By Ked · May 2026
May 2026
Long before the M-mount existed, before the rangefinder window and the viewfinder were combined into one bright frame line, Leica had already invented the 35mm camera as we know it. The story of how Leica got from a fixed-lens experiment in 1925 to a mature interchangeable-lens rangefinder by 1933, and then spent the next twenty-seven years refining that design, is told in three model families: the Leica I, the Leica II, and the Leica III. Each family added something fundamental, and within each family Leica kept iterating, refining the build, adding flash sync, smoothing the controls, and finally adding parallax-corrected brightlines (borrowed from the M3, which arrived in 1954) before the screw-mount line ended in 1960. One of the confusing things about these cameras is that the models were not named in the order they were introduced.
This post covers all of it, family by family: what makes a model family unique, and then every letter variant within each family, in the order Leica built them, from the original Model A through the last IIIg. The dates are approximate, because production runs overlapped and many variants saw multiple sub-versions, but the broad strokes are well-established.
From the I to the III, every Barnack-era Leica is built around the same basic camera: a small aluminum body with brass top and base plates, a horizontal cloth shutter, bottom-loading film transport through a removable baseplate, knob film advance, and that unmistakable round-eyepiece look.
Loading film means trimming the leader first: the film slides into a removable take-up spool and is slipped through a narrow throat at the bottom of the camera. A modern factory film leader is too short and doesn't quite work so it requires lengthening. It is a one-minute procedure every Barnack owner learns, and trimming templates are cheap and widely available if you'd rather not eyeball it.
Hold one of these cameras and the construction quality is obvious. These were precision instruments built to be repaired and serviced indefinitely, and most of them have outlasted multiple owners.
A self-timer shows up later, on the IId and IIId letter variants, on the final red-dial sub-variant of the IIIf, and as standard equipment on the IIIg. The viewfinder on the I, II, and III shows you roughly 50mm of view at infinity, with no projected frame lines and no parallax correction. The IIIg, the last of the screw-mount line, would later become the only LTM Leica to get a much larger, brighter viewfinder carrying projected, parallax-corrected frame lines for 50mm and 90mm.
| Model | Years | Rangefinder | Flash sync | Self-timer | Strap lugs | What is significant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I Model A | 1925 | No | No | No | No | The original 35mm Leica. Fixed collapsible 50mm lens, no rangefinder. |
| I Compur (Model B) | 1926–1929 | No | No | No | No | Compur leaf shutter in the lens instead of the focal-plane shutter. About 1,500 made. |
| I Model C | 1930 | No | No | No | No | First interchangeable lenses: the 39mm screw mount, standardized partway through the run. |
| Standard (Model E) | 1932 | No | No | No | Late bodies only | Standardized 39mm mount on the simple I body, still no rangefinder. |
| II (Model D) | 1932–1948 | Yes | No | No | No | First coupled rangefinder Leica. |
| III (Model F) | 1933–1939 | Yes | No | No | Yes | Slow speeds to 1 second plus T, rangefinder diopter adjustment, strap lugs. |
| IIIa (Model G) | 1935–1940 | Yes | No | No | Yes | Top shutter speed raised to 1/1000. |
| IIIb | 1938–1940 | Yes | No | No | Yes | Rangefinder and viewfinder eyepieces moved much closer together. |
| IIIc | 1940–1951 | Yes | No | No | Yes | One-piece die-cast body shell, about 3mm longer. |
| IIId | 1940–1946 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | IIIc with a self-timer. Only a few hundred made. |
| IIc | 1948–1951 | Yes | No | No | Yes | Postwar die-cast IIIc body without slow speeds or flash sync. |
| Ic | 1949–1952 | No | No | No | Yes | Postwar die-cast body without a rangefinder. Two accessory shoes. |
| IIIf | 1950–1956 | Yes | Yes | Late bodies only | Yes | IIIc with flash sync. The highest-production screw-mount Leica, over 184,000 made. |
| IId | 1951–1952 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | IIc with a self-timer. A few thousand made. |
| IIf | 1951–1956 | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | IIc with flash sync. The most common II-family body. |
| If | 1952–1956 | No | Yes | No | Yes | Ic with flash sync. Black-dial and red-dial versions. |
| Ig | 1957–1960 | No | Yes | No | Yes | Last and most refined no-rangefinder Leica. Slow-speed dial. |
| IIIg | 1957–1960 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Last screw-mount Leica. Larger, brighter viewfinder with parallax-corrected 50mm and 90mm brightlines. |
The Leica I was the camera that Oskar Barnack built around the idea that 35mm motion picture film, rotated ninety degrees so the frame ran horizontally, could be used to make small, light, perfectly usable still cameras. It debuted at the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1925 and quickly turned what had been a curiosity into a category. Every camera in the I family shares one defining trait: no built-in rangefinder. You focus by scale, by experience, or with an accessory rangefinder slid into the cold shoe on top. That makes the I family more limiting than the II and III, but it also makes these bodies lighter, simpler, and often less expensive on the used market.
A few things define the family as a whole:
Fair-price data pulled September 20, 2026. Across the whole I family (Model A, I Compur, Standard, Ic, If, and Ig pooled together), body-only listings run to a fair-price median of $1,105, fair range $687–$2,060, on 203 clean comps. That family-wide number spans everything from a scale-focus Ic to a nickel-trim Model A, so treat it as a broad-strokes figure; the individual variants below are the more useful reference.
The original. Fixed Elmar 50mm f/3.5 (or the earlier Anastigmat / Elmax on the first runs). No rangefinder, flash sync, or interchangeable lens; the lens collapses into the body for transport. Focus is by the distance scale on the lens or an accessory rangefinder in the cold shoe, and the viewfinder window (no brightlines) only roughly approximates a 50mm angle of view. Nickel-plated examples from the first couple of years are sought after by collectors; chrome bodies came later in the run.
Listings that just say "Leica I" without specifying a sub-variant, which is most of them, run to a fair-price median of $1,700, fair range $1,097–$2,712, on 87 clean comps. A smaller pool of listings explicitly tagged as Model A specifically, a mix skewed toward the collector-grade nickel examples, runs higher: median $1,830, range $1,571–$2,342, on 7 clean comps.
A rare variant fitted with a Compur leaf shutter in the lens rather than the focal-plane shutter. Roughly 1,500 made, mostly of interest to collectors. You'll see them on the market only occasionally and at prices to match; we're currently tracking a single active listing at $4,928, which is a data point, not a fair-price range.
An important transitional variant. Model C introduced the 39mm screw mount, what we now call LTM, making interchangeable lenses possible on a Leica for the first time. Model C's earliest lenses were hand-matched to one specific body by serial number, and true interchangeability across different bodies only arrived when the 39mm mount was standardized partway through Model C's production run. Sometimes called the "Schraubgewinde" Leica, it's the key link between the fixed-lens I and the rangefinder II two years later, and it's rare enough on the used market that it doesn't have a dedicated pricing bucket of its own on this site.
The model that carried the newly standardized 39mm mount forward into the II and III era. Still no rangefinder, but lens changes are now fully interchangeable across bodies, unlike the early Model C. The Standard sits awkwardly between families because of this: it has the same lens system as the II and III but the simpler I-body construction (no rangefinder). Fair-price median $1,604, fair range $999–$2,348, on 29 clean comps, well above the postwar Ic/If/Ig below because of its scarcer, earlier production.
Postwar. Die-cast body shell but still no rangefinder. Two accessory shoes on top let you mount a viewfinder and a separate rangefinder if you want. Speeds 1/30 to 1/500 (early) or 1/25 to 1/1000 (later), no front slow-speed dial and no T position here, unlike the III family. Practical and affordable. Fair-price median $527, fair range $459–$619, on 28 clean comps.
The Ic with flash sync added. Two main sub-variants: black-dial (1/30 to 1/500) and the more desirable red-dial (1/25 to 1/1000). If you're buying an If to actually use, look for the red-dial. Fair-price median $516, fair range $410–$765, on 23 clean comps.
The final no-rangefinder Leica. Strap lugs, the longer "gezogen" top plate, slow-speed dial. The Ig is the most refined of the no-rangefinder bodies. It is also the rarest, because it was made for only three years before the screw-mount line ended entirely. Fair-price median $802, fair range $762–$1,031, on 23 clean comps, well above the Ic and If as the scarcest of the no-rangefinder bodies.
If you want a screw-mount Leica purely as a small, light scale-focus camera for hyperfocal street shooting or as a take-anywhere body, an If red-dial or Ig is the sweet spot. You get the postwar build quality without paying for a rangefinder you weren't going to use.
Two years after the screw-mount Model C, Leica brought out the model that most people picture when they hear the words "vintage Leica." The II combined the now-established 39mm thread mount with a fundamental new capability: a coupled rangefinder in a second window on the top plate. This is the moment 35mm photography became precise.
Every II has interchangeable lenses on the now-standard 39mm thread and a minimum shutter speed of 1/20 (or 1/25 on later bodies), unchanged from the I. The II has two separate eyepieces, one to compose and one to focus. If you don't need to shoot indoors hand-held, you don't necessarily need a III; a II is lighter, simpler, and often cheaper.
A few things define the family as a whole:
Fair-price data pulled September 20, 2026. Across the whole II family (Model D, IIc, IId, and IIf pooled together), body-only listings run to a fair-price median of $545, fair range $344–$850, on 85 clean comps.
The original rangefinder Leica. The body shell evolved over the long production run, but the basic feature set (rangefinder, viewfinder, no slow speeds, no flash) stayed put. Nickel-trim examples from the early 30s are collector grade; chrome bodies from the late 30s and 40s are more abundant and more practical. Fair-price median $690, fair range $438–$1,032, on 36 clean comps.
Postwar simplified body. Same die-cast shell as the IIIc but without slow speeds and without flash sync. Modest production run of fewer than 10,000. A bargain in the screw-mount Leica world if you find a clean one. Fair-price median $349, fair range $339–$756, on 12 clean comps.
The IIc with a self-timer added. Very small production run of a few thousand. You'll see them listed occasionally and they generally sell at a small premium over the IIc; we're currently tracking a single active listing at $1,536, which is a data point, not a fair-price range.
The IIc with flash sync. Like the If, there are black-dial and red-dial sub-variants: black runs 1/30 to 1/500, red runs 1/25 to 1/1000. The IIf is by some margin the most common II-family body on the used market and is a credible shooter if you don't mind the absence of slow speeds. Fair-price median $400, fair range $334–$675, on 35 clean comps.
Note that there's no IIa, IIb, IIe, or IIg. The II family was simpler than the III family, and Leica didn't apply every refinement to it. The model jumps from II to IIc because Leica reset the lettering when the postwar die-cast body arrived.
The III arrived just a year after the II and took the camera in two important directions: slow shutter speeds, via a second, small dial on the front of the camera just below the rewind knob, controlling speeds of 1 second, 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8, plus a T (time) position that holds the shutter open with a single press. A diopter adjustment lever under the rewind knob was added to allow eyesight correction. Strap lugs were added too, finally allowing the camera to hang without a case. By the III, the layout that survives all the way through the IIIg in 1957 is essentially complete: knob advance, separate rangefinder and viewfinder windows, shutter dial on top, slow-speed dial on the front, and a removable bottom plate for film loading. Everything Leica did in the screw-mount era after 1933 is a refinement of the III, not a re-invention. The III family is where Leica did most of its refining: six major letter variants and an entire war's worth of small changes inside each one. Of all the screw-mount Leicas, this is the family people buy most often as shooters, because the combination of slow speeds, rangefinder, and (in later variants) flash sync is useful for general-purpose photography.
On the III you focus and frame through two separate windows. You put your eye to the rangefinder eyepiece, turn the lens until the double image snaps into one to set focus, then slide your eye across to the neighboring viewfinder eyepiece to compose, which shows roughly a 50mm field with no frame lines and no parallax correction (at least not until the IIIg). Focus with one window, frame with the other, a deliberate two-step rhythm that feels slow at first and then becomes second nature. The IIIg was the first screw-mount Leica with a brighter viewfinder carrying parallax-corrected 50mm and 90mm brightlines, though its focusing rangefinder still lives in a separate window. Merging the two into a single combined window was one of the M3's signature advances in 1954.
A few things define the family as a whole:
Fair-price data pulled September 20, 2026. Across the whole III family (Model F through IIIg pooled together), body-only listings run to a fair-price median of $618, fair range $435–$970, on 509 clean comps, the largest single pool of screw-mount inventory on the site by a wide margin.
Slow speeds via the front dial, down to 1 second plus a T (time) position that holds the shutter open with a single press; this same dial, T included, carries through every III-family variant below, none of which change or remove it. Diopter adjustment on the rangefinder, strap lugs. Top speed 1/500. Chrome bodies are common; nickel-trim examples are scarce. Fair-price median $561, fair range $401–$1,010, on 103 clean comps.
The single change is significant: top shutter speed bumped from 1/500 to 1/1000. Everything else identical to the III. The IIIa was the workhorse of photojournalists through the late 1930s, and a lot of historically important photographs were taken with one. Fair-price median $515, fair range $369–$956, on 49 clean comps.
The two eyepieces are moved much closer together. You still focus through one and frame through the other, but the eye-shift between them is much smaller, a subtle ergonomic improvement. Production was disrupted by the war, so IIIb examples are not common. Fair-price median $500, fair range $367–$687, on 16 clean comps.
Major construction change: the body shell, top deck, and rangefinder housing become a single one-piece die-casting, replacing the separate parts screwed together on earlier models. The body is about 3mm longer and slightly taller, and the shutter was redesigned at the same time with ball bearings. You can tell a IIIc or later body from a prewar one at a glance: prewar bodies show a seam where the rangefinder housing sits on the top plate, screws along the top plate's front and back edges, and four screw heads in a rectangle on the baseplate, none of which appear from the IIIc on. The IIIc was made through the war and into the postwar period. Early war-era bodies (sometimes called "war-time" IIIc) sometimes have additional collector interest. As a shooter, the IIIc is reliable, common, and inexpensive. Fair-price median $562, fair range $395–$882, on 79 clean comps, higher than the IIIf below because collector interest in war-time bodies pulls the model's overall number up; a plain, non-war-time example runs at or below the IIIf's own fair price.
The IIIc with a self-timer added. Very rare, with only a few hundred made. Almost entirely a collector item; you'll rarely see one come up at all. We're currently tracking two active listings, at $5,270 and $16,005, too few and too spread out to be a fair-price range; the higher one is a rarity or military-marked example, not a going rate for the model.
The IIIc with flash sync. Three sub-variants in order of production: black-dial (1950–52, speeds 1/30 to 1/500), red-dial (1953–54, speeds 1/25 to 1/1000), and red-dial with self-timer (1954–56). The red-dial variants are the most desirable shooters. The IIIf is the highest-production screw-mount Leica of all: more than 184,000 were made. They're common on the used market, and prices are reasonable for clean ones. Fair-price median $550, fair range $445–$763, on 184 clean comps, by a wide margin the deepest and most liquid pool of screw-mount inventory on the site.
The final screw-mount Leica and the most refined. Important additions: a much larger, brighter viewfinder window, nearly M3-sized, and by some estimates even a stop brighter than the M3's, now carrying parallax-corrected brightlines for 50mm and 90mm lenses, borrowed from the M3 (which had arrived in 1954). The top plate is larger to fit the new viewfinder, the slow-speed dial is restyled, a self-timer is now standard equipment (carried over from the late red-dial IIIf), and the camera feels closer to a modern rangefinder in use. Only about 42,000 were made before Leica shut down the screw-mount line, and prices run higher than the IIIf. Fair-price median $1,021, fair range $860–$1,225, on 72 clean comps, sitting well above the rest of the III family as the most refined.
All three families are still very much around on the used market. As of September 2026 we're tracking 259 Leica I-family listings, 184 Leica II-family listings, and 851 Leica III-family listings across the active market, 1,294 in total. The III family alone is the largest single pool of screw-mount Leica inventory on the site. Across all three, examples range from near junk bodies under $400 to mint and collector-grade pieces in the thousands. Prices depend more on cosmetic condition and originality than on which of the three families it belongs to. A clean III isn't necessarily worth more than a clean II.
If you want to shoot one, the practical considerations are roughly:
For practical use, the individual variants that come up most often as buyer-friendly sweet spots are:
What to avoid as a first buy:
If you buy a screw-mount body, you have access to a deep and varied lens ecosystem: collapsible Elmars from the 1930s, Russian copies of those same lenses from the postwar Soviet years (FED and Zorki bodies typically came with Soviet-made Industar or Jupiter lenses, copies of Zeiss and Leitz optical designs), 1950s Canon rangefinder lenses, and Nikkor lenses of the same era (Nikon's own rangefinder cameras used a different, incompatible bayonet mount, but Nikon also built many of its best lenses of the period, like the 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S.C, directly in Leica screw mount for sale to Leica shooters), and modern Voigtländer and Zeiss optics. Browse the LTM lens listings on UsedLensTracker to see the range. You can fit any of them on any of the bodies in this post.
That ecosystem is part of the appeal of buying into screw-mount Leica. The camera is the gateway. The lenses are where the fun lives.
Fair-price data pulled September 20, 2026. Body-only asking prices, family by family. Kit/bundle listings, special editions, and black-paint premiums are excluded, since a bundled lens or a rarity premium skews what a plain shooter body actually costs.
| Family | Fair price (median) | Fair range (middle 50%) | Body-only listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leica I (all variants) | $1,105 | $687–$2,060 | 203 |
| Leica II (all variants) | $545 | $344–$850 | 85 |
| Leica III (all variants) | $618 | $435–$970 | 509 |
| Variant | Fair price (median) | Fair range (middle 50%) | Body-only listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| I (unspecified sub-type) | $1,700 | $1,097–$2,712 | 87 |
| I Model A | $1,830 | $1,571–$2,342 | 7 |
| I Compur (Model B)* | $4,928 | single listing | 1 |
| Standard | $1,604 | $999–$2,348 | 29 |
| Ic | $527 | $459–$619 | 28 |
| If | $516 | $410–$765 | 23 |
| Ig | $802 | $762–$1,031 | 23 |
| II (Model D) | $690 | $438–$1,032 | 36 |
| IIc | $349 | $339–$756 | 12 |
| IId* | $1,536 | single listing | 1 |
| IIf | $400 | $334–$675 | 35 |
| III (Model F) | $561 | $401–$1,010 | 103 |
| IIIa | $515 | $369–$956 | 49 |
| IIIb | $500 | $367–$687 | 16 |
| IIIc | $562 | $395–$882 | 79 |
| IIId* | $5,270–$16,005 | two listings | 2 |
| IIIf | $550 | $445–$763 | 184 |
| IIIg | $1,021 | $860–$1,225 | 72 |
*I Compur, IId, and IIId currently have only one or two clean, body-only comps each, so those asking prices are not reliable market rates, just what a seller happens to be asking right now. Among the rest, the Ig commands a real premium over the Ic/If as the scarcest of the no-rangefinder bodies, the IIIg sits well above the rest of the III family as the most refined, and the IIIf remains by a wide margin the deepest and most liquid pool of screw-mount inventory on the site.
Browse the UsedCameraTracker listings for any of these variants by selecting the model from the dropdown. Every variant covered in this post has its own bucket, so you can compare prices and conditions across our 1,294 active screw-mount Leica listings.