I did the right thing. LXV turned out to be in excellent condition, with only a dent in its metal accessory lens hood cap to bring it down. That dent was of no consequence, as I've never used the hood cap. But because of that damage to it, I got a Wetzlar-made Leica cheaply, saving perhaps £200. Lucky me! A lesson in the benefits of not dithering. I've always thought that if I'd waited until I got home, the camera would have gone, sold to somebody else.
LXV's serial number is 4794548, and my own researches into X Vario serial numbers - I maintain a spreadsheet of cameras spotted for sale on the Internet, as Leica themselves do not publish production information - suggest that it was one of 4,000 cameras initially made. Not many more followed. Indeed, I think that altogether only 5,000 X Varios were ever manufactured. So although not rare, it's a decidedly uncommon camera. I don't think I'll ever come across somebody else using another Leica X Vario. Flickr hosts billions of photos, but I seem to be the only person in the world who, in 2024, is constantly uploading pictures taken with a Leica X Vario. I conclude that most of them languish in collectors' cabinets, and are rarely touched. A pity; they make very good cameras for travel and street photography. And they have that currently-fashionable retro vibe in spades.
A few are always available for sale online - mostly in good or excellent condition, because they haven't been used enough to collect knocks and scrapes. The prices asked vary between £500 for beat-up examples to £3,000 for 'mint' cameras, the upper end of this price range signifying an as-new model that has allegedly never been taken out of its box. Quite often the seller is abroad, in Japan or the USA, and not only is there a shipping cost, but import duties too, making the purchase a rather expensive proposition. I believe that after its launch many of the X Varios made were left stranded on dealers' shelves for a long time until bought up by resellers, mostly foreign, hoping to make money from the collector market. Well, I wish them luck. They may have to wait quite a time to get their money back, let alone make a profit on such a speculation.
Although it has now become - at least among Leica enthusiasts - something of a cult camera, the X Vario bombed when first revealed back in June 2013. The pre-launch marketing raised high expectations that were immediately dashed. People thought Leica were going to offer something very different, and claimed to feel misled. These grown adults - mostly mature men of course - felt able to rubbish and vilify the camera to an astonishing extent. Why did it matter so much to them? Why was the language so intemperate? Leica took a kicking. After this awful start, sales never picked up, and the company withdrew the X Vario from its list of current cameras in 2017. But it was dead long before that.
So my camera was a one-off model with no successor. Leica never took the concept of an APS-C camera with a fixed zoom lens any further. In truth they didn't need to. They had instead the highly successful full-frame Q series on their hands.
The X Vario has remained unknown to the general public. It's easily mistaken for one of Leica's super-expensive and very famous M series rangefinders. I am sometimes accosted by other photographers who think I am toting an M9 or M10, which when new cost thousands of pounds for the body alone, or even the current M11, for which you will certainly pay luxury money. LXV's lens, assumed to be detachable, is also regarded as very expensive. So at first glance I could be carrying a camera-and-lens combo worth at least £10,000. I'm mindful that this makes me a potential target for snatch thieves. When shooting, my fingers tend to cover that tell-tale red dot. But increasingly I see peril in displaying LXV too openly in the wrong place. In a poor district, or in a crowd, I'd keep LXV hidden. I may have spent only hundreds on LXV and its accessories, but the world at large doesn't know that, and I don't want to be mugged - and probably hurt - when some drug addict needing cash tries his luck.
That's a reason why it's wise not to take photographs with one eye squinting into a viewfinder and the other closed. In that moment, one is blind and oblivious to what may be happening in the vicinity. One needs to stay aware of dubious characters shuffling into position for a heist.
I think that in any case it's especially good policy for a woman to retain an all-round field of view in potentially dangerous situations, and not keep her eye glued to a viewfinder. She should stick to the screen, and stay alert. I never put myself within grabbing-distance of any man unless I'm sure he's all right. In theory, I could throw, swing or shove LXV into a male attacker's face and hospitalise him, my camera being an all-metal blunt instrument; but I wouldn't be too confident of getting the chance.
LXV arrived in a fancy box with drawers. The only part of the packaging missing was the silver outer case that would have fallen open like a flower spreading out its petals. Everything else I hoped for was there, including the metal lens hood.