I switched to digital when I rented a Canon digital outfit that (roughly) matched the Nikon film outfit I normally used at my daughter's horse shows. The digital deal was closed first night, when I put the CF card in my laptop computer and had digital "contact sheets" from the equivalent of 10 rolls of film, ready to print (when I got home) in a matter of minutes instead of the 3-4 nights I would have spent in the darkroom making contact sheets with film. I came back from that weekend and ordered the then-new Nikon D100 and never took another frame of film. Once I'd gone for a couple of years without even thinking about pulling out a film camera, I sold all of the film cameras (Minox, Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Rollei, and Graphic), all but the Nikon lenses, all darkroom developing and enlarging equipment and almost all of the tidbits that went with all that stuff. (I kept the Gossen flash meter for some reason, although I never use it, and the radio remote triggers that worked with the Nikon digital cameras.) The darkroom is now where the photo printers live.

I remember the film days, and darkroom work, fondly, but would never go back to it as long as I can afford to stay digital (which, despite the free "film" seems a lot more expensive than I remember film capture and output being.) The near-limitless roll of film that is a 32GB SD card, the instant review of exposure and composition if desired, the immense flexibility of image editing software and the ability to safeguard the originals by merely copying to an additional storage device or two, plus the power and quality of photo printers - I made ~1,000 8x8 B&W prints that went into bound books as gifts for about a dozen family members last Christmas, which were done WITHOUT having to stand up for hours on end in a darkroom, on ever-ageing feet - means film is going to remain a memory I can visit when I choose, but don't have to endure any more.

Well, it was a long time ago (late '60s, 1970 at the latest) when I bought the M3 - new in box with the collapsible Elmar 50/2.8, in a small camera store in Northern California (not a hotbed of Leica users) - and IIRC the Summaron with eyes was THE way to go if you wanted a 35mm lens that automatically "fixed" your viewfinder when you put the lens on the camera. They were readily available, at least when I looked for one. The 35mm f/2.0 Summicron was the sexier alternative, but that extra stop of speed cost a lot AND you had to buy the separate viewfinder, which was also expensive and (compared to the big clump of Summaron with eyes) easier to lose.