Check out the guts of the Leica M8

 

 

Most of us will never be able to afford a Leica digital rangefinder. Even a non-functional, heavily damaged Leica M8 can still fetch almost $1000—which makes it that much more painful to look at these images from ePhotoZone of the guts of the first Leica digital rangefinder.

While billed as a teardown, there's not much ordered or exploratory behind these three images—in fact, we only really see one angle of the camera itself. Something a bit more like iFixit's famous teardowns would do a lot more to give us a more educated and insightful look at what goes on inside this incredible piece of engineering.

As it stands, these shots are impressive just to see someone willing to take apart an M8, and remove much of it's circuitry. We hope it was an already dead model, because it can not be good for the sensor to just be lying out like that!

But if you're interested in the internals of older, film based Leica rangefinders, there are some really interesting resources available. You can look at repairs of old cameras, dig up manuals, or even pick them up on eBay if you want to take a screwdriver to one yourself. And film cameras are probably just a little easier to repair than a fully digital version would be.