A new 50mm Summicron will set you back £2000, and bring you very little, if any, objective advantage over the Zeiss Planar. If you want a new, or at least modern Leica lens, you need to push that budget to at least £1000, if not more. Or you could buy a 1970’s version 3 Summicron – a great lens in its own right, but the modern 3rd-party alternatives are – objectively speaking – better lenses (sharper, less flare, etc). So what about the arguments made that Leica lenses have always been objectively better? Well, given the fact that the likes of Voigtlander and Zeiss (all be it largely via Cosina) still make Leica Mount lenses today, and the fact that even very old Leica lenses demand a significant premium on the used market, there’s a good chance there’s a 3rd-party lens that offers objectively more than what an equivalent Leica lens does at the same price point.įor example, if you’ve just bought a Leica M6 for £1200, and you want 50mm lens for it and have a budget of up to £800 to keep your total spend less than £2k, you could buy a brand new Zeiss 50mm f/2 Planar, a Voigtlander 50 f/1.2 or f/1.5 Nokton. With Leica mount kit, it all comes down to subjective preferences for both camera and lens, but since the lens mounts are the same – and there’s no compromise to functionality with either combination – the choices made can be for subjective preferences for either or both camera and lens, and not just for technical compatibility. My M-Mount Konica Hexar with the only Leica lens I currently own – a Leica thread mount 50mm Elmar Not only this, but many if not most of these brands have also made cameras that take advantage of the Leica lens mounts, meaning it’s just as viable for someone to buy a Leica camera just to shoot a Konica lens as it is valid to buy Konica camera just to shoot a Leica lens. In fact, Canon, Nikon, Zeiss, Voigtlander, Minolta, Konica, Fuji, Olympus and many more, have all at some point in their history made lenses that will – without compromise to functionality – work perfectly on the Leica mount camera systems. Many brands over the years have made lenses that fit Leica cameras too. Things are different with Leica rangefinder cameras because their lens mounts are so universal.
#50mm summicron apo microcontrast full
This is primarily because to shoot a Nikon lens and retain full functionality, ideally a Nikon camera is required. Camera choiceįor example, if someone were to purchase a Nikon SLR film camera, just to access the Nikkor lens range, I don’t think it would seem particularly unusual. What compounds the oddness here is that it would actually make more sense in some other brands. In fact, more often than not, what I find elsewhere costs less money, and I like what I find slightly more.īut, before I get to some some of the realities of Leica lenses, I just want to touch on the odd fact that this sort of ideal doesn’t really exist in other brands – at least not to the same extent. They just don’t ever give me what I want from a lens that I can’t find elsewhere. It’s not that I don’t like them, in fact I’ve had a lot of appreciation for all of the Leica lenses I’ve shot for one reason or another. Call me shallow if you like, I don’t care! As a photographer, I think I’m well within my rights to appreciate the things in front of my eyes based on their aesthetic appeal!Īs for the lenses though, I’m not so smitten. They’re small, they have a simple interface which I appreciate a great deal, they are rangefinders – which work better for me than SLRs – and I’d even add to those pros by saying I like the way they look. I’m well aware of their flaws I’ve shot most of them now, so I know what about them works, and indeed what doesn’t.Īll I’m saying is that, for me, and the way I use cameras, they do work – in fact, they suit me down to the ground. Now, just for clarity, let me say that I don’t think they are the best cameras ever made, or that everyone should own and shoot them, or that they take better photos than other cameras. They are, to me, the absolute peak of camera design! If you’re new to this website, you might not be aware that I’m a massive fan of Leica rangefinder cameras. I guess the place to start is to first explain my feelings toward Leica brand cameras and lenses.