I’ve spent plenty of time cursing Leica as a company. They can drive a man insane. On one hand, they’re the last half-sane camera outfit left on the planet, the only lunatic craftsmen still cranking out machines that feel like cameras instead of soulless digital calculators wearing a camera costume. On the other hand, they milk that purity for all it’s worth – dropping fashion pieces and limited-edition cash grabs that distract from the mission and jack prices into the stratosphere.

And yet… I’m still a Leica shooter. My main kit is a digital M11, a film M7, and three lenses I’ve owned for damn near twenty years. I’ll never sell those lenses. I’ll never sell the M7. And I’m clinging to the M11 with white knuckles, trying to keep it for a whole decade just to justify the financial beating.

That’s the Leica experience in a nutshell… you bite the bullet, you enjoy the only real camera left in the modern world, and you pray that someday the joy and the investment meet somewhere in the middle.

But every now and then – once a decade if the planets align – Leica drops something that actually makes financial sense, at least for a small slice of humanity. This decade, that unicorn has been the Q-series. You get a modern body, a sensor comparable to the M11, and a Summilux lens baked right in. In the M system, that combination would run you around fourteen grand or more. A Q3? Four to seven thousand depending on how hard you hunt the used market. It’s practically a bargain, by Leica standards anyway.

And now Leica’s done it again. They just released the Q3 Monochrom – basically a 28mm Q3 with a dedicated Monochrom sensor. For a professional who lives and dies in black and white, this thing is a do-everything workhorse. A deadly little machine that earns every bit of its $7,800 price tag.

It’s still outrageously expensive, and the market for it is tiny (microscopic even) but it exists, it makes sense, and for the first time in a long time…

I’m not gonna bitch about it.

Details here.