Voigtlander Nokton 40mm f/1.4 MC (VM)

Forty millimeters is the focal length the M system mostly forgot. Too long for the 35mm shooters, too short for the 50mm crowd, and ignored by Leica for decades except in oddball bodies like the CL. Cosina built a fast one anyway. When Voigtlander relaunched under Cosina around the turn of the millennium, the plan was never to clone Summicrons. It was to make the lengths Leica had abandoned, and the Nokton 40mm f/1.4 arrived at Photokina 2004: f/1.4, all-metal barrel, a fraction of what any Summilux cost.

Wide open it behaves like a classic fast Gauss-type design. It glows. There is veiling flare at f/1.4 that softens contrast and lifts the shadows, and sharpness sits in the good-but-not-clinical range, sharp at the focus plane with a halo around point highlights. Stop down to f/2.8 and that glow burns off, contrast snaps up, and by f/4 it is crisp across the frame. The bokeh runs busy rather than creamy. Out-of-focus highlights pick up outlining and a faint swirl toward the edges, which is character if you like it and distraction if you do not. This is not a smooth Zeiss-style portrait lens. It has an opinion about how things render and it imposes it.

The 40mm length earns its keep once you stop fighting it. It is the natural single-lens-on-the-body focal length, wide enough to work a street without backing into traffic, long enough to fill the frame with a face. Street and documentary shooters are the obvious audience, the people who clamp one lens on an M6 or a Bessa and leave it there for a year. You learn to see in 40mm, and after a while the in-between framing feels right rather than like a compromise.

The real headache is framelines. Mount this on most Leica M bodies and it brings up the 50/75 pair, so you frame with the 50 line and mentally add roughly 20 percent outside it. Only a handful of cameras (the CL, the Bessa R series with the right finder) actually show 40mm. That guessing game pushes a lot of people toward a clean 35 or 50 instead, and it is a fair complaint.

Today it sits as the value pick for a fast forty. The MC version handles flare better than the older single-coated runs, and the cross-shop is usually a Leica Summilux-M 35mm or a used 40mm Summicron-C, neither of which hands you f/1.4 at this money. People still buy it because nothing else gives a fast in-between prime on an M body this cheaply. One metering note: shooting it at f/1.4 indoors is exactly where Zone Light Meter pays off, since you can meter for the shadow you actually care about and trust the placement instead of letting an averaged reading blow out the one bright window behind your subject.