It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon-root for the winning team, rave about a popular restaurant or join in on a fad. On the other hand, it’s lonely supporting the underdog, trying a hole in the wall dining spot or setting your own personal style.

Such as it is with the Leica R6, one of a series of SLRs that Leica introduced beginning with the SL and SL2 in the 1960s and culminating with the oddly shaped R9 in 2002. Scour the internet for reviews on any of these cameras and you’ll find slim pickings. While cameras like the Canon AE-1, Minolta X-700, any of the Nikon F series, Pentax M42 or K mount bodies or Leica’s M rangefinders have legions of devoted followers singing their praises, with the Leica R series…you’ll hear mostly crickets.

Let’s face it, Leica was not known for building great single lens reflex cameras. The company wandered down that road only after it became apparent that Japanese camera manufacturers were capturing the imagination of photographers (and the marketplace) with a quickly evolving line of well designed and easy to use SLRs. After the SL and SL2, German designed and built manual everything tanks, Leica teamed up with Minolta to release a series of perfectly capable camera bodies with varying degrees of technology that mated to a limited but quite extraordinary series of Leica-built R lenses. The R3, R4 and R5 cameras had electronically-controlled shutters and auto exposure metering. None of them sold well. By the time 1988 rolled around, Leica decided to return to what they knew best-a fully manual minimalist mechanical camera. At this time, it was far more economical to build a camera with an electronic shutter rather than the clockwork mechanism required for a shutter independent of electricity, so when the R6 hit the shelves it came with a price tag that put it out of reach for the advanced amateur and pro market it was intended for. When you consider the fact that Nikon was rolling out their revolutionary auto focus F4 at the same time as the R6, it’s amazing Leica sold any of these cameras at all.

Unpopular and unloved. An underdog. A perfect camera for the Fogdog Blog!