Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Thanks to a kind donation to my camera collection I now have two Leica cameras but not that kind of Leicas.

I’m always a little cautious about running an expensive roll of film through a new to me camera so I tend to initially use a roll of expired film with almost predictably awful results. The upside is you get to see if the main functions of the camera such as focus and shutter are working without the expense of a good roll of film. And ta-da the Leica Mini worked and the film sucked. With any fixed lens camera the most important thing after it working is the lens and the Leica mini is supposed to have a great one. It has a 32mm f3.2 Leica Summar lens. I don’t speak Leica so as best as I can tell Summar refers to the design and that it has 6 elements. That name is more closely associated with much older 50mm lenses for Leica rangefinders though. The Mini 3 was only made briefly so didn’t make much of an impact and isn’t very common (unlike the Mini which seems to be everywhere in multiple forms) I do really like the 32mm focal length as it sits nicely between 28 and 35mm much like the Pentax UC1. Now that I know the camera works I guess I will give it another shot with some better film.