Voigtlander Nokton SL 58mm f/1.4 (Nikon F)

The 58mm focal length is the tell. Almost nobody made a 58 on purpose, and the one Cosina chose to revive was the Tokyo Kogaku RE Auto-Topcor 58mm f/1.4 from 1963, a lens with a real cult following. Cosina first reissued the optic under the Topcor name, then rebranded it Voigtlander Nokton for the SLR mounts. So when people invoke Nikon's Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2 looking at this thing, they have the wrong ancestor. The Noct shares the odd focal length and nothing else. This is Topcor glass, a double-Gauss, dressed in modern metal.

Wide open at f/1.4 it is soft in the corners and glows a little on specular highlights, which is the point. The rendering comes back with an old-school, vintage character. The bokeh is where you have to be honest: at f/1.4 a busy background can throw structured, double-edged outlines, the nervous double-line look an all-spherical double-Gauss gives you when there is a lot going on behind the subject. Put it against a clean wall and it is lovely. Put it against backlit branches and it gets busy. Stop to f/2.8 and that settles down while the center sharpens up hard; by f/5.6 it is a clean, contrasty landscape lens edge to edge.

The honest drawback is field curvature, and Voigtlander never hid it. Flat charts at infinity show the edges pulling forward of the plane, so if you shoot brick walls and pixel-peep the corners you will see softness that does not fully clear until you stop well down. Focusing on a face and letting the surroundings fall off, you never notice it. Landscape shooters who want every blade of grass sharp at f/8 will be happier with a flat-field Nikkor. Portrait and street shooters will not care.

It comes in two visually distinct versions, and both carry the same optics. The original 2007 SL II is all metal, black or chrome, with engraved depth-of-field scales and a built-in CPU chip from the start; the current SL II S went to an all-metal scalloped grip and shaved the filter thread down. Mount either of them on an FM2 or an F100 and the focus ring has real damping, the aperture clicks in full stops, and it is built out of metal in a way most autofocus glass abandoned long ago. The CPU chip is what matters on a modern electronic Nikon, where it feeds metering and EXIF; on an FE or FM the mechanical AI coupling meters at working aperture directly, no chip and no stopping down needed. The metered-prism Nikons handle it cleanly.

Filter thread depends on which one you have. The SL II S this spec describes takes a small 52mm, cheap to feed for a screw-in ND or polarizer when you are shooting slide and want to hold the sky. The older SL II used 58mm, so check the front before you buy a stack. People cross-shop it against the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF and the Zeiss ZF Planar 50; the Voigtlander wins on tactility and that 58mm rendering while undercutting the Zeiss on price.

One note for film. You will run this wide open in dim interiors, and at f/1.4 you are metering at the edge of most handheld meters' comfort. Take the reading in Zone Light Meter at the working aperture rather than trusting a stopped-down prism read, place your shadow on Zone III, and let the falloff do the rest.