Modern Classic: Leica Summilux-M 50 mm f1.4

[Leon Berg]

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vor 32 Minuten schrieb FrozenInTime:

@Leon Berg The new 11714 has the modern sharp high contrast rendering with smooth backgrounds similar to the ASPH lenses, but without the aspherical surfaces or weak mechanics of the ASPH v1 FLE mechanism; consequently I think it will retain value better than the v1 ASPH. The 11714 Achilles heal is field curvature and corner sharpness; if you can manage that it is a good choice.

The pre-asph v3 E46 looks very different; better corners with large structure detail; outlining in background; fine resolution and contrast are lower. Good v3's cost more than used ASPH v1s for a reason.

Thank you for the insight. Interesting fact. 
 

May I ask what you mean with "if you can manage"? Like if you can live with it or to include it in your thoughts while shooting with it? How pronounced is the field curvature and corner sharpness from your perspective? 

I might try the lens out and find out for myself If it's a keeper.. Have you tried it and maybe tested yourself? Whats wrong with the mechanics of the Asph. Mark I ? 

 

 

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[lct]

1 hour ago, Leon Berg said:

But man.. this new old Summilux man, this lens is really smiling at me from the other corner of the room, raising it's glass, asking me to come

Not that old (1998?) but nice 2nd hand copies can be found for less than USD 3k. Just ordered a mint 11868 for EUR 2.7k.

[Leon Berg]

vor 21 Minuten schrieb lct:

Not that old (1998?) but nice 2nd hand copies can be found for less than USD 3k. Just ordered a mint 11868 for EUR 2.7k.

I saw a couple for around 3k and more and great condition, but yes, you can get lucky and find a good offer.

I try to justify buying the new classic one but also have Kai W from YouTube in my ear: it‘s a great lens, but if you want old, why not just buy the old?

I am trying to find out if I am falling for a toy (just speaking for myself here..) and should buy a „proper tool“, namely the aspherical. As mentioned, I own and love and will not part with my rigid Summicron.

[FrozenInTime]

58 minutes ago, Leon Berg said:

Thank you for the insight. Interesting fact. 
 

May I ask what you mean with "if you can manage"? Like if you can live with it or to include it in your thoughts while shooting with it? How pronounced is the field curvature and corner sharpness from your perspective? 

I might try the lens out and find out for myself If it's a keeper.. Have you tried it and maybe tested yourself? Whats wrong with the mechanics of the Asph. Mark I ? 

 

If your have a layered image : e.g. foreground, subject at 6ft/2m, background

When shooting wide open you can expect great contrast and sharpness on the main subject in the centre of the frame, with a smooth separation of background immediately behind the subject. But the background corners will be sharp as if the lens was focused at infinity, and the foreground corners will be rough and splayed out.

To mange this either stop down or avoid images with structure in the corners.

The ASPH v1 is great, almost an ideal lens when it is perfectly lubricated, but over time many either wobble or are too tight with stiction as the FLE cam moves - Leica then struggles to service them to users satisfaction. The mechanics cannot support the weight of the elements without becoming over stressed.

The v3 pre-ASPH is not without its troubles;  many reports of lens epoxy separation - so be sure to check the glass for rainbow patterns.

I owned the ASPH v1, and now have a 11868 v3 pre-ASPH and the new modern optical formula 'classic' 11714. 

[Stephen.s1]

Forgive my ignorance; but aren't there filters that will bring on the dreams and glow?

 

[Leon Berg]

Thank you so much for sharing your detailed knowledge about the different fifties.

as long as the 11891 is serviceable I am happy. The copy I bought just one hour ago from a dealer I know and appreciate for less than 3k is serviced and from 2018.

I still might order the Classic to see for myself if it’s a keeper or not.

what you described with the field curvature sounds bothersome to me, I don’t know if I want to deal with such issues. &nbsp
Sometimes passion wins over ratio.. so we will see..

[FrozenInTime]

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20 minutes ago, Leon Berg said:

Thank you so much for sharing your detailed knowledge about the different fifties.

as long as the 11891 is serviceable I am happy. The copy I bought just one hour ago from a dealer I know and appreciate for less than 3k is serviced and from 2018.

I still might order the Classic to see for myself if it’s a keeper or not.

what you described with the field curvature sounds bothersome to me, I don’t know if I want to deal with such issues. &nbsp
Sometimes passion wins over ratio.. so we will see..

The test for 11891 ASPH v1 helicoid lub/wear is to compare focus smoothness with the lens pointed vertically then horizontally ; hope it works out - optically it is the better lens.

[wlaidlaw]

19 hours ago, lct said:

It is a personal matter but the 50/1.4 asph is not dreamy, at least my asph v1 is not so, rather the opposite TBH, it is a modern lens that will show all the skin imperfections of your models if they have not a perfect skin. Great for children and young beauties but otherwise i had to tweak my shots in post when i tried to use the lens for portraits on people my age (70+) or even younger. Not my cup of tea but again it is a personal thing. As for the Reissue, i do like its IQ but the weight is a deal breaker, again for me. Now there is one solution. For me to keep my 50/1.4 v3 with its 0.7m MFD, for you perhaps to consider it. It is not a compact lens but the silver variant is lighter than the Reissue and the anodized black variant is even lighter. YMMV.

I so disliked the rendering of the 50 ASPH Summilux, that I sold it after less than a year. On the M8 it caused noticeable purple fringing on high contrast edges and this was before Capture One introduced their de-fringe tool. My ASPH also had a razor sharp focus tab and very stiff focusing, to the extent I cut my fingers a couple of times when focussing. A little bit later I bought a 1999 year 50 Summilux III LTM Special Edition, whose rendering I love. Yes it has a bit of aperture shift but if you get it set up so that front focuses a fraction when wide open, you can safely ignore the aperture shift, as it is all within the DOF. I imagine its rendering is similar to the 50/1.4 re-issue, as the optical cells are quite similar. The only downside is that it does not have a focus tab, so I have mounted an ugly but effective rubber ring with a tab on it. 

Wilson

 

[lct]

I never noticed focus shift on my 1996 copy of the Summilux 50/1.4 v3. Its only flaws are CA and softness on edges and corners below f/5.6. But i use it as a character lens dedicated almost exclusively to portraits. Another flaw of the v3 is its weight as far as the silver variant is concerned but the Reissue is even heavier. I dream of a Summilux 50 with the same size and weight as Sonnar or Nokton 50/1.5 but Leica seems less interested in compactness than in the Mandler era. As for focus tabs, i like them on lenses with short focus throw but that of the v3 is too long for this purpose, i feel, matter of taste as usual. YMMV.

[wlaidlaw]

5 minutes ago, lct said:

I never noticed focus shift on my 1996 copy of the Summilux 50/1.4 v3. Its only flaws are CA and softness on edges and corners below f/5.6. But i use it as a character lens dedicated almost exclusively to portraits. Another flaw of the v3 is its weight as far as the silver variant is concerned but the Reissue is even heavier. I dream of a Summilux 50 with the same size and weight as Sonnar or Nokton 50/1.5 but Leica seems less interested in compactness than in the Mandler era. As for focus tabs, i like them on lenses with short focus throw but that of the v3 is too long for this purpose, i feel, matter of taste as usual. YMMV.

It is really only detectable on an A3 Nikon focus chart. It is not a problem in real life and I ignore it.  Again like many of the older fast Leica lenses, I suspect there is a considerable degree of sample variation, such as on the 35/1.4 ASPH Summilux, which can vary from unusable to brilliant. 

Wilson

[Ken Abrahams]

37 minutes ago, wlaidlaw said:

It is really only detectable on an A3 Nikon focus chart. It is not a problem in real life and I ignore it.  Again like many of the older fast Leica lenses, I suspect there is a considerable degree of sample variation, such as on the 35/1.4 ASPH Summilux, which can vary from unusable to brilliant. 

With regards the potential "variant" copies of the Summilux M 35 Asph Wilson, when do you think (which decade) that copies became consistently true to design? Or did they? 😀

It's amazing how heavier the 50 Summilux M ReIssue is compared to the SL Summicron 50 Asph. I have only 😳 realised the benefits of lighter lenses after using the SL Summicron Asph. I haven't  ever minded the weight gear but maybe it's my denial or lack of  good sense around lighter equipment? This SL 50 lens is a lot of fun and very light for an auto focus lens. I have seen the light so to speak.

Ken      

[lct]

3 hours ago, wlaidlaw said:

Again like many of the older fast Leica lenses, I suspect there is a considerable degree of sample variation, such as on the 35/1.4 ASPH Summilux, which can vary from unusable to brilliant.

2 hours ago, Ken Abrahams said:

With regards the potential "variant" copies of the Summilux M 35 Asph Wilson, when do you think (which decade) that copies became consistently true to design? Or did they? 😀

I have good examples with lenses many people consider suffering from focus shift when mine seem to be totally free from it. I mean Summicron 35/2 asph v1 and Summilux 35/1.4 asph pre-FLE. Both of mine have been 6-bit coded by Leica. I would not swear about them but when i had coded my Elmarit 90/2.8 v2, i asked Leica to fix a front or back focus issue on it and they told me they calibrate lenses for digital when they code them this way. Don't ask me what they did but i'm the happy owner of 4 coded lenses with no focus issue since then, including a Summicron 90/2 v3.

[wlaidlaw]

Ken said:

With regards the potential "variant" copies of the Summilux M 35 Asph Wilson, when do you think (which decade) that copies became consistently true to design? Or did they? 😀

4 hours ago, lct said:

I have good examples with lenses many people consider suffering from focus shift when mine seem to be totally free from it. I mean Summicron 35/2 asph v1 and Summilux 35/1.4 asph pre-FLE. Both of mine have been 6-bit coded by Leica. I would not swear about them but when i had coded my Elmarit 90/2.8 v2, i asked Leica to fix a front or back focus issue on it and they told me they calibrate lenses for digital when they code them this way. Don't ask me what they did but i'm the happy owner of 4 coded lenses with no focus issue since then, including a Summicron 90/2 v3.

I had a long discussion with a Leica employee, many years ago about the 35 ASPH Summilux,not long after the article in LFI explaining the "inevitable" aperture shift on that lens. I asked him to explain why therefore my chrome 35 ASPH Summilux had minimal aperture shift, showing him the photos of the A3 Nikon focus charts to prove it. He said that when this lens was designed there was an unrealistic view on the levels of assembly/machining accuracy that could be achieved with lens groups relative to each other, which resulted in an undesirable degree of sample variation, with a relatively small number like yours and mine, near perfect. Zeiss when they were designing their ZM series lenses, recognised the difficulty in ultra accurate lens group positioning and their designs required more realistic tolerances to achieve design parameters, rather than unrealistic, as the 35 ASPH Summilux did (I was a Zeiss/Contax Beta tester at that time). The Leica person (who better remain nameless) said that subsequent designs had taken realistic tolerances of manufacture or adjustability more into account than previously, hence the predominance of FLE lenses after the ASPH, with a view to a more consistent product. 

Wilson

 

Edited July 26 by wlaidlaw

[lct]

Interesting indeed. Another explanation i heard from a Leica dealer is that early copies of the pre-FLE were calibrated for f/1.4 when later ones were so for f/2. In fact my pre-FLE copy is not as sharp as the FLE at f/1.4. I would not say that it soft there but it has a bit less crispness actually. Not sure it comes from calibration or lack of floating elements though.

[wlaidlaw]

If Leica was correct with their assertion that the FLE system near eliminated Aperture Shift, setting prime focusing at f2 should be the same as f1,4. For those who don't understand what aperture shift is, borrow an f1 Noctilux, focus on say a book title at 3 metres wide open and then shift to f8 and you will find that the book title is no longer in focus. I could not live with that so did a swap with Jono Slack for other lenses. 

Wilson

[adan]

On 7/25/2025 at 11:33 AM, Stephen.s1 said:

Forgive my ignorance; but aren't there filters that will bring on the dreams and glow?

There are certainly soft-focus filters - but their activity is "generic" (it will look about the same on any lens made by anyone).

A soft-focus filter is one piece of glass, usually with some form of "blurring material" coated, sprayed or otherwise added over the whole surface. it adds a general "gaussian" fuzziness all across the picture.

The "glow" of a 50 or 35 Summilux "of a certain age" comes from the total aberrations, throughout the lens's 7-9 elements, and varying across the picture frame, that could not be removed or fully corrected.

An analogy:

The complexity and flavor of a wine is formed "organically," by many interacting (and not always controllable) elements: the terroir; the weather; the microbes used for fermentation; the barrels used for aging, etc.

Such is the case with the "organic" aberrations in a lens structure. They are "built into" the design and manufacturing (and also not always completely controllable or identical from "vintage" to "vintage").

You can change the flavor of the wine by adding a teaspoon of sugar or vinegar (the equivalent of adding a filter) - but that will not be the same as what the natural, organic, and somewhat unpredictable combination of elements do.

.....................

Here is a picture made with the 35mm Summilux pre-ASPH "vintage." (M9, 2009, f/1.4)

The whole picture for reference:

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Crop of the extreme top-right corner, showing this lens's natural aberrations at their maximum effect:  coma (point-lights distorted into arrow-shapes or "darts" pointing towards the center of the whole picture/image-circle) and astigmatism (that spreads those coma-arrows/darts sideways at 90° into moth-like "wings").

 

Here is a crop from the center of the picture, where the same abberations (far smaller in the image center) also distort the light, to a lesser entent, but are transmuted (with the addition of more obvious spherical aberration), into soft "glow" around the white areas.

It is probably barely technically possible to engineer a - very complex, and probably very expensive - filter that could replicate the specific organic imaging pattern of a 35mm Summilux-M pre-ASPH (for a given value of "replicate"). But an off-the-shelf "soft-focus filter" will not do it.

Nor will that complex filter replicate anything except the complex glow and drawing of a 35 f/1.4 pre-ASPH. You would need a whole portfolio of different filters to replicate:

A Canon 35mm f/1.5 LTM lens's aberrations, glow and "character"
A Nikon 35mm f/1.5 LTM lens's aberrations, glow and "character"
A Leitz 50mm f/1.4 Summilux pre-ASPH v.1, etc.
A Leitz 50mm f/1.4 Summilux pre-ASPH v.2, etc.
A Leica 50mm f/1.4 Summilux 2025 non-ASPH, etc.
A Leitz/Leica 35mm Summicron pre-ASPH v.1 (8-element)
- OR v2
- OR v3
- OR v4 (Bokeh not-so-King).
A Voigtlander 35mm Nokton Classics f/1.5m in each of its various "flavors" - v.1 or v.2, SC or MC.
not to mention the first-generation R 35mm Elmarit-R or Summicron-R.

- they will ALL produce different amounts and combinations of aberrations or glow, natively and organically. Their "character."

Might as well buy a $6.99 bottle of California Red plonk - and try to turn it into a Chateau Lafite Rothschild Pauillac, 2010 by just adding stuff -  as try to replicate the (occasionally notable) characters of some lenses by way of filters.

https://www.totalwine.com/wine/red-wine/bordeaux-blend/chateau-lafite-rothschild-pauillac/p/28710750?glia=true&cid=plia:Shopping+US+None+ENG+SPART:::google&s=2303&gclsrc=aw.ds&&pid=cpc:Performance+Max%2BUS%2BProduct+Category%2BWINE+TEST::google::&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22639919675&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInf_DwrXbjgMVHZfuAR1YCgcfEAQYAyABEgJcHfD_BwE

BTW - I am neither a wine-drinker, nor much of a glow-afficiando myself. But some people like to play with it, and "the real deal is "the real deal." Accept no substitutes.

Edited July 26 by adan

[Stephen.s1]

Well said.  Thanks 

[mmradman]

In my hands since early July, to give myself chance of focused shot at maximum aperture used Nikon Z7.  Picture shows dog, lens is anything but.
Probably works equally well on SL cameras. On M camera in good light and stopped down it produces lovely sun stars.

 

 

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Edited July 27 by mmradman

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[Ken Abrahams]

5 hours ago, mmradman said:

In my hands since early July, to give myself chance of focused shot at maximum aperture used Nikon Z7.  Picture shows dog, lens is anything but.
Probably works equally well on SL cameras. On M camera in good light and stopped down it produces lovely sun stars.

 

 

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Such beautiful rendering in background and sharpness at centre. Any more out of focus and the appeal is lost for me (maybe a bit more is still okay)

My thoughts on the Noctilux and 0.95 bokeh is that it can be too much in some images. Portraits for example and when there is little or no demarcation from the hoped sharpness (focus) in the subjects eyes. Sometimes I am left with unnerving doubt that something must be in focus. I think the best example of "too much" when looking at posted images with the 75 Noctilux. Maybe the 90 Summilux too?    

[mmradman]

4 hours ago, Ken Abrahams said:

Such beautiful rendering in background and sharpness at centre. Any more out of focus and the appeal is lost for me (maybe a bit more is still okay)

My thoughts on the Noctilux and 0.95 bokeh is that it can be too much in some images. Portraits for example and when there is little or no demarcation from the hoped sharpness (focus) in the subjects eyes. Sometimes I am left with unnerving doubt that something must be in focus. I think the best example of "too much" when looking at posted images with the 75 Noctilux. Maybe the 90 Summilux too?    

Well long fast lenses have own appeal, personally I am happy pairing 50mm with Summilux 75/Nokton 75mm, biggest problem is my eyesight when using RF for focusing.

With respect to 50mm v4  I think it is keeper for me, it is smooth lens.  Despite all Leica optical goodness there are annoying ninja stars and onion rings in most ASPH lenses and some older lenses also.