Summilux-R 80mm f/1.4

The Summilux-R 80mm f/1.4 is an extremely high speed lens with a relatively compact construction. It consists of 7 elements in 5 groups and has a 30° angle of view. Even at full aperture it exhibits very good performance, especially when set to infinity. This is, however, only translated onto film when the lens is accurately focused. At close range, curvature of field increases. This characteristic is not noticable in normal photography but is only of importance in the reproduction of flat subjects (e.g. during copying work), where the edges and corners show some lack of sharpness. The problem is easily cured by stopping down to medium apertures. The lens' high contrast, even at full aperture, makes it especially suitable for available light photography. Under such conditions, the brightness fall-off in the corners, caused by the correction employed, is scarcely noticeable. Even for subjects which are very critical in this respect (i.e. which are evenly bright, such as house walls or blue sky), vignetting is not detectable when stopped down to f/2.8 or more.

The French photo magazine Chasseur d'Images awarded this lens 3 stars for optical performance (their test system penalizes lenses with large f-stops; star results can only be compared among lenses within the same f-stop category). The German photo magazine ColorFoto gave this lens 85.4 points (maximum score of 5 stars). It came out as the best of high speed 80-90mm medium telephoto lenses. Weight: 625 gr, length from bayonet flange: 69 mm, built-in lens hood. E67 filter size. Its Leica catalog number is 11881 or 11349 (with ROM). First introduced in 1985.