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Leica minilux

Leica · Fixed lens · 24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back · 1995

Also known as: Leica Minilux · Leica minilux 18006 · ライカ ミニルックス

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
minilux, titanium (order no. 18 006) 35mm compact 1995 2066001–2166000
2435801–2455800 		No production figure published. The Leica Wiki's serial table assigns 100,000 numbers to the Minilux in 1995 (2066001–2166000) and 20,000 more in a block it dates "1998?" with its own question mark, giving 120,000 assigned numbers for 1995–2002 — numbers allocated, not cameras built, and the later block is contested (see `disputed`)
minilux, black (order no. 18 009) 35mm compact — — No figure published
minilux with databack (order nos. 18 010, 18 069) 35mm compact — — No figure published
minilux DB exclusive (snake leather) 35mm compact 2002 — A limited series; no quantity published
minilux Tintin 35mm compact 1997 — No quantity published in any source consulted
  1. The lowercase is Leica's own: the camera was sold as the Leica minilux, never Minilux, and the styling runs through the whole compact line — mini, minilux, minilux zoom, then the CM. Dealer copy capitalises it constantly, which is why the capitalised form is carried as an alias for search and not as the name.
  2. 120,000 assigned serial numbers for 1995–2002 is the closest thing to a production figure this camera has, and it is not one. It counts numbers Leica allocated, it is contradicted in part by a known zoom body inside the second block, and it stops in 2002 while both the Leica Wiki and Casual Photophile run production to 2006. Leica has published no total.
  3. Erwin Puts rates the Summarit's overall character as close to that of the 35mm f/2 Summicron ASPH, suspects it is the best of its kind on current knowledge, and says outright that it would deserve to be fitted to an M body. His one substantial complaint is two stops of vignetting wide open. That verdict is the reason the lens outlives the camera.
  4. Which it does, literally. Because the E02 failure kills bodies that are otherwise sound, a trade has grown up in stripping the Summarit out and remounting it for Leica M. MGR Production announced a conversion adapter in January 2016 — anodised aluminium and brass, rangefinder-coupled, focusing 0.7 m to infinity with a built-in hood — and other conversions use MS-Optics helicoids. Dealers now list converted lenses as their own product. It is the only camera in this section whose lens has a second-hand market independent of the body.
  5. Leica sold the camera on the lens and reviewers bought the argument, but the market runs on the fault. The flex cable that drives the aperture cracks with age and the camera reports E02 and stops. Bill Thoo, writing for 35mmc in 2019, found no repairer in Sydney who would take it on and left his as an ornament; the fix exists at roughly €120–165 for a cable replacement, in Ukraine or Portugal or wherever a specialist can be found. Kamerastore's own test copy threw E02 within five frames.
  6. The design credits rest on one uncited table. The Leica Wiki names Klaus-Dieter Schaefer working with Manfred Meinzer and dates the design to 2 June 1995; Casual Photophile says the camera was designed in Germany by Meinzer and Schaefer. No Leica document naming either man has been seen for this entry, and the Leica Wiki gives no source for its own credit, so the two accounts may be one account twice. The names are carried because they are the only ones anyone offers, not because they are documented.
  7. Joachim Giebelhausen wrote a German book on the minilux and minilux zoom — *Leica Minilux and Leica Minilux Zoom, Technik, Tips und Tricks*, Umschau/Braus, 1998, ISBN 3-8295-7202-6. There is no English translation, and this entry has not consulted it. It is the one substantial printed source on the family and would likely settle several of the questions below.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • A remote-release socket on the front of the body — rare enough on a compact that every review consulted here mentions it
  • Titanium body with leather panels; the zoom model that followed dropped the leather entirely
  • Real-image finder at 0.35× covering about 85% of the frame, with markings for the AF field, the close-up range and the panorama adapter
  • Only two lamps beside the finder image — focus and flash — and no shutter speed anywhere except the top LCD
  • E02 on the top LCD: the flexible printed circuit driving the aperture has cracked and the camera is dead
  • The camera is switched on by turning the same dial that sets focus, which is how photographers land on infinity by accident

minilux, titanium (order no. 18 006):

  • Bare titanium shell with leather panels where the hands fall
  • Two coaxial knurled knobs on the top right: the outer sets focus distance, the inner sets the exposure mode and aperture

minilux, black (order no. 18 009):

  • Black over the titanium in place of the bare metal

minilux with databack (order nos. 18 010, 18 069):

  • Deeper back — 42.5 mm rather than 39 mm — carrying the date-imprinting module

minilux DB exclusive (snake leather):

  • Titanium finish with a colour-matched snake-leather covering in place of the usual hide

minilux Tintin:

  • Tintin-themed decoration; otherwise the standard camera

Serial-range notes

2066001–2166000
100,000 numbers, dated 1995 in the Leica Wiki's table, drawn from Leica's published serial list. Numbers assigned to a batch, not cameras counted off a line.
2435801–2455800
20,000 numbers. The Leica Wiki's minilux page dates this block "1998?" and attributes it to the Minilux; its own minilux zoom page records camera 2445882, inside this block, as a Minilux Zoom. The block therefore cannot be read as 20,000 more non-zoom cameras.

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film, hinged back
Finder
Real-image direct-vision finder with markings for the autofocus field, the close-up range and the panorama format; LED displays for flash, focus and metering · 0.35× magnification · 85% coverage · no rangefinder image
Shutter
electronically controlled leaf shutter · 1/400 to 99 s, plus B and T; the long end is reached through the SLOW modes, which switch automatically to B · self-timer
Film advance
motorised loading, advance and rewind, with mid-roll rewind; near-silent
Back
hinged; date imprinting only with the accessory databack
Meter
Centre-weighted, with exposure compensation from −2 to +2 EV in 1/2 EV steps and an exposure series fired by holding the release down. DX film speed ISO 25–5000 in 1/3 steps; non-DX and slower films default to ISO 100.
Designed by
Schaefer Klaus-Dieter — camera design, dated 2 June 1995 by the Leica Wiki · Meinzer Manfred — camera design with Schaefer; credited alone for the minilux zoom that followed
Weight
330 g
Dimensions
124 × 69 × 39, or 42.5 deep with the databack (Leica Wiki) mm
Country
Japan
Accessories
Databack 18 525 · Panorama Adapter · Lens hood · Cable release, via the socket on the front of the body

Casual Photophile gives 0.38× instead. Reviewers agree on the complaint rather than the number: there is no exposure information in the finder at all, which the Contax T2, the Konica Hexar AF and the smaller Minolta TC-1 all provide.

Where sources disagree

Black finish: year and process
  • Black chrome-plated titanium, made in 1996 only (Leica Wiki)
  • Black lacquer, introduced 1998 and available only for a short period (Pascal Heyman, Leica Pages; English Wikipedia follows him)

Better supported: Unresolved

Both refer to order number 18 009, so this is one camera described two ways. The Leica Wiki is generally the closer reader of Leica's own literature, but Heyman is the source Wikipedia cites and the only one who says how long the finish was catalogued.

End of production
  • 1995–2006 (Leica Wiki, production era; Casual Photophile gives the same span)
  • Superseded by the CM in 2004 (English Wikipedia, which dates the CM and CM Zoom to 2004)
  • The replacement came in 2005 (Thorsten Overgaard)

Better supported: The Leica Wiki

The CM's arrival and the minilux's departure are not the same event, and treating them as one is how 2004 and 2005 get into circulation. `years.last` is left unset rather than asserting an end date none of these three agrees on.

Dimensions (mm)
  • 124 × 69 × 39 mm, or 42.5 mm deep with the databack (Leica Wiki, from Leica's technical data)
  • 124 × 67 × 38 mm (English Wikipedia, converting 4⅞ × 2⅝ × 1½ in)

Better supported: The Leica Wiki

Two millimetres in height and one in depth. Wikipedia is converting rounded inch figures from an American source, which is enough to explain the gap without either being wrong.

Magnification
  • 0.35× (Leica Wiki; English Wikipedia, from Leica's compact-camera brochure)
  • 0.38× (Casual Photophile)

Better supported: 0.35×

Two independent readings give 0.35× and both trace to Leica's own literature. Casual Photophile does not say where 0.38× comes from.

Where it was built
  • A Leica design, engineered and manufactured by Matsushita/Panasonic (Pascal Heyman; English Wikipedia)
  • Made in Japan by Panasonic or Minolta (Casual Photophile, which declines to choose between them)

Better supported: Panasonic

Japanese manufacture is not in doubt; only the partner is unsettled, and the Minolta suggestion is plausible only because Leica's earlier compacts really were Minoltas. English Wikipedia states flatly that the minilux "was developed in partnership with Panasonic Corporation", which is the clearest wording anyone offers.

What reviewers say

History

The minilux is the first compact Leica designed instead of buying. The point-and-shoots that carried the red dot before it were Minoltas — the AF-C1 of 1989 is an AF-Tele Super with different engraving — and Kamerastore’s history of the line puts the change at 1995, when the minilux arrived with a titanium shell, leather panels and a 40mm f/2.4 Summarit that Leica had developed for it. The Leica Wiki dates the design to 2 June 1995 and names Klaus-Dieter Schaefer working with Manfred Meinzer. The building was done in Japan, by Panasonic on the reading most sources take.

The shape of the argument is visible in the camera. A folding cover over the lens, control dials on the top right, a shutter release beside a small LCD: the resemblance to the Contax T2 of four years earlier is not accidental, and the minilux arrived into the same narrow market of titanium compacts at luxury prices that the T2 and the Nikon 35Ti already occupied. Dan Richards reviewed it for Popular Photography in November 1995; that article has not been read for this entry and is cited here only because Wikipedia cites it, so nothing is claimed about what it argued. What the minilux has that its rivals do not is a cable-release socket on the front of the body. What it lacks is any exposure information in the finder — two lamps, focus and flash, and nothing else, on a camera that costs more than a Konica Hexar AF which shows a distance scale and parallax marks.

The lens is why the camera is remembered, and it is remembered mostly apart from the camera. Six elements in four groups, a symmetric double-Gauss, f/2.4 at 40mm: Erwin Puts placed its character close to that of the 35mm Summicron ASPH, called it probably the best of its kind on current knowledge, and said it would be worthy of an M body. Two stops of vignetting wide open was his substantial complaint. That judgement, plus a fatal electrical fault, has produced the one genuinely odd market in this section. The flexible circuit that drives the aperture cracks with age, the top LCD reads E02, and the camera stops; so people buy dead bodies for the glass. MGR Production announced a rangefinder-coupled M adapter for the salvaged Summarit in January 2016, other conversions run the optic in an MS-Optics helicoid, and dealers now sell the result as a lens with its own catalogue entry. The camera has become a container.

The counting is where the entry has to be careful, because there is something that looks like a production figure and is not one. The Leica Wiki reproduces Leica’s serial list: 100,000 numbers assigned to the Minilux in 1995 as 2066001–2166000, and 20,000 more at 2435801–2455800 in a block it dates with its own question mark, totalling 120,000 assigned numbers for 1995 to 2002. Those are numbers allocated to batches, not cameras completed. Worse for the tidy reading, the Leica Wiki’s own page on the zoom records body 2445882 — inside that second block — as a Minilux Zoom, so the block is not even purely non-zoom cameras. Leica has published no production total for the minilux in any finish, and none of the limited editions has a stated quantity: not the Tintin of 1997, not the snake-leather DB exclusive shown at Photokina 2002.

What remains open beyond the numbers is most of the model chronology. The black camera is order number 18 009 in every source and nothing else about it agrees: the Leica Wiki says black chrome over titanium, made in 1996 only; Leica Pages says black lacquer, introduced in 1998 and quickly gone. The end of production is 2006 on two readings, 2004 on a third that is really dating the CM’s arrival, and 2005 on a fourth. Even the body dimensions come in two sets, two millimetres apart, because one source is converting rounded inches. The one printed monograph on the family, Giebelhausen’s 1998 German book on the minilux and the zoom, has not been read for this entry and is the obvious place several of these questions would go to die.

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.

Example photos

Sample photo taken with the Leica minilux
Leica minilux, black — Dddeco, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)
Sample photo taken with the Leica minilux
Leica minilux, titanium — Wutthichai Charoenburi, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Sample photo taken with the Leica minilux
Maple Tree Community, Taichung — shot on a Leica minilux (Lordcolus) — Lordcolus, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sample photo wanted — shot with a Leica minilux? We'd love to feature it (with credit).

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $1,300 across 32 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $1,100–$1,800). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $1,300.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$1,300$1,100–$1,80032
2026-09-06$1,300$1,100–$1,80032

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Related: Leica minilux zoom

Sources (13)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.