Leica Summilux-R 80mm f/1.4

A face in a dim room, available light only, the eyes tack sharp and everything behind the head dissolving into smooth color. That is the frame this lens owns, and most short teles of its era lose it. At f/1.4 on an 80mm you get a sliver of focus and a background that does not blur so much as evaporate. An 85mm f/2 cannot do that. Neither can flash, which kills the very mood you walked in for.

Leica kept the Summilux-R 80mm in the catalog from 1980 until the R system shut down in 2009. It is a fast Gaussian-type design, heavy and dense, with a 67mm front and a focus throw long enough to actually land an eyelash at full aperture. Wide open there is a faint veiling glow that lowers global contrast and raises the shadows a touch, so skin reads soft without going mushy. Stop down to f/2.8 and it goes clinically sharp across the frame. The bokeh is what people chase. Out-of-focus points stay round and quiet, with none of the nervous edge ring you get from cheaper fast glass.

When the R mount folded, the lens did not go with it. It found a second life in motion pictures. The R primes, the 80 in particular, were rehoused into cinema barrels by specialist cine shops, and cinematographers chased them for the same reason portrait shooters did. Skin comes back organic instead of surgical, and the focus rolls off into the blur the way digital sensors badly need.

The honest weakness is focus, and it belongs to you, not the glass. Manual focus at f/1.4 on an 80mm leaves depth of field measured in millimeters at portrait distance. Miss by a hair and the lashes are sharp while the iris is soft. There is some longitudinal color fringing wide open too, green behind the plane and magenta in front, the usual tax on a fast vintage design. It is also front-heavy enough that a small body feels wrong behind it.

People cross-shop it against the Contax Zeiss 85mm f/1.4 Planar and the Canon FD 85mm f/1.2, both cheaper, neither with quite the same draw. Cinema demand has pushed clean R copies well above their 2009 price, which is the real reason to think twice before buying. You are paying for the rendering and nothing else, so be sure that is what you came for. One field note: f/1.4 in bright sun outruns even the 1/8000 top speed of the last R bodies, the R8 and R9, so daylight portraits wide open usually mean a 67mm ND on the front. Meter at f/1.4 in Zone Light Meter and the shutter speed it hands back tells you how many stops of ND to stack before the body tops out.