Leica M4-2

Ernst Leitz Canada · Leica M mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film, loaded through the base · 1978

Also known as: Leica M4-2 · Leitz M4-2 · ライカM4-2

Variants & identification

Variant	Mount	Years	Serial ranges	Production
Black chrome	Leica M	1977–1980	—	About 15,000 cameras (Leica Wiki)
Gold	Leica M	1979–1980	—	About 1,000 cameras, in blocks of 500, 500 and 2
Ernst Leitz Canada, first block	Leica M	1977–1977	—	100 cameras dated 7 December 1977

The gold cameras have a reason: they are the Oskar Barnack centenary edition, 1,000 pieces marking a hundred years since Barnack's birth in 1879, each carrying a special number of the form 100-xxxx on the top plate and sold as a set with a gold-plated Summilux-M 1.4/50mm. Leitz Photographica Auction 47, lot 181, sold an unused set for €5,400 including buyer's premium.
An olive M4-2 exists and is not in the model lists. Leitz Photographica Auction 45, lot 120, catalogued no. 1530024 of 1980, with a matching olive Summicron 2/50mm, as made for the Tank Division of the Israeli Army — "only a few examples are known to exist; most probably, none of them left the factory". It made €28,800 including buyer's premium against a €40,000–50,000 estimate.
The first batch is identifiable from the outside. Leitz Photographica Auction 45, lot 118, describes no. 1468059 as carrying a red Leitz logo, "Wetzlar, Made in Canada" on the top plate and "Made by Leitz Canada" on the back; it was estimated at €4,500–5,500 and did not sell.
Ryan HK's review lists the Midland cost reductions the specification does not: a printed rather than engraved frame-counter disc, steel gears in place of brass, a plastic covering instead of vulcanite, black chrome instead of black enamel, and a larger Leitz stamp where the M4 carries the Leica script.

How to tell them apart (expand)

No self-timer: the front is plain where an M4 has the delayed-action lever
A motor coupling in the base as standard, which the M4 offered only on 855 special bodies
Made in Canada engraving

Black chrome:

Black chrome finish — the standard and near-universal version

Gold:

Gold plating

Ernst Leitz Canada, first block:

Canadian markings

Gold: The serial list's last gold entry is two cameras at 1932001–1932002, numbered far outside every other M4-2 block.
Ernst Leitz Canada, first block: A precise day rather than a year — the first hundred cameras of the restart.

Serial-range notes

1468001–1468100: The first 100 cameras, dated 7 December 1977, before the model's 1978 introduction.
1468101–1470000: Printed inside the M4-2's table as a 2,000-number block of Leica R3 Olive — an SLR, not an M — with two cameras inside it separately confirmed as M4-2s.
1932001–1932002: Two gold cameras numbered 400,000 above the rest of the model.

Specifications

Format: 24×36mm on 35mm film, loaded through the base
Finder: Combined viewfinder and coupled rangefinder, parallax corrected · 0.72× magnification · 35mm, 50mm, 90mm, 135mm framelines · automatic, selected by the lens · automatic parallax correction
Shutter: focal plane, rubberised cloth · 1s – 1/1000 and B; flash sync at 1/50
Weight: 545 g
Dimensions: 138 × 77 × 36 mm
Country: Canada

Figures we worked out rather than found: About 16,000 cameras in three years, against 59,217 M4s in eight · The two outlying gold cameras account for the entire 1980–1993 span in the list

Where sources disagree

Production span

1978–1980 (Leica Wiki, production era)
1977–1993, the range printed under its own serial list

Better supported: 1977–1980

The 1993 end date comes from the two stray gold cameras at 1932001–1932002, whose numbers belong to a much later period. One pair of cameras stretches the model's apparent life by thirteen years.

What reviewers say

Ryan HK (blog) — Ryan HK grants every complaint about the Canadian build and still recommends it, concluding that anyone after a price-point full-size Leica M body has found their camera. single source, unconfirmed

History

The M4-2 is a restart. Leitz had discontinued the M4 in 1975 in favour of the M5, the M5 had not sold, and for two years there was no M camera in production at all. What brought it back was Ernst Leitz Canada at Midland, which reintroduced the M4 in 1978 with the self-timer removed, a motor coupling fitted as standard, and the whole camera made in Canada.

It was received badly and its reputation has taken forty years to recover. The complaints were the finish, the rangefinder, and the missing timer — an M4 that had lost something and gained a feature most photographers did not want. What it actually did was keep the M system alive through the years when the alternative was nothing at all, and everything since, the M4-P, M6, M7 and MP, descends from this camera rather than from the Wetzlar M4.

About 15,000 were built in black chrome and around 1,000 in gold. The first hundred are dated to a specific day, 7 December 1977, a year before the model’s stated introduction.

Two entries in its serial list are worth reading as a warning about all of them. A 2,000-number block printed inside the M4-2’s table belongs to the Leica R3 Olive — an SLR entirely — and contains two confirmed M4-2s. And the final gold entry is a pair of cameras at 1932001 and 1932002, numbered some four hundred thousand above everything else in the model, which is why the list’s own date range reads 1977 to 1993 for a camera that was built in three years. Two cameras stretch the record by thirteen years.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Leica M4-2 — Rama, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 fr)

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