Leica Summicron-R 90mm f/2

Ask anyone who shot the Leica R system what they kept when they sold off the rest, and a lot of them say the 90 Summicron. It is the lens people held onto. Wide open at f/2 it resolves an eyelash cleanly while the background behind goes soft and quiet, and skin keeps its texture without turning harsh. You can find pores if you go pixel-hunting, but the lens never punishes a face for having them. That balance, sharp subject against a calm backdrop, is what it does better than almost anything in the range.

There are really two lenses hiding under one name, and used buyers should know which they are looking at. The classic Summicron-R 90mm f/2 is a compact 5-element, 4-group telephoto by Walter Mandler, launched around Photokina 1970 and produced for decades with only barrel, hood, and filter changes (early one-piece hood, then a two-piece, and a shift to the E55 filter size). The optics stayed put the whole run. In 2002 Leica released a separate lens, the APO-Summicron-R 90mm f/2 ASPH, which added apochromatic correction and an aspherical surface in a more compact body. The APO is the technically cleaner optic, tighter into the corners and better controlled against backlight. The classic Mandler version draws with slightly softer contrast that a lot of portrait shooters actively prefer for skin. Neither is the wrong answer. They just have different signatures, and the price gap between them is real.

Bokeh is the trait this lens is known for. Out-of-focus highlights stay round and undisturbed, with no hard rims and no nervous churn in the transition zone behind the subject. Color runs warm and saturated, contrast holds without going brittle. The older classic can flare and wash out a frame if you point it straight into a bright source, so the hood is not optional on that one. Stop down to f/4 and it sharpens up edge to edge, which is why some people press it into service as a short telephoto for landscape and detail work rather than just heads and shoulders.

The honest weakness is the dead-end system around it. Leica R bodies were discontinued in 2009, and both lenses ended their runs with it; the mount has no future on a native body. So you are committing to manual focus on film, or to adapting the lens onto mirrorless with a good R adapter, where it genuinely comes alive on a Sony or Panasonic. The 55mm thread it shares with many R primes is convenient if you run one polarizer or ND set across several lenses.

Cross-shopped against the rangefinder 90 Summicron-M, this R version usually costs less and is easier to nail at f/2, because you focus through the lens instead of fighting a rangefinder patch at distance. That is the practical case. Working wide open in dim light, meter off the subject's face in Zone Light Meter and place it where you want it on the zone scale; you get a true f/2 to work with, so you can hold a usable shutter speed without pushing the film. For what it does to skin and to backgrounds, it stays one of the great portrait lenses Leica made, and the secondhand prices say plenty of people figured that out.