Leica Camera AG is a German company that manufactures cameras, optical lenses, photographic lenses, binoculars, rifle scopes and microscopes. The brand is also best known for being the first to successfully market a 35-mm compact camera. With its rich history dating back to the 1840s, the company was founded in 1869 by Ernst Leitz. Oskar Barnack successfully developed the first 35-mm compact camera named the UR-Leica in 1913. Despite the development of the camera being interrupted by WWI, finally in 1924, Ernst Leitz II decided to mass produce the camera and the first six Leica cameras were built at E. Leitz in December of the same year. The Leica camera was presented to the public for the first time in 1925 and instantly became a success. The first serial Leica I or model A was small enough to fit in a coat pocket and allowed photographers to take several pictures in a row without changing film. With its success, E. Leitz refined and improved the next generations of cameras in numerous ways. With its growth, competitors grew as well with Contax – another 35-mm camera introduced by Carl Zeiss in 1932. The brand also had several notable partnerships such as a co-operation with Minolta in June 1972, Panasonic incorporating Leica’s lenses to their digital cameras and video recorders in 1995, and even co-engineering its cameras with Huawei smartphones starting with the P9 in 2016. In 2021, Leica established a technology partnership with Sharp Corporation with their cameras being co-engineered into Sharp smartphones in the Japanese market. In 1996, the company officially placed an initial public offering of Leica Camera AG in Frankfurt.
With such a rich history, it’s no wonder the company has so many products out there, from new to used. Finding the right documentation can be difficult, especially in the English language. This is the reason why we opened up a section dedicated to Leica User Manuals, where you can view or download each PDF.