About

These reviews are based on my personal preferences, which include the following:

  1. I prefer modern, sharp lenses. I like lenses that perform well at all apertures, and don’t have quirks like focus shift, field curvature, or other things that get in the way of sharp, in-focus images.

  2. I prefer lenses with shallow depth of field, but not to an extreme degree. For example, I have no desire to use a 50mm f/1 lens.

  3. I highly value compactness. Form factor is a huge part of why I shoot with a rangefinder.

  4. Price is a factor. If two lenses are equal but one costs $4000 and the other costs $900, I will always recommend the cheaper option. It’s true that lenses often hold or even grow in value, but for the purpose of these reviews, a lower price tag is better.

  5. I have no brand loyalty. Many Leica camera users are biased towards Leica glass, and will use meaningless words like “3D pop” and “Leica look” and “rendering” to justify brand preference. But on this page, if a Leica lens isn’t objectively superior, I’ll say so.

Many people value very different things in their lenses, and will form opinions about them accordingly. For example, my reviews are not helpful for those who value character and vintage rendering in their lenses.

As a second note, here are some things that I do not evaluate in my reviews:

  1. Performance on non-Leica sensors. M-mount lenses aren’t designed to be used on Sony E-mount cameras, and often perform poorly on them. If you want to use M lenses, use them on an M camera.

  2. Flare. Almost every M-mount lens I’ve ever used has had good flare control, so I won’t comment on it unless it’s an issue.

  3. Color transmission. Modern lenses differ extremely little from one another in terms of color transmission. And even if lens X has warmer colors than lens Y, temperature and hue are adjustable so this has no effect on the final image.