Leica turned movie film sideways and made cameras pocket-sized
Leica's key trick in the 1920s was simple: turn the frame. Cinema cameras exposed 35 mm film across the strip; Leica ran the image lengthwise, getting a bigger picture from the same film in a body small enough for hikers and cyclists. The name is a contraction too, joining the first letters of Leitz and camera.
The company's roots go back to 1849, when Carl Kellner founded an optical institute in Wetzlar that Ernst Leitz took over twenty years later. Prototypes of the small camera existed early in the twentieth century, but sales began only in the mid-1920s. A built-in rangefinder arrived with the Leica II in 1932, along with interchangeable lenses, and the Leica III of 1933 added a top shutter speed of a thousandth of a second. Its variants stayed the flagship until the late 1950s.
Success invited trouble. Before the Second World War, Leica and Zeiss's Contax were regarded as the best 35 mm cameras available. Afterwards, Soviet and Japanese copies appeared, and through the 1950s cheaper, inventive Japanese cameras gutted the European industry. Single-lens reflex designs then made rangefinders look dated, and Leica retreated into an expensive niche for professionals and devoted amateurs, where its M system still lives in both digital and film versions.
The optics went further than cameras. Leitz sold its first prism binoculars in 1907, stopped in 1931, and returned in the 1960s with the Trinovid line; a single-barrel version built for NASA's Apollo missions earned the nickname Eye of Apollo. In 1992 the Geovid became the first binocular with a built-in rangefinder.
Modern Leica leans on partners. It designed lenses for Panasonic's Lumix cameras, worked with Huawei on smartphone cameras from 2015 until 2021, and switched to Xiaomi in 2022. It also sells watches, spectacle lenses and home-cinema projectors. With roughly 2,300 staff, it reported revenue of 596 million euros in its 2024/25 year, and Blackstone holds a 45 percent stake.
Source: Leica Camera
