Why  would anyone buy a Leica?

At first glance, you'd have to be mad to splash your money on a Leica camera.

Compare them feature for feature with other cameras and you can get a lot more of those features for a lot less money if you go down the Nikon, Sony or Canon routes. And actually I wouldn't spend my money on the interchangeable lens cameras like the M11, mainly because in this day and age a camera that won't even auto-focus is not something I'd consider. Well, that and the eye-watering price.

The Leica Q3, though, is a different matter; and I have bought one, and owned it for more than a year. I'm going to set out some reasons here for why I like it, and why there is nothing comparable at any price.

Headlines

Let's leave the price and the brand to one side for a moment, and look at what this camera has to offer as a photographic instrument.

• It has a full frame sensor (36 mm x 24 mm) providing 61 megapixels
• It has image stabilisation
• The fixed lens operates in auto-focus, manual focus and macro modes
• It is solidly built (brass, I think)
• It has direct manual controls (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) on the body

Outstanding user experience

The Leica Q3 is built to a very high quality finish. The body is smooth black metal with finely textured cloth on the front. The lines are clean and sharp. When the lens is in manual focus position, the focus action is smooth. The aperture ring clicks precisely at one-third stop increments. Moving the camera into macro mode is likewise smooth and precise. This camera is a fine piece of engineering.

By comparison with my Olympus, Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm cameras, the menu system is positively minimal. That suits me well though; Leica has stripped things back to the essentials, leaving the photographer with very quick access to the key features. I can honestly say that I don't miss, for example, the multitude of shutter options that my Olympuses offer, or the range of button configurations available on the Fujifilms. The only camera with a comparably simple menu system is the Hasselblad X2D 100C (love to have one, but it's out of my reach. Probably out of my photographic league too).

There are only four function buttons, unlabelled on the body but described in menus as FN Button 1, FN Button 2, Thumbwheel Button and the four-way Center Button. You can configure these in the menu system, but there is a nicer option available using press-and-hold. For example, buttons such as the FN1 button (which I use for AF-ON) have quick access to alternative settings. Press and hold and a list appears allowing you to change the function to, say, activate the Digital Zoom. It's a very usable approach to configuration.

The menu system itself is clear and easy to access. Just press the MENU button and a multi-function menu appears. The options here can be reached by using the touchscreen, the four-way or the thumbwheel. Press the same button again and you get to the 6-page set of menu options. It's incredibly intuitive.

The overall effect is to help you to focus on taking the picture as opposed to setting things up.

There is a slightly irritating quirk here. If you pull the menu up and swipe right on the touchscreen the camera goes into video mode. It's too easy to swipe across inadvertently and I suspect a lot of new Q3 users encounter this problem. As someone who never uses video I'd really appreciate being able to disable video altogether to avoid this.

Uncompromising image quality

Well, I suppose you'd expect nothing else from Leica, but it's true. I have not had one bad picture out of this camera. The 61 megapixel images give all of the detail you could ask for. The wide angle lens means that you can crop in out of that 61 megapixel range and still get a good quality image. I should mention one of the features in the camera that I don't use (and frankly think is a bit silly) and that is the Digital Zoom. This isn't really a zoom at all; it gives you a set of frame lines for (in addition to the native 28mm), 35mm, 50mm, 75mm and 90mm focal lengths. If you do this then your JPEG photos will show a cropped image, but the RAW photo will still be full-sized. I never use this; I'd rather take a full sized image and crop it later if I need to.

There has been a lot written about "the Leica Look". This is said to be a quality that imbues images taken with a Leica with an unmistakeable look. Of course, I don't claim to be an expert photographer, so it might just be my blunt sensibilities, but if I took two equivalent (focal length, speed, aperture, RAW) images with two cameras I really don't think I could say which was taken with Leica equipment. Actually, I'm sure I couldn't. I tried the quiz at this web page: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2022/08/understanding-the-leica-look/ and failed miserably (a score of 29%).

Speaking of looks, the Q3 includes a few additional themes called "Leica Looks" (confusing, I know). These are built-in or installable themes that give a particular flavour to the images you take (such as Sepia, Chrome and Blue). Leica also provide a small number of these themes that you can download and add to your Q3 using the LeicaFotos phone app. I don't know whether it is possible to make your own themes.

Does anything compare to the Q3?

Since I bought my Q3 Leica have released the Q3 43 - as I understand it, this is identical to mine apart from having a 43mm lens rather than 28mm. Apart from this, and the Fujifilm X100VI, I don't think there is much in the way of competition.

The Fujifilm X100VI is a brilliant photographic instrument. Like the Q3, it has a fixed lens (23mm, roughly equivalent to a 35mm full frame lens). Physically, the cameras are similar in size, though the Q3's lens sticks out further than the Fuji's. Like the Q3, the X100VI has a build and design that exude quality. It also has a high resolution sensor - 41 megapixels. It is APS-C rather than full frame, but to me that is a distinction without a difference (for that matter, I use Micro four thirds cameras and don't feel hard done by having a sensor one quarter of the area of the one in the Q3 - Olympus image quality is outstanding too).

As an aside, I don't think photographers in general pay enough attention to the average pixel size in cameras. What I mean by this is the physical size of a single light-gathering element in the sensor. Take a 24 Mpixel full frame sensor (as in the Nikon Zf). This has 6000 light gathering pixels in the long dimension and 4000 in the short length. With a sensor size of 36mm long by 24mm high, the average pixel size is 0.00595 mm. The 41 Mpixel X100VI has 7728 x 5152 pixels in a sensor of 23.7mm x 15.7mm - an average pixel size of 0.00306mm (nearly half the size). Now, for the 61 Mpixel Q3; it has 9520 x 6336 pixels in a 36mm x 24mm sensor, so the average pixel size is 0.00378mm; bigger than the X100VI, but smaller than the Zf.

So what? Well, setting aside any electronic trickery that the manufacturer brings to bear, a larger individual element can gather more light, and can give better tonal range than a smaller one. This is why, for example, the 12 Mpixel Nikon D3 was the choice of professional photographers even after much higher resolution sensors were available (average pixel size 0.00847mm!).

Like the Q3 the X100VI has rangefinder styling, but unlike the Q3 it has a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder. A flick of the lever on the front of the camera switches the view between OVF and EVF. In practice I use the EVF almost exclusively, mainly because I have a hood on the lens and this partially blocks the OVF. The X100VI also has something like a digital zoom, and also shows the framelines in the viewfinder. I don't really use this feature either.

Something that you get with the Fujifilm cameras - and which I use all the time - is the film simulations. There are at least 20 simulations supplied as standard, but you can also create your own, and there are entire websites devoted to showing you how to build your own film simulations. So if you want to make images that are reminiscent of, say, Kodachrome 64 or Ilford Pan F, there's a simulation for that.

I should give an honourable mention to the Olympus Pen F. This is not a fixed lens camera, but coupled with a pancake lens like the Lumix 20mm f1.7 or the Olympus 17mm f1.8, it occupies a similar ecological niche. It has a rangefinder style body, is mostly metal in construction, and looks beautiful. I have written here about its effective successor, the OM-3. I have owned a Pen F since not long after its introduction in 2016.

So is there a comparable camera to the Q3? I think the X100VI is reasonably close in terms of quality and features, and it comes in at less than a third of the price. But I don't know of anything else.

Now, let's talk about the price

I have to address this, of course. I paid £5300 for my Q3 at the beginning of 2024. That's a lot of anyone's money, but I think it's worth considering how well the value holds. Looking at MPB in May 2025 I see prices for used models around £4000; in my experience cameras lose half their resale value within a few months. The Q3 shows every sign of being a classic, so prices are likely to hold, and probably even to rise in the long term. Leicas are built to last and keep their value well.

The fact that I've left this to the end of this article should illustrate that price is not the most important consideration with this camera. I don't intend to sell it, and hope my kids pass it on to theirs, so its a sunk cost anyway. The important thing is the quality. You can achieve everything that a Leica Q3 will do at a fraction of the cost, so if that's the yardstick then the Leica is not for you. If build quality, user experience, image quality and longevity are important, the Q3 is a great choice.

I think a valid comparison is with watches (which, alongside cameras, I also collect). If all I wanted to do was tell the time, I would buy an electronic watch for less than £10, or just use my phone. I wear an Omega Seamaster that I have owned for 35 years, because it looks and feels good, is built like a fortress, tells the time dependably and just keeps on going.

Quality matters. That's why I like my Leica Q3.