The Leica Glow… And All That
Ridiculous lens comparisons No. 2
In our last installment of ridiculous lens comparisons I attempted to demonstrate that most lenses, even the most reviled, are extremely competent and comparable. The difference shows up in edge cases. I proudly use all sorts of unacceptable lenses that I’m sure many photographers would consider unsuitable, even unusable. My Canon 24-105 f4L version I, my Canon 17-40 f4L, and all sorts of crappy glass like the subject of today's musings; the ancient Leica screw mount Summitar.
I have a few photographer buddies that spend a ton of money shooting Leica digital M bodies with both older and brand-new Leica lenses. None of those people using anything as old and crappy as the Summitar. It’s kind of funny given that even when using lenses such as the 35mm Summicron ASPH or a new-ish 2000’s 50 Summicron they speak a lot of some je ne sais quoi Leica glow that drives their choices.
I tease a lot when I ask them to “show me”. Invariably they show me an image that doesn’t really exhibit any distinguishable characteristics beyond a reasonably sharp image shot at a wide aperture with a reasonably okay blurry background. Of course, I cannot resist shooting side by side with them using my crappy Canon RF 35mm and 50mm 1.8 lenses which are quite good but dirt cheap. In many cases they are the same, sometimes my plastic-fantastic Canon RF lenses are measurably better both aesthetically and technically given how good they actually are, the absurdly close focus distances they have, and the ability to focus absolutely perfectly on a Canon mirrorless camera.
That brings us to today’s ridiculous lens comparison, the Leica 50mm Summitar vs. The Fuji 35mm 1.4 XF. I love both of these lenses. I like the Fuji 35mm as it’s very good but not so clinical as to have zero character. I also like it because it fits on my X-Pro cameras. The Summitar from the 1940s (I think) is a completely different beast. I like the Summitar because it’s like two or three lenses in one tiny little package. Shot wide open the Summitar looks absolutely wild in terms of bokeh but still retains unbelievable sharpness where it’s actually in focus. If you stop it down even a tiny bit, say half a stop, the lens is crazy sharp, possibly better than the Fuji 35mm f1.4, and hard to tell the difference from a far more modern lens.
Oh, what about that Leica glow? Well, that exists but it certainly doesn’t exist in more modern Leica glass. It’s become a word that people use to mean “I like this lens” because it’s sharp wide open. Want to see where that term came from? Let’s take a look at the Summitar vs. the Fuji 35mm 1.4 both shot wide open. Yes, the Fuji is a stop faster given the Summitar has a maximum aperture of f2.
The shot at the top is the Summitar on a Canon R body. Can you see the Leica glow now? That’s all sorts of optical aberrations that are corrected away in modern glass. This happens a lot with Leica’s older fast lens formulations. It also happened a lot with other companies' lenses with similar aberrations. So why did Leica git famous for this? The best I can come up with based on my own experience and evaluation over the last three or four decades is that Leica formulations happened also to be very very sharp at the same time. Compare that 1940s screw mount lens to the modern Fuji where the two are both in focus.
It’s hard to tell which one resolves better. The focus fall-off and transition behavior are worlds apart. The RF has a bit more magnification given its 30 megapixels vs the X-Pro 2’s 24. The bokeh of these two lenses is also completely different. Does one have “good” bokeh and the other “bad”? I really don’t look at it that way. The Fuji is mostly non-offensive in most circumstances. The Summitar is wild and in some conditions, it looks busy and awful. In other conditions the Summitar is sublime in its rendering, some refer to this bad bokeh as swirly. I can attest that in the right conditions, it looks more like a painting and does look swirly.
We use that word swirly because it’s a Leica lens, if were a third party more modern lens we’d just say it had bad, horrid, busy bokeh. When it comes to out-of-focus point light sources (how many people measure bokeh but that’s only one aspect and only important in conditions with point light sources) it is very good because of the amazingly round 10-bladed aperture. I think at some point Leica got rid of that and newer versions have 6 bladed apertures. Personally, I’d avoid those 6 bladed versions because they just don’t look as cool as the older lenses with crap tons of rounded aperture blades.
If we stop both lenses down a hair they look more the same than different. Both are fantastically sharp a stop or two down from maximum aperture. This is typical of old lens designs with fewer elements and a more classical design vs. modern lenses that are mostly retro-focus designs.
Again were’ looking at the Summitar with more magnification and less depth of field given both of them are now at f/4. The Fuji is a stop faster when shot wide open but the Summitar appears to have less depth of field than the Fuji 35mm, I’ve always felt that one stop less depth of field thing when comparing full-frame to APS-C was a bit off, who knows. I consider both of these lenses to be very sharp where they are in focus and the ancient Leica is very comparable with the new Fuji at f/4.
So which lens is “better”? I like both, I especially like the Fuji when in circumstances where auto-focus will make a big difference. I like the Summitar because I give up nothing if I shoot at f/2.8 or f/4 in terms of sharpness but gain the actual old-school Leica glowy-ness and wild, crazy, swirly bokeh wide-open.
Do different lenses have different renditions, different focus fall-off characteristics, etc? Sure but the more modern the glass, the less different they actually are in my estimation. Does the new Leica glass have some degree of special sauce? It depends on which lens you are discussing. Some of them do have a very different “look”, the ones that attempt to perform across all circumstances, all apertures, all focus distances, and provide edge-to-edge sharpness don’t really have any sort of distinguishing rendering beyond the performance they attempt to achieve. T
This is why I can comfortably compare my RF 35mm 1.8 to more modern Leica glass and be sort of agnostic. Is the canon built the same way? No, Does it feel as good to use? No way. Does it mostly make the same pictures, in some situations marginally worse or marginally better? Sure.
Keep in mind that when it comes to physically small lenses the compromises made in some Leica lenses from an optical design standpoint do have a different rendering than those that attempt optical perfection. Heck, Leica is even selling a reproduction of the first version of the 35mm Summilux now and it has a lot of the characteristics I appreciate in the Summitar when it comes to rendering. Guess what other lens has crazy rendering to a degree when it’s wide open... That RF 35mm 1.8 but that’s a Canon plastic non-L lens so we call that bokeh bad.
#photography #camerafashion #essay