Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical (VM)

Put this next to a Leica Summilux-M 50mm f/1.4 ASPH and the first thing you notice is the receipt. The Nokton runs around nine hundred to a thousand dollars new. The Summilux is four and a half grand. For that gap to matter you have to ask what the cheaper lens actually gives up, and the honest answer for most shooters is not very much.

Wide open at f/1.5 the center is already sharp, sharper than people expect from a fast fifty in this price class, and it holds well across the middle of the frame at portrait and street distances. The corners stay soft until about f/4, then they snap into line. Where it gives ground to the Leica is in the rendering between the sharp plane and the blur. The Summilux smooths that transition into a near perfect Gaussian falloff. The Nokton's out-of-focus areas look painted on, with harder outline edges on specular highlights, busier in cluttered backgrounds than you might want for a clean head-and-shoulders. Some people read that as character. If you shoot a lot at close range you should know it is there.

The design is modern double-Gauss territory with aspherical correction baked in, which is the whole reason it stays this small and this sharp at f/1.5. That also brings the one quirk worth metering around: focus shift. As you stop down from f/1.5 to f/2.8 the plane of best focus creeps backward slightly, a known trait of fast aspherical rangefinder glass. With a rangefinder you focus wide open and shoot stopped down, so on close subjects at middle apertures you can land focus just behind the eyes. Focus a hair forward when you stop down and you will beat it.

This is a Leica M lens, so there is no shutter of its own; it rides the body's focal-plane shutter. The point of an f/1.5 lens is the f/1.5, and that is exactly where rangefinder metering gets thin, in a bar or a doorway at night. Meter for the shadow you care about wide open rather than trusting an averaged reading off a dark scene, and let Zone Light Meter place that value so the highlights fall where they should. The 49mm filter thread is a genuinely common size, so a polarizer or an ND for daylight wide-open work costs you nothing to find.

It is an easy lens to recommend, and an easy one to know the buyer for. Rangefinder shooters who want true f/1.5 speed without the Leica tax. Documentary and street people who live at a normal. Anyone running a Voigtlander or Leica body who wants one fast fifty that does not cost more than the camera. The cross-shop above it is the Summilux, and below it the Voigtlander APO-Lanthar 50mm f/2, which trades a stop of speed for cleaner, more clinical correction. The Nokton sits in between on purpose. You buy it when the four thousand dollars you saved is better off as film and processing.