WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: 88-Day Confirmed Operation Warranty. Clean and pristine. Some very minor wear marks, only noted for full disclosure. Scroll down if you want to learn about the design, performance, and story behind it. Or don’t. It’ll be here either way.

The Leitz Wetzlar 14167 is known in collector circles by the rather fetching nickname "MR Ring." It's as though it were a jewel rather than a chunk of chrome-plated brass and anodized aluminum. It is one of those quietly brilliant solutions that only a certain kind of obsessive German engineering culture could have produced, and only in 1971.

Introduced as the more refined successor to the earlier 14127, this precision adapter exists to answer a question most photographers never thought to ask: what happens when a lens designed for the peculiar optical distances of the Visoflex mirror housing suddenly wants to live on an R-series SLR body? This applies to the 65mm Elmar, the 90mm Elmarit, and the 135mm Tele-Elmar, each a small masterpiece of glass.

The 14167 is the answer, a mechanical diplomat fluent in both M-mount and R-body dialects. It allows those Visoflex lenses to achieve infinity focus on the Leicaflex SL, SL2, and the full R3-through-R9 lineage. It has the good manners to remind standard M-mount lenses that they're welcome too, though strictly as macro extensions, mind you.

It carries no optics whatsoever and at roughly 103 grams, it adds mass without adding glass, confidence without compromise. Its tolerances are so tight that light leaks and mechanical play simply don't occur. There's the red alignment dot, the satisfying locking lever, and the stop-down metering that asks you to slow down and think.

It's rare enough to make collectors lean forward slightly at estate sales, and significant enough that serious photographers still mount one without irony.