Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 (v3, pre-ASPH black)

Shoot this one wide open in a dim room and you get a picture no clinical fast fifty will give you. That is the whole reason the pre-ASPH Summilux 50mm stayed in working bags for decades. It is small, it focuses close enough, and at f/1.4 it lays a soft bloom over bright points that flatters skin and pulls a face out of near-darkness. This is the black-finish version, the last of the line before Leica went aspherical in 2004 and reset the character of the lens entirely.

Optically it is a double-Gauss, and it behaves like one wide open. Center sharpness at f/1.4 is good and falls off as you move out, wrapped in a low-contrast veiling glow. There is real field curvature, so the plane of focus dishes toward you at the edges. Stop down to f/2.8 and it tightens; by f/5.6 it is crisp across the frame and contrast climbs to where it sits next to anything modern. The cost is that you lose the look you bought it for. Bokeh is mostly smooth but gets busy right at the focus transition before melting into clean backgrounds. Out-of-focus highlights stay round in the center and lemon toward the corners, the standard mechanical vignetting of a fast lens.

Color is gentle and never harsh, contrast is lower than the ASPH, and the rendering reads warm. Flare is real if you swing it at a streetlamp, so a vented hood earns its keep. Treat this as a documentary and available-darkness lens first and a landscape lens a distant second. People who shoot it know that going in and pick it for exactly that reason.

The honest weakness is wide-open softness tangled up with focus shift. Spherical aberration moves the point of sharpest focus back as you stop down a little, and on a rangefinder you cannot see that through the lens. Shoot a portrait at f/2 on a calibrated body and you can land focus a hair behind the eye. The ASPH that replaced it greatly reduced both the wide-open haze and the shift, though even that lens has been noted to shift a touch. On the pre-ASPH you learn to compensate, or you accept the occasional miss as part of the deal.

It sits in an odd price slot today. The ASPH costs more, modern fast Voigtlander fifties generally run cheaper, and yet the black pre-ASPH holds value because the rendering is genuinely its own. The later pre-ASPH versions share essentially the same optical formula from the early 1960s revision onward, so people cross-shop those, while the original 1959 first version is a different and earlier computation worth knowing apart. The Zeiss C-Sonnar gets cross-shopped too for a similar vintage glow.

One practical note. You will run this at f/1.4 in light a meter barely registers, so when you point Zone Light Meter at a dim interior, meter for the shadow you actually want to hold and let the highlights bloom on their own. The 46mm thread takes a standard filter if you want a yellow on black-and-white, which helps under hard sidelight where the glow can run away from you.