Leica M3

When Leitz unveiled the M3 at Photokina 1954, it obsoleted every rangefinder on the market overnight — including Leica's own screw-mount bodies. It introduced the M bayonet mount (still used on the M11 seventy years later), a bright combined viewfinder/rangefinder with automatic parallax-corrected framelines, and a 0.91x magnification finder that has never been bettered in an M body since.

For newcomers: when people say "no digital M finder is as good as the M3's," this is the camera they mean. Over 220,000 were made, so clean users are still affordable — it's many collectors' first classic Leica. Early "double stroke" (DS) bodies need two advance strokes per frame; later "single stroke" (SS) bodies are the more usable pick. Buttondown early examples with Buddha-ear strap lugs command collector premiums.