The first item on the Leica M11-P menu is titled “Lens Detection.” I had originally set it to “Auto” (who wouldn’t) and then found out very quickly that as I am not using any Leica lenses, the Auto setting is meaningless. In fact, the “Auto” setting actually coded “R-Lens” into the EXIF data, which is not what I wanted.
This annoyance brought me on a little journey to fix the ‘error.’ Google search show several options to fix the EXIT data (mostly by using some combination of EXIFTools). Then I came across (a) a Lightroom plugin called LensTagger — which deserved a separate post, and (b) something called the Leica’s 6-bit code. (see here)
Leica introduced the 6-bit code to ‘tag’ their lenses — a list has been created by La Vida Leica, and is available here.
Then someone discovered that if the 6-bit code were to be ‘drawn in’ onto the rim of an uncoded lens (using a Sharpie pen), this could fool the Leica M-camera into thinking a certain Leica lens was mounted. For example, when using a Voigtlander 21mm f1.4, one could using the 6-bit code for
Here’s another write-up about the 6-bit code.
La Vida Leica has an improved template that can be printed, should you be interested in that.
However, according to Elgenper, there is really no need for a template.With the list of Leica 6-bit code in hand, follows the following steps:
- Take the lens off the Leica M (camera).
- Locate the sensor on the Leica M.
- Mark the positions of the sensor on the lens mount surface.
- Continue the marks down the outside of the mount.
He had included an image in the original post (which is now lost on the Internet). So I decided to decipher what he actually mean.