s and 0’s nature expressing itself before its final death.

I had fun with the M9, as much because it was broken as it ticked other boxes for what I look for in a camera. Would I mail it out for surgery to restore it to perfect function? I was really tempted to do this and keep it as a remembrance of my friend who passed away and left it to me. It could come in handy to test lenses and shoot casual photos with.

Alternatively, was it worth spending thousands on a camera that I didn’t previously want? Apparently, the service isn’t fully guaranteed to work anyway. If it did, how would spending that money and having a digital camera affect how much film I shoot this year? How would spending the money affect my photography budget if the repair, for some reason, didn’t work out? These are all potential conflicts and problems that I did not have before the M9 dropped into my life.

In The Gods Must Be Crazy, the main character chooses to go on a mission to take the nefarious Coca-Cola bottle to the edge of the known world and throw it off.

Like the Coke bottle from the Gods, the M9 was inspiring for a short while before its presence disrupted my previously simple existence.

Like the Coke bottle, I decided to send the M9 back to the modern world from whence it came, without any further investment into it.

So I listed the Leica M9 on eBay and priced it pretty low since it was a gift. I figured it was still cheap enough that it would be worth it for someone else to have its sensor and processor replaced or trade it back into Leica for a discount.

I used the proceeds to buy another film camera – a Zeiss Super Ikonta B, a medium format rangefinder from the 1950’s that will likely outlast the M9 as well and also serve as a remembrance of my colleague without disruption. I think he would approve. What about you? Are the gods crazy or just me?

Thanks for reading, happy shooting!

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