Leica M11
Freezes & profile problems

• Maestro III processor with triple resolution: 60, 36 or 18 MP in both DNG and JPG
• Mechanical shutter 60 min–1/4000 s · electronic up to 1/16,000 s
• 4.5 frames/s · 2.95-inch touchscreen with 2.3 million dots
• BP-SCL7 battery, 1,800 mAh — 64% more capacity than the M10’s
• No baseplate: the battery forms the bottom of the camera (see section 1.1)
• USB-C, manual focus via rangefinder — no autofocus, no video

Sources: Leica Camera · Red Dot Forum · DPReview · PetaPixel · Macfilos

Because the M11 has no traditional baseplate — the battery serves as the base — members described the frustration of having to yank the battery mid-shoot. Technically minded members noted that when the camera freezes during a write sequence and you cut power, the file system (FAT32/exFAT) can be damaged.

The forum theory was that this not only corrupted images but often zeroed the camera’s NVRAM — where the user’s own profiles are stored — making the camera boot up as if factory-fresh. Terminology correction: several retellings speak of profiles called ”C1/C2/C3”. Leica does not name them that — the M11 uses custom profiles the owner names themselves. C1/C2/C3 is Sony and Canon nomenclature that crept into the second-hand accounts.

Partly supported — the battery pull and the absence of a baseplate are confirmed; the NVRAM mechanism is an independent community theory, not officially established.

Theories spread that Leica’s memory controller couldn’t keep up. Members reported that fast UHS-II cards — especially Lexar and certain Sony Tough cards — crashed the camera more often than slower UHS-I cards, with debate over whether the fault lay in hardware (too weak a buffer for 60 megapixels) or in buggy firmware.

Partly supported — several independent reviewers confirm the M11’s card handling is unusually sensitive and poorly compatible; the exact brand pattern (Lexar vs SanDisk) is user observation.

A tip circulated: don’t format the card in the camera first. Members told each other to deep-format with SD Card Formatter on a computer and only then format in-camera. That this was needed at all was taken as proof of how fragile the M11’s handling of its own storage was.

Not verified — the formatting tip itself is widespread, but the story that it came straight from Leica’s technicians in Wetzlar can’t be substantiated.

Other threads isolated the freezes to the camera’s 6-bit reading of the lenses. When the camera woke from sleep and you fired quickly, profile settings, lens detection and the memory buffer were thought to collide — locking the system.

Likely — in firmware 2.6.0 (Oct 2025) Leica explicitly added improved lens detection for 6-bit coded lenses, which supports this being a real problem area.
Source: L-Camera Forum · r/Leica · Macfilos (FW 2.6.0)

Every update was analysed closely. When firmware 2.2.1 shipped in February 2025, the editorial team wrote openly that the M11 family was finally cured of the occasional freezes that occurred when starting or shutting down the camera.

Confirmed — Macfilos, Leica Rumors, Red Dot Forum and L-Camera Forum all report that FW 2.2.1 (20 Feb 2025) remedied startup/shutdown freezes.

The real frustration shows in the comment sections. Reader Brian Nicol described how he suffered freezes that required a battery pull — and that his M11 had to spend four months in Wetzlar to repair an electronic fault.

Confirmed — a genuine Macfilos comment describes exactly this: recurring freezes needing a battery pull and a four-month Wetzlar repair of an electronic hardware fault.

Another reader commented wryly after a software crash:

I suppose you have to pay more for a camera … I’ve never had this problem with any other brand.Macfilos — comment section

There was a widespread sense that Leica owners were being used as free beta-testers for a half-finished software platform.

Confirmed — this kind of comment, and the ”beta-tester” sentiment, recurs throughout the Macfilos comments and the forums.

Several guest writers pointed to the irony that analogue cameras like the Leica M-A, or the stable M10 generation, never suffered these problems. They argued Leica was losing its identity — ”Das Wesentliche” — as the camera filled up with advanced but unstable digital architecture.

Confirmed — as a widespread opinion; a common counter-move is M11-P owners returning to an M10-P (or film) for the sake of stability.
Source: Macfilos · DPReview Leica forum

The phenomenon was about the camera losing its settings after sitting switched off for a few hours. Users described carefully configuring street-shooting profiles — auto-ISO, a specific metering mode, screen off — only to find the profile icon blinking red the next day, the camera reverted to its default profile.

Every time I put in a freshly charged battery it’s as if the camera has amnesia. I’ve owned every digital M since the M8, and never had to reset the clock, date and base profiles three times in a week.L-Camera Forum — referenced comment

The proposed cause: profiles created in an older firmware became incompatible after an update, and instead of a warning the camera entered a boot loop that wiped the settings register.

Name not verified — the experience itself (profiles being reset) is well documented, but the term ”M11 Dementia” can’t be found as an established forum expression, and the loop mechanism tied to a specific firmware is a theory.

The comments under Macfilos’ firmware articles are a goldmine of real field problems. Brian Nicol described how his M11 froze so badly that not even a battery pull helped — the camera had to go to Wetzlar, and the repair took four months.

I’m grateful the update focuses on the freezes and not on new emojis or voice options. But it has taken far too long to fix basic stability.Brian Nicol — Macfilos

A recurring thread claimed the Leica FOTOS app, on sync, overwrote the camera’s internal profile settings with the app’s defaults.

Mixed — the Macfilos quotes and the frustration around the FOTOS connection are confirmed; the specific claim that FOTOS overwrites profiles I find no clear support for — treat it as an independent report.

The photographer behind the YouTube channel Gaston Shutters sparked debate after recounting how his M11-P froze during a job. He reportedly isolated the freezes to lens detection, with the camera locking — using a Summilux 50 mm f/1.4 — when he switched profiles as the lens was being identified, to the point that on the final event day he had to move to a Sony.

Partly — Gaston Shutters is real and shoots both a Leica M11 (with a Summilux 50) and Sony, so the premise is plausible; the exact event (a mid-job switch due to freezing) can’t be verified from available sources.

Whole threads list which memory cards work and which ”kill” the profile memory. The M11’s architecture — where you can write to both internal storage (64/256 GB) and the SD card at once — is said to have been confused by certain fast UHS-II cards, and on a battery pull mid-write a voltage spike was thought to corrupt the hidden partition where the profiles lived.

Partly supported — card compatibility is a real, well-documented weak spot; the voltage-spike-vs-hidden-partition idea is a technical hypothesis from the forums.
Important: at least one M11-P owner reports freezes even with internal storage only — so changing cards is no guarantee.

Internal storage is no guarantee. At least one M11-P owner reports freezes even with internal storage only — relevant to your own isolation test: a clean run during the test does not prove the card was the cause.

The M11-P was not the ”fixed” M11. Several bought the M11-P believing it was a polished M11, only to hit the same freezes within days, despite the latest firmware.

The persistent counter-move. A common reaction among disappointed owners is to go back to an M10-P or to film for the sake of stability — the same reasoning Prosophos used when he switched to Nikon.

After firmware 2.2.1 (Feb 2025) the forum reports of startup/shutdown freezes fall notably quiet, and neither 2.6.0 (23 Oct 2025) nor 2.6.1 (30 Jan 2026) contains any freeze-related items. But the silence online is not the whole truth: this archive’s own M11-P Safari has frozen 3–4 times since October 2025 and keeps losing profiles — on the latest firmware (fully documented in 6.6). The conclusion is therefore not that the faults are gone, but that they have become rarer — and that those affected today are more alone, because the big threads have gone to sleep. See also 7.8: part of that silence is a dark figure, not an absence of faults.

Improved — but not fully solved — the online reports fall quiet, but see 6.6: a first-hand case in this archive shows freezes and profile problems even on the latest firmware.

Two limitations are well documented and remain by design: banding under AC/LED lighting (worse at fast shutter speeds and with PWM-dimmed fixtures) and rolling shutter — the sensor reads out in roughly a tenth of a second in 14-bit mode, so fast panning produces leaning verticals. The mechanical shutter is unaffected.

Confirmed — an architectural trait, not a bug; no firmware can conjure it away.

The community’s verdict after four years: Delkin Black V90, Lexar Professional 2000x and the Sony M series work reliably; V60 cards and UHS-I (e.g. SanDisk Extreme Pro) are often more stable than faster V90 cards. The Sony Tough cards are documented trouble — freezes on playback and, in at least one case, persistent data corruption. Fstoppers also confirmed that an overwhelmed buffer combined with lesser cards could freeze the camera.

Partly supported — benchmarks and forum threads point the same way, but no official compatibility list from Leica exists.

Through 2025 the reports kept coming: Bluetooth pairing refusing despite Bluetooth being on, demands to disable VPNs, and a confirmed bug where background transfer on the M11 ignored the favourites-only setting (fixed in an app update). One user wryly summarised that it was easier to transfer files from a 1971 M4 than through the app.

Confirmed — Leica’s developers have acknowledged the issues in App Store replies and shipped fixes continuously.

Bricked during firmware update (2022). Cameras stuck installing 1.2.1.0 could be rescued by removing the card, deleting the firmware file and reinserting it — a real but early-fixed bug.

1–1.5 fps instead of 3. A forum thread documents Continuous Low shooting slower than promised, along with randomly overexposed frames — both addressed in later firmware.

AWB and auto exposure. Recurring reviewer criticism (Alik Griffin among others): not on par with modern flagships. Remains a weakness rather than a fault.

The Prosophos case. Confirmed: he documented intermittent freezes requiring a battery pull despite updates (Oct 2023) and left the system — the dig’s clearest example of the trust cost.

The long-term test as counterpoint. Jonathan Slack’s eight months with the M11 Monochrom (Macfilos, Apr 2026) describes a stable camera — a sign that late units on current firmware are a different experience from 2022–2023.

Sources: Red Dot Forum · Leica Rumors · Macfilos · Fstoppers · DPReview forums · L-Camera Forum · Alik Griffin · Prosophos

The archive’s own camera — an M11-P Safari on the latest firmware — has frozen 3–4 times since October 2025 and shows recurring problems with the user profiles. This directly contradicts the picture in 6.1: the online reports falling quiet doesn’t mean the faults are gone, only that they have become rarer.

The case is especially telling because the Safari edition launched in May 2025 — a late-production unit, technically identical to the M11-P, that nevertheless shows the same symptom pattern as 2022–2023: freezes requiring a battery pull and profiles that don’t survive.

A milder failure mode that requires no freeze at all. Alongside the four freezes there is a far more frequent behaviour: the camera sits with a chosen custom profile, goes into standby — and when you enter the menu again it has silently reverted to the default profile. No crash, no warning, no battery pull; the settings are simply no longer the ones you selected.

This deserves to be distinguished from ”profiles reset”, described in 1.1 and 3.1. Nothing is erased here — the profiles are still there — but the active profile is dropped on wake-up. That ties the symptom to the same wake-up sequence that recurs in 1.4 (lens detection) and 7.6 (first frame misexposed after standby), and makes that link considerably more plausible than a theory about corrupted NVRAM.

The frequency differs too: freezes are counted in single events since October 2025, whereas the profile switch happens repeatedly. It is likely precisely this kind of silent fault that is hardest to capture in statistics — the owner often notices only once a frame has come out wrong.

Isolation test in progress: factory reset on the latest firmware with profiles rebuilt from scratch, a period on internal storage only, manual lens selection instead of 6-bit auto detection, and FOTOS/Bluetooth switched off. Every freeze is logged (date, lens, card, action) as documentation for Leica Customer Care.

Confirmed first-hand — documented by the archive’s owner; to be updated as the isolation test yields results.

The weightiest of the new finds: Fred Miranda — founder of one of photography’s oldest review sites — writes that he tested two M11 bodies a few months after launch, and that both suffered random freezes. An experienced tester getting the same fault on two separate cameras argues against the “isolated Monday-morning unit” explanation.

Confirmed — first-hand account from a named, established tester.

Three separate threads carry the discussion: M11 problems, M11 problems as widespread as they seem? and Is Leica M11 software too buggy. The picture that emerges is split. On one side, owners whose bodies were ”riddled with problems” — cameras refusing to charge over USB and freezing regularly despite firmware, hard resets and card swaps — describing ”the unsettling sense of a defect lottery” when buying, new or used. One owner sums up the software as Leica’s Achilles’ heel.

On the other side, equally firm counter-voices: M11-P bodies described as flawless through a two-month trip around Africa, and Leica Amsterdam stating that freezes on the M11-P are now extremely rare.

Mixed — both pictures are real; the variation between individual units and production periods appears to be the decisive variable.

On L-Camera Forum a thread runs across eight or nine pages under the telling title ”M11 service problems: a sign of bigger underlying issues”, started in October 2023. The starting point was a barely one-year-old M11 that stopped recognising Leica’s own lenses — not every time, but often enough to become untenable. The thread ties lens detection (see 1.4) to service quality and the question of whether the faults are symptoms of something structural.

Alongside it sit the thread ”Poor quality control in Leica?” and, on Fred Miranda, ”Leica M11-D Issues: Seeking Advice on Replacement vs. Repair” (Feb 2025) — an eight-week-old M11-D whose owner is weighing replacement against repair.

Confirmed — the threads exist and are extensive; the “structural” conclusion is the thread starter’s interpretation, not established fact.

The street photographer behind Streets of Nuremberg documented his departure across three posts: My Leica failed me (2022), The Leica failed me – AGAIN (2 Feb 2025) and The end of my journey with Leica (16 Feb 2025). The camera that failed twice with System Error was an SL2-S, not an M11 — but the case belongs here anyway, because it concerns the same thing as the Brian Nicol case: how Leica handles a broken camera. The repair was classified as impact damage and priced at roughly 800 euros, and it was the treatment as much as the fault that sent him to Nikon.

Confirmed event — different model — relevant as service culture and trust cost, not as evidence of M11-specific faults.

Notebookcheck (German) concluded already in its launch test that the M11 shows great potential but also weaknesses that in part cannot be fixed by updates — the headline speaks plainly of “new features and new problems”. Alik Griffin titles his review ”An Icon With Glaring Problems” and notes among other things that the camera does not write at UHS-II speeds even though it supports the standard — a detail that connects to the buffer and card problems in 6.3.

On Trustpilot, complaints about Leica’s customer service recur: customers left in the dark for weeks, disputes over warranty and repair quality. DPReview carries a thread with the less-than-subtle title ”Leica customer service – THE WORST”. Individual ratings are always selective, but the pattern is hard to dismiss.

Partly supported — the trade press criticism is verifiable; customer ratings are by definition self-selected and should be read accordingly.

One find sits close to this archive’s own case (6.6): an owner reports that a brand-new M11-P shows flickering in the viewfinder when the camera is moved between scenes of differing brightness, plus auto exposure that blows out the first frame — typically right after waking from standby. The symptom “first frame after sleep comes out wrong” points to the same wake-up sequence the forums suspected back in 2022 (see 1.4).

From the service side there is also a documented case where Leica, during repair, found both a defective shutter and a sensor that had shifted out of tolerance, requiring replacement of the sensor carrier and the sensor — and where the same faults returned two years later, by then out of warranty.

Individual reports — not statistics, but the “fault on wake-up” pattern recurs independently and is worth testing against in one’s own log.

The digging must not become one-sided. Gajan Balan (Church & Street) has published a series of long-term reviews of the M11, M11-P and M EV1 in which reliability does not dominate. Moment calls the M11 “the best M camera to date”. Jonathan Slack’s eight months with the M11 Monochrom (see 6.5) point the same way. And the DPReview threads contain plenty of owners who simply never ran into anything.

The reasonable conclusion from the whole body of material: the faults are real and well documented, but they affect a subset of units — which is precisely what makes them so frustrating to discuss, since two owners can have diametrically opposite experiences of the same camera model.

Confirmed — an important balancing point: the absence of problems is as well documented as their presence.

There is a methodological weakness here that applies to this entire archive, and it is worth stating plainly. All the material rests on those who bothered to write: started a thread, commented under an article, left a rating. Owners who are affected but stay silent appear in none of it.

The archive’s owner personally knows of three M11 owners with freezes or profile problems who never reported them — neither to Leica Customer Care nor on any forum. The reasons are the usual ones: it takes time, you suspect you did something wrong yourself, you have grown used to pulling the battery, or you are simply not a forum person.

The consequence matters for how section 6.1 should be read. The number of posts measures willingness to write, not fault frequency. The big threads going quiet after 2.2.1 may just as well mean that those affected gave up reporting as that the faults stopped. The same cuts the other way in 7.7: people who never had a problem rarely start a thread about it.

There is a practical consequence for Leica too. Faults never reported to Customer Care never enter the statistics that determine what the next firmware prioritises. Every unreported freeze therefore makes the problem slightly less visible to the people who could fix it — which is the strongest argument for actually logging and reporting (see 6.6).

Methodological limitation — three known cases are anecdote, not statistics; but they suffice to establish that unreported cases exist, and therefore that silence cannot be read as the absence of faults.
Sources: Fred Miranda — M11 reliability · FM — M11-D Issues · DPReview — Too buggy? · DPReview — As widespread? · DPReview — M11 problems · DPReview — Customer service · L-Camera Forum — Service problems · L-Camera Forum — Quality control · Streets of Nuremberg · Notebookcheck · Trustpilot · Church & Street

The first dig missed an entire seam: threads dealing specifically with user profiles not being saved. There are at least seven, spread across several firmware versions and across the M11, M11-P and Monochrom — which makes it one of the most persistent faults in the whole body of material.

The symptom descriptions are strikingly close to this archive’s own case in 6.6: the camera starts in the default profile instead of the chosen one, the profile reverts mid-shoot without anything being touched, and custom profiles marked as active simply have no effect.

But the most recent thread (May 2026) points to something other than a firmware fault. An M11-P owner describes how the FN button switches mode on an accidental press: ISO jumps to 12500, the shutter changes to hybrid, file handling changes — and as he puts it, the profile becomes meaningless. That is a concrete alternative explanation requiring no fault at all, just an awkwardly placed button.

For anyone affected the difference is decisive. A firmware fault can only be waited out; an FN button can be reassigned. Check what the FN button is set to before concluding the camera is broken — and note in the log whether the profile change coincides with the camera being handled, not merely with standby.

Partly supported — profile loss is broadly documented across several models; the FN button as the explanation is a single owner observation to be tested, not assumed.
The threads: M11P resets the settings (May 2026) · M11M — profiles not persisting · FW 2.0.1 — profiles not saved · M11 won’t save custom settings · Profiles not working properly · M11-P setting user profiles · Fred Miranda — getting the M11 to save profiles