The 1973 Leica CL — Compact Leica — was co-developed with Minolta as a smaller, affordable M-mount rangefinder, sold in Japan as the Leitz Minolta CL, and remains the lightest way to shoot Leica M glass on film.
It offers a vertical-travel cloth shutter from 1/2s to 1/1000s, TTL match-needle metering on a swing-out CdS cell, framelines for 40mm, 50mm and 90mm, and a body roughly two-thirds the weight of a Leica M5.
Its significance is democratising the M mount: paired with the 40mm f/2 Summicron-C it outsold expectations so convincingly that Leitz reportedly discontinued it to protect M-body sales, and it later inspired the Minolta CLE.
Used CLs hinge on the meter: the CdS cell and its swing arm are the known weak point and parts are scarce, so a dead meter should discount the price — the camera shoots fine without it. Check framelines and shutter tapering; the 2017 digital Leica CL is a completely different L-mount camera sharing only the name.