I recently came back into the Leica fold, with a new M9P and four lenses. Many years ago I shot Leica M film cameras but eventually sold them off, including four beautiful lenses. Hmarkweidman 2132 wrote: I have a question for Leica M users. Leica's rationale is that it is better to include a little more information than expected rather than a little less, so the 1m seems to be a good compromise. With an optical rangefinder system, it is impossible to have accurate framing at minimum distance and at infinity. So, the 2m frame lines were changed back to 1m.

This wasn't desirable as you ended up cropping out picture details. But, when shooting at closest focusing distance the frame lines showed more than what was captured. Long distance framing was more accurate with the 2m frame lines of the M8.2. The reason for 1m frame lines is so that close subjects (most M lenses focus down to 1m and some are 0.7m) won't be cropped relative to the frame lines. Most previous film M cameras were also calibrated to 1m. Just to add to what Jack already wrote (and the long thread on L-Camera-Forum), The M9 and M9-P frame lines are calibrated at 1m.

At best I now at least feel a little better learning my M9P is not malfunctioning. I assumed it was too obscure of a problem for previous discussion, which clearly was a mistake. Hmarkweidman 2139 wrote: Thanks for the link Jack, I just read through all the old posts about this topic.

Leica viewfinder