Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 (v1)

This is the lens people mean when they talk about old Leica glass wide open looking like memory rather than reality. The first Summilux-M 50, made for only two years starting in 1959, throws a soft veil over f/1.4 that no modern fifty will reproduce. Stop it down and it cleans up into a perfectly usable sharp lens. Open it back up and the contrast drops, the highlights bloom, and skin goes luminous. The lens is two different optics depending on the aperture, and that is exactly why people chase it.

The v1 is a seven-element, five-group computation by Walter Mandler and Erich Wagner, loosely descended from the earlier f/1.5 Summarit but with improved glass. Call it a Gauss-derived formula and leave it there. Whatever the textbook label, it shows its age in the best way. Wide open you get noticeable spherical aberration and a gentle field curvature, so the plane of focus is not flat and the corners trail behind the center. Point sources at night render as soft glowing discs instead of hard circles. Bokeh is smooth and a little nervous toward the edges, never the clinical creaminess of a current aspherical Summilux. Flare control is weak by any modern standard. Shoot into a streetlight and the frame will wash with veiling glare. For most people who own this lens, that glare is the point.

Who shoots it: available-light street and environmental portraits, mostly on black and white, by photographers who want the rangefinder look without the antiseptic edge of the 1990s aspherical version. It is a low-light tool first. The f/1.4 maximum gives you a real stop over the contemporary Summicron, and the 50mm framing on an M body is the classic reportage length.

The honest weakness, beyond the flare, is consistency across the frame at full aperture. If you want corner-to-corner bite at f/1.4 this is the wrong lens, and the close-focus performance is soft. You learn to put your subject near the center and let the edges dissolve. Compose for the middle of the frame and the lens rewards you; insist on sharp corners wide open and it never will.

Where it sits today is firmly in collector territory. The two-year production run makes the first version scarce and expensive, often priced well above the later pre-aspherical v2 that many shooters actually prefer for daily use because it renders similarly with fewer quirks. People cross-shop it against that v2 and against the Canon 50mm f/1.4 LTM, which gives you a chunk of the vintage glow for a fraction of the money. The original is a lens you buy for the way it draws and for the early Mandler lineage, knowing you are paying a premium for both.

One metering note. Because the real reason to own this lens is shooting it wide open in dim light, meter for the shadows you care about and let those blooming highlights go where they go. In Zone Light Meter, place your key shadow on Zone III or IV and expose for that; the lens will lift the rest into glow on its own. Trying to hold the highlights with this glass is a losing game, so meter for what you want to keep and trust the falloff.