Konica Hexar RF
35 mm rangefinder camera

The Konica Hexar RF is a 35 mm rangefinder camera which was sold by Konica. It was introduced to the market on 13 October 1999. and subsequently discontinued (apparently without official notice) some time before the end of 2003. The camera used the "Bayonet Konica KM-mount", a copy of the Leica M-mount, thus sharing interchangeable lenses with those designed for Leica cameras and others compatible with them. The Hexar RF has a combined rangefinder/viewfinder modeled on that of Leica cameras, a similar body shape and size - and so is similar to Leica M-mount cameras in many aspects of operation.
Lens mount
The Konica Hexar RF accepts lenses designed for the "Bayonet Konica KM-mount" a copy of the Leica M-mount. Because of this, the Hexar RF can mount and focus lenses designed for the Leica and other compatible M-mount cameras or, when used with an adapter, the earlier Leica thread mount lenses (note that due to physical constraints there is no adapter to allow bayonet mount lenses to be fitted to a Leica screw-mount camera).
When first released there was some controversy and discussion about whether the "Bayonet Konica KM-mount" of the Hexar RF was, in fact, fully compatible with the Leica M-mount. Some earlier testers reported problems using Leica lenses on Hexar RF cameras. Konica made no comment on the issue, and continued to refer to their lens mount by their own name, with no reference to Leica.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Konica Hexar RF” is 35 mm rangefinder camera. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Konica, Hexar and rangefinder, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q349978. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Konica Hexar RF” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.