Leica Summicron-M 28mm f/2 ASPH

Straight lines stay straight. That is the first thing you notice shooting the 28 Cron. Point it at a doorframe near the edge of the frame and the verticals do not bow. Most fast wides of any era give you some mustache or barrel distortion you learn to live with. Leica corrected this one down to a negligible level, which is why architecture and interior shooters reach for it even though 28mm is not the obvious choice for either.

Wide open at f/2 it is already sharp across most of the frame, not the soft-center-crisp-by-f/4 behavior you tolerate on older glass. Contrast runs high, almost punchy, with that Leica microcontrast that makes a print look like it has more resolution than the numbers say. Stop down to f/4 or f/5.6 and the corners snap fully into line for landscape work. Color is clean and honest, and the rendering leans clinical without feeling sterile, no obvious character flaw to hide behind. Flare control is strong for a lens this fast and this wide, holding contrast better than you would expect with a bright light sitting near the frame edge at night.

This is the documentary and street lens for people who shoot 28mm as their normal. Wide enough to put you inside a scene rather than observing it from across the room, fast enough to keep working when the light goes flat blue at the end of the day, and small enough that nobody clocks it as a camera. The 28mm field of view on an M body is a reportage classic, and a stop more speed than the f/2.8 Elmarit-M matters once dusk sets in. People who find 35mm too tight and 24mm too distorted often settle here.

The honest caveat is separation. At 28mm and f/2 there just is not much background blur to work with, and some shooters find the out-of-focus rendering busier than they would like, though plenty of others rate the bokeh well for a wide angle and find it smoother than its specs suggest. Either way, nobody buys this lens for falloff. It is a deep-focus, everything-sharp tool, not a portrait separator, and judging it on bokeh misses the point of why it exists.

On price it sits where every modern Summicron sits, which is to say expensive, and it gets cross-shopped against the smaller f/2.8 Elmarit-M and against Voigtlander's fast 28s that cost a fraction. What you are paying Leica for is the distortion correction and the wide-open performance, and for working pros that is usually enough to justify it. For everyone else the Voigtlander gets you most of the way for a tenth of the outlay.

One metering note. At f/2 you can read genuinely low light wide open and still get a usable answer where slower wides would leave you guessing, so in Zone Light Meter set your max aperture to f/2 and let the app hand you the honest shutter speed before you decide whether to push the film. The 46mm filter thread is small and cheap to feed, so a screw-in ND or polarizer for daylight long exposures is an easy add.