Leica 35mm, f1.4 Steel Rim
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
This may not be the proper forum for a lens review. Please accept my apologies. I was bombarded by relentless marketing and have an affinity for old-fashioned style black and white photographs. I enjoy taking and processing pictures in the style of yesteryear. Life was simpler then, and we now use all the high tech at our disposal to get back to our photographic roots. So why not start with almost orginal mechanics?
There are numerous reviews and YouTube videos on this lens, each repeating the same marketing stats, many commissioned, and all opinionated. The jist is as follows. The Leica Summilux “Steel Rim” has a 35mm focal length and as the fastes aperture of f1.4. It is all manual and has seven elements. It is a pre-aspherical lens. It has no floating elements. Apparently, the design was state of the art in 1960 and has been reissued last year.
What does all that mean? Pre-aspherical means it has distortions and aberrations that are common in spherical lenses. Modern lenses do not have those distortions. “Seven elements” means they did a hell of a job trying to correct for those. This is not a hundred year 1890s Cooke triplet design, and it shows.
I like reissued lens designs over used orginals. I am not a purist, nor a collector. The value of a reissued old design…
