Leica M11 Monochrom & Noctilux-M 35mm f/1.2 ASPH review

What are the Leica M11 Monochrom & Noctilux-M 35mm f/1.2 ASPH?

If you think the Leica M11 rangefinder camera is little more than a niche product for a specific sort of traditional photographer, the recent Monochrom version takes that idea a step even further. It makes no attempt to be everything to everyone, and that’s precisely the point. 

The camera fully commits the most modern digital Leica M platform to black & white photography, using a dedicated monochrome full-frame sensor without a colour filter array.
The result is a shooting experience that feels deliberately narrow but also unusually pure.

If you relish the idea of ignoring the colours of the world and will enjoy  working with light, texture and tonality, the M11 Monochrom is one of the most compelling cameras you can buy. For flexibility, speed, autofocus or video, it’s very easy to spend less and get more. It’s not a camera for everyone. It’s for purists only… and well-heeled ones at that. Launched in April 2023 at £8300 for just the body, it lands in luxury territory. 

You may think its price and single-minded focus would make it a very rare camera to buy, but it is a big seller for the German brand. This is thanks to a cult following of believers in the impressive, high-quality M camera and its matching lenses. 

Until now, the favoured 35mm reportage-lens companion to the M11 Monochrom has been the £6700 APO-Summicron-M f/2 ASPH or the £4499 Summilux-M f/1.4 ASPH. Nothing has
yet been available from the hallowed Noctilux range – long known for ultra-fast apertures and a unique character.

Now, the Leica superfan can get the lens to match their obsession with quality: the Leica Noctilux-M 35mm f/1.2 ASPH. It is the first time Leica has brought the Noctilux heritage to arguably the most versatile focal length in photography. The result is a lens that feels both groundbreaking and deeply familiar. And at £7700, it’s not as much of a price hike as you’d expect over the f/2 APO lens.

So armed with £16,000 of exciting, new equipment, we set off to see if this dream package lives up to the hype. 

Leica M11 Monochrom design

Once you are used to the unique handling of a Leica M rangefinder, it becomes second nature. And the M11 Monochrom is a classic Leica M in the hand. It’s compact, dense, beautifully finished and largely unchanged in concept from decades of rangefinders. 

Leica’s no-logo styling keeps the front clean and understated, and its minimalist approach reinforces the camera’s Monochrom philosophy: less distraction, more concentration. It also offers premium levels of durability with details such as scratch-resistant black paint and sapphire cover glass over the rear monitor. 

After years of thorough use, some of the paint will probably wear off to build up a patina – the mark of a truly serious Leica-holic. However, the top-plate is now aluminium instead of traditional Leica brass, so it won’t look quite as cool when the eco-friendly black paint has worn away to bare metal – that’s if it ever does! 

Ergonomically, it is still a rangefinder. Manual focus is the only way of working, and the viewfinder is optical to encourage a slower, more deliberate pace. Rangefinder focusing works down to 70cm. Closer than that you need Live View via the rear screen, which becomes relevant because the Monochrom has an extended close focus ability down to 50cm. 

Continuous shooting is modest by modern standards at up to 4.5fps, with a buffer of 15 DNG frames and over 100 JPEGs. It’s fine for documentary, street and portrait work, but not action.

The camera has three buttons to the left of the LCD for Play, Menu and Fn options. The Fn key defaults to turning Live View on and off, but can also be configured to any other function. And a button on the top-plate can be made to default to any particular menu option. 

A third function button is accessed by pressing the rear thumbwheel. A short press of either of the Fn buttons will bring up the last selected menu option. A long press makes the menu of available menu options appear. The thumbwheel can be set to either Focus Assist or Exposure Compensation. And there is a four-way rocker switch for navigation and confirmation. 

To change ISO, there’s a small knob on the top left of the camera that offers Auto ISO options. This locks but can be awkward to change in a hurry. You can always set ISO via the menus, which are logical and easy to scroll through.

Leica M11 Monochrom image quality

The headline feature is Leica’s monochrome BSI CMOS sensor with Triple Resolution capture options. It means you can shoot DNG and JPEG files at 60, 36 or 18 megapixels depending on your specific workflow and storage needs. It would be hard to justify spending this much on a camera-and-lens set-up to use any other setting than the largest, though. Especially to save a few quid on hard drives or memory cards. 

As there’s no colour filter array, the camera doesn’t need to debayer data into luminance detail. In practice, that delivers the two things Monochrom cameras are loved for: crisp micro-detail and exceptionally smooth tonal transitions. Fine texture – skin, stone, fabric, weathered wood, hair – has a tactile realism that’s hard to replicate by converting a colour file to black & white. Leica claims the design helps push monochrome image quality to another level, aided by the omission of colour filters and the use of high-quality filter glass. 

Dynamic range is another strength, but the M11 Monochrom does reward highlight protection. Clipped highlights can arrive sooner than expected if you expose too brightly, so be warned. It pays to get your exposure right. The upside is shadows can be lifted aggressively thanks to deep tonal information in the Raw files. 

High ISO performance and tonality are the camera’s biggest real-world advantages. The ISO range runs from 125 up to 200,000 and, when armed with the superfast 35mm Noctilux lens too, you have a dream combo for low light and nighttime scenes. 

Without the colour filter array, the images offer improved sensitivity and noise performance compared to the standard colour M11, with base ISO rising from 64 on the conventional M11
to 125 on the Monochrom. In practice, the camera produces clean midtones and pleasing grain-like noise at higher ISO settings, maintaining a filmic look rather than collapsing into mushy detail reduction. It makes you want to go out in low light and create images that ooze character.

If you shoot indoors, in the evening or on winter streets, the Leica camera is liberating. You can work with available light and yet retain crisp edges and rich midtone separation, even when shutter speed and aperture choices would be limiting on many high-resolution colour cameras. And with great control of flare, you’re not going to get nasty, distracting sunbursts off light sources.

Leica M11 Monochrom storage

One of the most practical upgrades in Leica’s M11 generation is storage. Alongside a UHS-II SD card slot that supports SDXC cards up to 2TB, the M11 Monochrom includes 256GB of internal memory. That’s enormous by camera standards and genuinely useful if you want to keep shooting without constantly managing cards. You can also treat it like a pseudo dual-slot set-up for overflow or file separation. 

Connectivity is also more up-to-date than older M cameras because USB-C is included, and Leica promotes mobile workflows via the Leica Fotos app, supporting image transfer and remote control. 

Of course, you can just use a memory card and put it in a reader. Transferring images from the internal drive via USB-C is a little more fiddly; the computer doesn’t see the camera’s memory as an external card or flash device because it doesn’t offer a mass storage file transfer mode. You have to use something like a file transfer program that comes in your Mac’s Photo app instead. 

When it comes to real use, getting this camera means you’re buying into rangefinder shooting. Manual focus can be wonderfully direct and fast once you’re well practised but it does have a learning curve, and it’s not always the best tool for close-up work, long lenses, fast-moving subjects or wide-open shooting at very close distances.

The Monochrom’s output, though, is addictive if black & white is how you see. The files have a clarity and tonal richness that makes you want to shoot more simply. And once light levels drop and ISO creeps up, it excels.

Conclusion

Using a black-&-white-only camera removes the constant question of whether you should be shooting in colour or mono, and pushes you to compose through light and shape. That purity of photography is central to why the Monochrom line exists. In a world where it seems like so many people are chasing authenticity and retro essence in pretty much everything, the Leica M Monochrom and a superfast 35mm prime lens really delivers.

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