Leica M7

The M7 arrived in 2002 after a decade of requests from working photographers who wanted the M chassis to handle exposure automatically. Leica's answer was deliberate: add aperture-priority AE and an electronically timed shutter, keep everything else. The result was the first M body you could hand to a photojournalist who needed one less thing to think about — and who still wanted the M's silence and size.

For newcomers: aperture-priority means you set the f-stop and the camera chooses the shutter speed. On all earlier M bodies except the M5 you had to set both, every time. The M7 made the M accessible to a generation raised on SLRs.

The trade-off was battery dependency. Unlike a mechanical M, the M7 can only use 1/60 and 1/125 if the batteries die. Purists objected; working photographers didn't care. Leica discontinued the M7 in 2018 when the digital M10 rendered the film M lineup redundant.