It’s pretty hard for a digital Leica M camera to look anonymous. From a distance it might just be mistaken for one of Fujifilm’s X-Pro models or maybe even an X100, but up close there’s no mistaking the shape and styling. Yup, that’s a Leica alright, even if it doesn’t say so on the front.
So the M11-P is the ‘stealthy’ version of the standard M11 which means that it goes without the famous red-dot badge – a dead giveaway even if you don’t know your cameras – but there’s still ‘Leica’ writ rather large on the top plate in the classic script that dates back to the 1930s. It’s engraved and painted in, of course, not screen-printed, but it does rather give the game away. Tiny lettering on one of the hotshoe rails identifies the model number.
Although it may not exactly be incognito, the M11-P is all pared-back elegance, especially in black when metal and material all blend into the one…er… distinctive shape. But the big deal about the M11-P is not about what’s on the outside (or not, as the case may be), but what’s inside because it’s the world’s first camera to embed secure metadata along with an image using the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) technology. The digital provenance information – the ‘Content Credentials’ – is hardware-based so every image taken with the Leica M11-P receives a digital signature backed by a CAI-compliant certificate. Subsequently, the authenticity of these images can be easily verified at any time using a freely-available, open-source CAI tool. This means that ownership and copyright details can’t be tampered with and, any subsequent editing, is recorded so, for example, a photojournalist will be able to prove that an image is exactly as it was taken by the camera. Any changes made after capture and on the way to the end application – even basic edits such as cropping or exposure adjustments – is added to the secure CAI data and so there for all to see. The key impetus for this is obviously AI-generated
