Updated March 2025

Introduction

One of the first M lenses I ever owned was the Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4. I used it with my Leica M2 and loved it for its pancake size, good image quality, and low price. Unfortunately, that lens doesn’t play well with digital sensors due to the rear element being very close to the sensor. Once I bought my first digital Leica, it made little sense to keep the 21/4 and I swapped it out for the Voigtlander 21/1.8.

Then in 2018, Voigtlander announced the Color-Skopar 21mm f/3.5: essentially a newer, somewhat pricier version of the 21/4 designed to work well with digital M cameras. I excitedly bought one to have a smaller and lighter alternative to my 21/1.8.

About this lens

This lens is sold in three versions:
•Type I (black and silver, aluminum, with a focus stick)
•Type II (black, brass, with focus tab)
•Type II (silver, brass, with focus tab)

The version I bought was the type I, since the type II wasn’t released until years later, but if I bought this lens again I would get the type II for its focus tab and simpler appearance.

Build quality & Mechanics

Fantastic. All metal construction that is indistinguishable from Leica. Focus and aperture rings feel perfect. The only tiny note I can make is that although the optional metal hood feels very solid, the bayonet attachment has a small amount of play. This isn’t quite as nice as Leica’s metal screw-on hoods, which feel rock solid.

Size and handling

Also great. It’s marginally bigger than the 21mm f/4, and significantly smaller than any of the other digital-compatible 21mm options. This is an ideal ultra-wide for travel.

Minimum focus distance

The 21/3.5 focuses down to 0.5m, in contrast to 0.7m for lenses such as the Leica 21mm f/3.4. The rangefinder on my M10 stops moving at ~0.6m, but it’s helpful to have the flexibility of focusing to 0.5m with liveview. It’s also nice to have for Leica selfies:

Image quality

Distortion:
Minimal/none.

Vignetting:
Vignetting is quite strong with the lens uncoded, so I recommend either selecting an in-camera profile or using a Lightroom preset to correct it.

Lateral chromatic aberration:
There is significant blue/yellow color fringing towards the edges of the frame. Thankfully, Lightroom automatically corrects this before I even see it.

Sharpness:
Sharp corner-to-corner at all apertures. Here’s how the corners look wide open:

Field curvature:
Although this lens is sharp corner-to-corner, I noticed some field curvature that can significantly degrade landscapes. The plane of focus curves significantly inward at the edges. This means that focused at infinity, the outer 50% of the frame will be significantly frontfocused. It’s enough to soften the picture unless the lens is stopped down to f/8.

Below is a real world example of the field curvature. I intended to shoot this at f/8 but accidentally took it at f/3.5. It looks fine at a glance but pixel peeping reveals that the edges are much fuzzier than the center due to field curvature:

This is annoying at f/3.5, tolerable at f/5.6, and by f/8 you won’t even see this focus field curvature.

Summary and recommendations

In one sentence, this lens is the fantastic Voigtlander 21mm f/4 modified so that it works well on digital, for a somewhat higher price. It has the same tiny size, but actually delivers clean, sharp images on digital, which the 21mm f/4 did not do for me. The size and weight of this lens makes it the ideal ultra-wide M mount lens for travel.

The only fault I could find with this lens is field curvature. Intriguingly, Bastian’s review showed no field curvature at all. His infinity sharpness test, also on a Leica M10, demonstrates excellent performance even at f/3.5 in the corners. I’m not sure what exactly is happening here but I plan on buying another copy of this lens and testing it on my M10-R. It could be copy-to-copy variation in field curvature (which I have never heard of before) or possibly something to do with variation in flange distance, which I cover in this article.

My final recommendations will depend on whether my repeat testing still shows significant field curvature that degrades landscape performance. If not, it’s very hard to see why anyone should spend vastly more for the Leica 21mm f/3.4; the only advantage I can think of besides a potential difference in field curvature is its better lens hood. In addition to being a lot more expensive, it’s also slightly larger than the Voigtlander 21/3.5 and only focuses to 0.7m.

For those who want a faster aperture at the cost of size and weight, consider the Voigtlander 21mm f/1.8 (review) and the Voigtlander 21mm f/1.4 (review). These have great image quality and give you the option of shooting at really wide apertures. This can create a very unique rendering and also adds flexibility in low light. The 21/1.8 is my personal favorite, but I still want to try out the Voigtlander 21/3.5 some more. A tiny 21mm lens with great image quality is too hard to pass up.

Good
Image quality
Size and feel
Build quality
Price

Bad
Field curvature (repeat testing forthcoming)

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Additional reading

Review by BastianK
Review by Andrew Brestansky
Review by Phillip Reeve (Sony version)
Fred Miranda’s review (Sony version)

More Sample Photos