Chinese accessories and optics manufacturer TTArtisan has revealed its new Leica M-mount to Sony E-mount adapter. The TTArtisan ME 6-Bit adapter supports all modern and legacy M-mount lenses and in addition to supporting data transmission with lenses that support Leica’s 6-bit electronic circuitry, it has the additional ability to send pre-encoded focal lengths to a camera body and simulate the electronic communication.

Leica’s 6-bit code system is the company’s method for providing EXIF data to a camera. M-Mount lenses have electronic circuitry that tells the camera its lens information using a 6-bit code of ones and zeros. Depending on their arrangement, a camera with an optical 6-bit code reader can know what lens is attached.

Many M-mount lenses lack contacts for transmitting any kind of metadata to the camera bodies they’re attached to—be it an M-mount camera or adapted camera— so TTArtisan has taken it upon itself to pre-encode a set of common focal lengths into its new adapter, which can then be selected by the user via a rotary dial when a lens is attached.

This can be beneficial for a variety of reasons, chief of which is that the Sony mirrorless cameras use in-body image stabilization which is optimized for specific focal lengths. Without focal length information, the stabilization won’t be as effective. To function properly, the focal length needs to be set on the adapter after it has been placed on the lens but before the entire assembly is attached to a camera. In this way, the pre-encoded focal length information will be picked up by the camera.