Leica M and M39

Originally in the analogue era M-mount lenses were only available from Leica, but soon Cosina/Voigtländer and Zeiss started producing M-mount lenses as well. Today also many newer manufacturers from China release original lenses in M-mount as they can easily be adapted to all kinds of mirrorless cameras.

Reviews

Fisheye

Ultra Wide Angle

21mm

24mm

28mm

35mm

40mm

50mm

75mm

85mm

90mm

135mm

Adapters for Sony E-mount cameras

For a general overview have a look at our Adapter guide.

For M-mount lenses so called Close Focus Adapters are popular that work as a variable extension tube and reduce the usually quite high close focusing distance of your Leica M lenses.

TTArtisan also offers a 6-Bit adapter that allows you to have EXIF data for (some) of your M-mount lenses.

A very special adapter is the Techart LM-EA9 that turns your manual focus M-mount lenses into auto focus lenses.

Issues

Most rangefinder lenses (especially wide angle ones) do not perform as well on a digital camera as on film. For a very geeky analysis check out this lensrentals.com article, for a short comprehension have a look at our article Rangefinder wide angle lenses on A7 cameras: problems and solutions.
The most important factor is the filter stack thickness in front of the sensor. Leica has minimized the thickness of this sensor so that most lenses perform closer to film on their Leica M10, M9 or M240 series cameras. Sony uses a much thicker sensor stack with all their A7/A9/A1 series cameras but it can be replaced by a thin one and then the cameras perform as well as the Leicas.

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