Leica Solms Factory Tour
Andy Westlake and Phil Askey, September 2009

It's been a busy year on the product development front for Leica, with both the long-awaited M9 full-frame rangefinder and the all-new S2 medium format DSLR system simultaneously in the pipeline, alongside the distinctly less expected X1 APS-C compact. The company is justifiably keen to show off the fruits of all this hard work, and at the end of August we were lucky enough to be part of a small group of journalists invited to visit its factory in Solms for an early peek at the new products and a tour of its production lines.

The Leica shop and historic camera displays

The first thing visitors will come to when they step through the door at Solms is the factory shop. Here they can admire and buy all the latest cameras and lenses in suitably elegant, minimalist surroundings.

Opposite the shop is an impressive display of cameras and lenses, going right back to Oscar Barnack's first protoypes of his revolutionary miniature camera.

The left side case plays host to practically all of Leica's 35mm camera models, from the earliest 'ur-Leica' concept to the M6 rangefinder and R8 SLR.	The case on the right holds a range of interesting exhibits, including several of Leica's signature 'Special Edition' cameras.
This is Oscar Barnack's original miniature camera concept - the 'Ur-Leica' of 1913.	These are handworked sample cameras from Barnack's workshop.
Here are some more of the designer's concepts, sketchs and tools.	This camera sports an early example of an autowinder mechanism.
Here's an impressive array of screw-mount 35mm rangefinders...	...and this is a range of 1930s lenses to fit them.
This is the Leica CL, a 'mini M' which was co-developed with Minolta (and the kind of high quality interchangeable lens small camera that digital users have been denied until very recently).	Also on display is this rather handsome special edition green M6.
The 'ABCDE 30' was a 1970s design concept for an SLR-type camera.	Finally here's Leica's little-known first digital camera - the 1996 S1, which featured a scanning back with an image area of 36 x 36mm and 26 Mp resolution.

Foreword / notes

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