Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 (v2)

Walter Mandler's team in Midland, Ontario built this lens to keep M shooters working after the sun went down, and it did that job for over forty years. The Summilux-M f/1.4 grew out of the earlier Summarit 1.5, and the optical design that arrived in 1961 stayed in the catalog, essentially untouched, until 2004. That is the part worth holding onto. The barrel changed along the way (the hood, the close focus, the mount details all got reworked), but the glass behind it carried over for the whole run, which is why M2 and M3 owners and people on much later bodies are arguing about the same fifty.

And they do argue, because what it puts on film at f/1.4 splits the room. Wide open it is soft on purpose, not soft because something is wrong. You get a veiling glow off bright edges, focus that melts into a creamy out-of-focus field, and contrast that sits a notch below anything modern. That is the pre-asph signature a whole resurgence of shooters now chase. Stop down to f/2.8 and it tightens up fast. By f/4 to f/5.6 it is crisp across most of the frame, corners catching up last. The bokeh stays smooth and rounded, never nervous, and skin comes back warm instead of clinical.

The layout is a classic double-Gauss, the symmetric design that has anchored fast normals since the 1930s, and the flare follows straight from it. Put a streetlight or a bright window in the frame and you get a soft wash of veiling glare rather than crisp ghosts. Some people love that for night work; others fight it with a hood. Field curvature is there too, so a flat test chart will show the edges drifting at wide apertures. For the documentary and portrait work this lens actually does, that almost never shows up.

This is a low-light street and environmental-portrait lens before it is anything else. People shoot it wide open after dark, lean into the glow, and take the softness as part of the deal. Do that and your meter has to behave at the open end of the aperture scale. Zone Light Meter reads incident or spot at f/1.4 directly, so you can place a face in a dim bar on the zone you want instead of guessing how much the glow will eat your shadows. Metering wide open in marginal light is exactly where this lens lives.

The honest weakness is the flip side of the appeal. If you want a sharp, contrasty fifty for landscape detail or copy work, this is not it, certainly not below f/2.8, and the close-focus limit keeps it away from tight detail shots anyway. It is a glow machine, and it commits to that.

Today it sits in the collectible-but-usable tier. People cross-shop it against the modern Summilux-M ASPH, which is sharper and cleaner wide open and costs far more, and against the cheaper Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f/1.5 that chases a similar vintage feel. The pre-asph version keeps selling because it puts genuine Mandler-era rendering on an M body without ASPH money, and because that specific bloom is what the resurgence is actually paying for.