The Leica M8 doesn't just have a pretty body, nor is it resting on the laurels of its predecessors: it's got a 10.3 megapixel resolution, with a low-noise CCDimagesensor that starts at ISO 160 but that can also kick up to ISO 2500.
The key difference is that instead of focusing the light on a strip of photochemical film as in traditional cameras, digital cameras use an imagesensor, called a charge coupled device (CCD), to capture the image.