Hello everybody. I also share the opinion, that for to be able to truly enjoy a Leica (or any good camera, by the way), you need to go through the trouble of learning (and enjoying) to print yourself. You can't, or shouldn't, expect that a cheap supermarket print, or maybe even an expensive professional lab, can turn a Work of Art of your negative. For that you first need a good (technically speaking) and interesting (visually speaking) negative. That is only the beginning. Then, as some already said, you need to learn the rest of the trade. All in all, it means lots of learning, frustration, re-learning, perseverance. Picking up a brush full of colour and doing some strokes in a canvas doesn't make us artists, or am I wrong on that one? In my opinion, you also still need to learn the language of the medium, study the work of other photographers you admire, ask yourself lots of questions, learn to be selfcritical. I enjoy asking people what distinguishes good photographers from bad photographers. My answer is simple: the good ones throw away their trash! You should try to develop a certain personal vision, YOUR photographic language. I don't mean creating a gimmick and using it till exaustion, like so many self-called "artists" try to do. Be honest to yourself, be prepared for some years of hard, and hopefully rewarding, work. Have fun and passion while you are at it.
Your Leica M (or your Rollei, Hasselblad, Contax, Canon, Nikon, Voigtländer, etc), are very capable instruments to help you pursuing your path. Choose them and use them according to your style, according to the task at end, to the goal you want to achieve. No camera is perfect for everything. I surelly love my Leica-M's, but I surelly won't pick up them for Architectural Photography. I can use better (meaning more specialized) cameras for the task.
I also think that we finally should stop analysing digital versus analog, in the sense of asking wich is better. Both are valid mediums, we shouldn't go confusing one with other. They better complement one another. That's my humble opinion.
Going to your main question: don't fool yourself, no camera brand per si makes a better photographer of yourself. Those cameras can surelly help, but it is you who has to lead the way. Using other people's analogies, the various cars take you to the destination, but I add that the driver is you! Maybe if you are a very healthy person, maybe then you can hire a good driver=competent printer. But also then, you will only be driven... Why have only half of the fun, when you can have the whole fun?
By the way: I am also not very happy with the marriage of b&w film and scanners...At least in 35 mm... (In large format it looks a little better). But maybe I didn't do enough homework, I know that I am not that good at it. After all it is also rather boring. Why not go directly to the wet darkroom?
One last word: one of the things a like in photography is just the action of doing it. All this ritual procedures, all this choices that need to be made, all this thinking, all this building-up of an image. That's why I love manual-analogic cameras, that's why I love Leicas, or Hasselblads(the old ones, I never tried out a digital one), or Rolleis, or large format, or...or... Using auto-everything cameras might be very fun and bring you very good results. That's true. But I personally tend to get lazy and loose some of my awareness, some of my "inner-light", some of the "fun". After all I like to load film, I like to rewind it, I like it's physical presence. I came to the point, were I even enjoy to use an old Exakta, with it's aukward mechanism, it's left-hand shutter release, it's everything the "other way philosophy". It keeps me awaken, makes me use my brain, is not easy to acomplish. The fun just lasts longer. Have a nice time and a Good Year. Rui
