Just an overpriced luxury brand? Leica Summilux R 50mm f1.4 vintage lens review and test 

I appreciate your honest oppinion.I have the Summilux R 50 1.4 - and for me it is my favourite 50mm lens. I got vintage Minolta, Konica, Canon too - but the Summilux blows them all out of the water. My version seems sharper at 1.4 too. The version you got looked like it had not been cleaned - no offense here! But as fotographers we often forget to clean the back of the lens too. ;-) I would say the Konica comes close - and it is of course well better priced then the Summilux these days (I was lucky to get mine some years ago when prices were still a little lower). The one thing the Summilux does really well is the transition from sharp to unsharp areas. But at the end of the day we all have different likes and prefer different lenses. And this is very good! :-) Keep up the awesome work!

Their increase in price is because they are flawed. And theyre really just being bought by DPs who don’t want to pay 10x for the same qualities in actual cinema lenses. If you’re taking more modern photos, you’ll be disappointed. But they are a more budget alternative for DPs who need this.

Even a Super-Takumar 50mm F1.4 (7-element variant not the earlier released 8 element) is a sharper lens, but I also adapted the same Summilux to a Sony A-mount full frame (A99) and see the Leica as having a more consistent throughout sharpness to it, that seems to give a more balanced neutrality to the overall subject, which might be considered ideal for some subjects.) Takumar just seems to give a more vibrant aspect to the environment, which I tend to prefer, but for some reason I've rarely taken the Leica lens off the camera body (mostly because I still consider myself experimenting with it, but then again, it's similar to me using a fisheye lens when trying to explore the subject of retro-aspects of historical subjects, and think of it a bit like time warp theme, but also because forcing yourself into a perspective of a subject can seem boring. Though if I would recommend either lens, I would 100% suggest the Takumar, and just to forget about Leica-R series. I've not used the Sony E-mount camera bodies yet, in which case I would experiment with the cheaper low F-stop lenses that are available, and the same lenses that can be adapted to A-Mount have the option for E, but the adapter will probably change some of the aspects.

Great review, and thank you for testing that lens so we don't have to.

Overpriced luxury or worth it. Yes, to both. I haven't seen a single reviewer actually understand this lens yet. The summilux was designed as a nightscape lens for handheld photography. It has excellent correction for coma and ghosting from point sources of light. For the time it was released (1960s) this was mind blowing. Even against modern competitors there aren't many options that can do better. This is still a problem that plagues almost every fast 50 at f/1.4. Of the lenses that have good to excellent coma correction, not a single one is cheap. You have the Zeiss Otus 55 1.4 as a modern offering. Before then you had the Noctilux 1.2, which was exponentially more expensive. Nikon made the Noct 58 1.2 with a hand ground aspherical element and also super expensive. The Noct was faster at 1.2 but the contrast was significantly lower than the summilux. If you bought this lens for portraits, then you wasted your money. If you bought it for landscape, then you also wasted your money as the curvature on this lens is pretty aggressive and the summicon is the cheaper and better choice here. If you need the coma correction at f/1.4 for your work, then you don't have any low-priced options and compared to other lenses that can do this it's a bargain. It was also the best performing 50 at f/1.4 for decades. Other fast 50s would clean up significantly by f/2, but lagged significantly in performance at f/1.4 in comparison. These days with cheap aspherical elements this is a different story; spherical aberrations have been greatly reduced on modern 50s at f/1.4. However, even today the coma correction remains elusive and difficult with many lenses calculated decades later falling short of the summilux.

Honestly, I feel Leica's are overhyped. I own some so I'm not saying from lack of experience with them. Once they stop down, they are beautiful, but then, a lot cheaper lenses are beautiful stopped down as well (Nikon AI for example).

The Summicron R 50mm f2 is still a great alternative to the Summilux specially for the price gap.

For a lens that was banged up 40+ years in italy, it is quite impressive that it produces an acceptable Image at all. This version of the Summilux is also quite old and the V2 E60 is much better.

What is the cheapest lens or camera/lens combo you've created portfolio worthy images with? Thanks for the vid!

Seems great to me!

Surprisingly weak up to 2.8. Hard to accept, given the price. Thanks for review.

Thanks for another useful video.

R lenses look best on film. The only lenses that set Leica apart are the APO lenses. SL and M

of course, overpriced and overhyped ! That's always the same story about vintage lenses...

I would have liked to seen the price range at the start so I did not need to watch any further ???

Love your little town.