I must say, I am shocked. Despite being used to dismay design ideas from Leica, they did pull it like Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown: They made something totally ridiculous — again!

After the grossly bizarre exibition with the Leica-M10-D model, Company has prepared another model for their customers with more money than brains — it is called Leica M10-P ASC 100 Edition. At first, it doesn’t look so bad…

The idea is to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Society of Cinematographers. You may ask yourself what is the connection between a World famous STILLS camera brand with a cinematography. Well, since its very early days, when Oskar Barnack took 35mm motion picture film strips to use them in still cameras, he also used the original Leica camera to test exposure settings for cinema cameras with a still camera.

With the camera and lens, buyers of the set receive a Visoflex electronic viewfinder and a Leica M-PL-Mount which allows for the use for most PL mount cine lenses with the camera. This means cinematographers can view and test scenes with a cine lens before motion picture shooting begins.

And that is OK. But then you look at the top plate and see…

…NOTHING! The design “geniuses” of this “Strictly limited masterpiece” decide to leave you guessing about exposure and ISO settings, with black-on-black markings, all in line with the retro look of the 1914 Leica Ur model!

They should, by all means, call it Leica M10-P SRM 100% Edition, and save the “Leica M10-P ASC 100 Edition” for a normal one, with a white-on-black markings, that actually could be used in photography and cinematography. They have not yet figured out how high will they set a price for this monstrosity, but be sure you are sitting when they do it.

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you wondering what that SRM acronym means — it stands for Stark Raving Mad!

Universal Basic Income