Will Leica make a medium format mirrorless camera?

Those eagle-eyed folk at Leica Rumors have spotted something in the keynote presentation for the Leica M11. It’s a scene in a Leica design office with a row of camera mockups on a bench – and one of them, says Leica Rumors, looks like a medium format mirrorless.

We’re not so sure. To us, the body looks bigger but the sensor looks like regular full frame. To be fair, either possibility is intriguing. If Leica does make a medium format mirrorless camera it could spell the end for the big and pricey Leica S3 medium format DSLR, which does look beautiful, but with only 64MP and a $20,000 price tag it feels like this once-innovative camera is now some way behind the curve.

If this is a mockup of a larger full frame camera, that’s intriguing too. Will Leica make a super-fast sports camera in the same style as the Nikon Z9 or Canon EOS R3? 

Given Leica’s long association with Panasonic, we’re not so sure. Panasonic does not have a camera like this in its line-up, so pretty much all that’s left for a new full frame model is a ‘cinema’ Leica SL2 based on the Lumix S1H. 

Wouldn’t this have happened already? Not necessarily. The 24MP Leica SL2-S arrived a considerable time after the Lumix S1 we reckon it's based on.

So, back to a medium format mirrorless camera. It seems to us that in order to make this work commercially and technically, Leica would need one of Sony’s medium format sensors, notably the 100MP sensor in the Fujifilm GFX 100S.

And why not? The assumption is that the new 60MP Leica M11 uses the Sony sensor that features in the A7R IV (we don’t know if that’s true).