By Ked · June 2026
June 2026
Leica has built cameras for a century using a famously small vocabulary of letters and numbers. M, R, P, E, D, CL, MP, the company keeps recombining the same handful of designations, and inevitably it has reused several of them outright. You get the sense that somewhere in Wetzlar there is a very small drawer of approved letters, and rather than order more, everyone just agreed to take turns. The result is a catalog where a single name can point to two completely different cameras built decades apart, with different sensors, different formats, sometimes even different lens mounts. For anyone shopping the used market this is a trap: a listing that says "Leica CL" or "Leica MP" is genuinely ambiguous until you check the details. This post catalogs the duplicated names and how to tell the two cameras apart.
The MP name has been used twice, both times on film cameras. The original MP of 1956 was a rare professional M, built in small numbers and designed to work with a motor drive, prized today as one of the most collectible screw-and-bayonet-era Leicas. The modern MP, launched in 2003 and still in production, is a contemporary mechanical film M built as a no-compromise traditionalist's camera. They share a name and a back-to-basics spirit but are separated by nearly half a century and are entirely different cameras. And neither has anything to do with the digital "-P" suffix on bodies like the M10-P, which is a separate naming idea covered in our post on the Leica "-P" cameras. For the modern MP specifically see our M-A vs MP comparison.
The M-E name covers two different digital Ms. The first, the M-E (Typ 220) of 2012, was a budget version of the CCD M9. The second, the M-E (Typ 240) of 2019, was a lower-priced M built on the CMOS M (Typ 240) platform, with a completely different sensor generation. Same name, two different imaging cores, seven years apart. Both were simplified entry-point Ms, a story told in full in our post on the simplified Leicas. The Typ number is your disambiguator: Typ 220 is the CCD camera, Typ 240 is the CMOS one.
The "MD" designation goes back to the 1960s, when Leica made viewfinderless, rangefinderless M bodies, the MD, MDa, and MD-2, intended for scientific, technical, and reproduction work where the camera was mounted to a microscope or copy stand rather than held to the eye. Decades later Leica revived the idea and the letters with the digital M-D (Typ 262) of 2016, a screenless digital M with no rear LCD at all. The link is conceptual, a stripped-back M with something deliberately missing, but the cameras could hardly be more different: one is a film tool with no viewfinder, the other a digital rangefinder with no screen. See our post on screenless digital Leicas for the modern one.
The CL is the most dramatic reuse of all. The original CL of 1973, developed with Minolta and also sold as the Leitz Minolta CL, was a small, affordable full-frame film rangefinder, an inexpensive way into M-mount lenses. In 2017, presumably confident that everyone who owned the first one had moved on, Leica attached the exact same two letters to something utterly unrelated: the Leica CL, an APS-C digital mirrorless camera on the L-mount family of lenses, with an electronic viewfinder and autofocus. A film rangefinder and a digital autofocus mirrorless, sharing nothing but a name and 44 years of distance. A listing that just says "Leica CL" tells you almost nothing; the decade and the words film or digital tell you everything.
For a deeper cut, consider the S designation. In 1996 Leica made the S1, a high-resolution scanning studio camera, the kind of device that captured a single huge image over several minutes and was used for art reproduction. More than a decade later Leica launched its modern S system, the S2 and later S bodies, professional medium-format digital SLRs. The "S" lineage and the number recur on cameras with nothing in common but the manufacturer and a fondness for the letter. The S name has carried more meanings across Leica's history than almost any other single letter, which is saying something in a catalog this thrifty with the alphabet.
Beyond outright duplicate names, Leica leans hard on a few suffixes that reappear across generations and bodies, blurring the line between reuse and a naming convention:
These are arguably conventions rather than collisions, but they contribute to the same effect: a buyer has to read the full model string, not just the headline letters, to know what camera is actually on offer.
The practical takeaway for shoppers is simple. When a Leica name could mean two cameras, look for three things: the Typ number (which uniquely identifies every digital body, so M-E Typ 220 is never confused with Typ 240), the era or year (a 1970s CL versus a 2017 CL), and the format (film versus digital, full-frame versus APS-C). Any one of those usually resolves the ambiguity. A seller who lists only "Leica CL" or "Leica MP" without those details is not necessarily hiding anything, the names really are that overloaded, but it is always worth confirming exactly which camera you are buying before you commit. Leica may only own a dozen letters, but they are expensive letters, and you want the right one.
Browse current Leica listings on UsedCameraTracker, where bodies are organized by their full model and Typ designation, so the reused names are pinned down to the specific camera every time.