The hood is vented and can be reversed for storage, but its mount is enormous and it blocks a big chunk of the viewfinder all by itself. Did I say I have a troubled relationship with older Leica hoods? I mean, look at the lens mounted on the camera with and without hood: Indeed, this is the only 50mm 1.4 lens I used on the Leica M that doesn’t block the viewfinder at all until you get to the minimum focusing distance! Unless you use the Franken-hood, that is. I love the tapered barrel shape because the front of the lens, becoming narrower, gets out of the way of the viewfinder. This has been the only real drawback of this lens for me.
But this lens has a minimum focusing distance of 1m, which is a limit you hit fairly easily even trying to shoot a portrait of your partner across the table. One thing that I found irritating at times is the minimum focusing distance: Leica M rangefinders don’t collimate closer than 70cm, and that is not an issue for me. The aperture ring clicks fairly firmly and is not easily moved accidentally. This really is a matter of personal taste. I tend to prefer speed, I never found it very difficult to nail focus precisely even wide open on my rangefinder, but it really doesn’t ruin the experience for me. Such a long focus throw favours precision rather than speed in focusing. The finely ribbed focusing ring is silky smooth and has quite a long throw, around 180 degrees. The barrel is made of aluminium, the helicoid is brass. It inspires a sensation of durability, and indeed it‘s made to survive most of us. The lens is a solid chunk of metal and glass, very dense. My experimentation with different optics means that I tend to acquire and then trade lenses, at times more than once (in one case already four times, and I might not be done with that one! It’s a curse.). On top of that it has a beautiful image quality. I mean, it’s barely bigger than the modern Leica Summicron 50mm F2, balances perfectly on my Leica M typ 240 and looks beautiful. The reason why I have had not one but two samples of the E43 Summilux is that for me it has the perfect size to speed and performance ratio. I had two copies over time so I can draw from both of them for the testing, and I haven’t noticed any sample variation between them. The lens reviewed here is the E43 or version 2 with the 1969 barrel design. There is debate on the web about a possible change of coatings for the 1992 version, but the optical cell remains the same. There are barrel design variations in 1969 (minor, still E43) and in 1992, when version 3 appears with a 46mm filter size and built-in telescopic lens hood. This optical design has been sold unmodified for 43 years until the release of the Aspherical version of the Summillux 50mm 1.4 in 2004. The 1961 optical design was developed by Dr Walter Mandler, the chief designer of most Leica lenses produced in Canada and a demigod worshipped by many Leicaphiles for his divine and perfectly flawed creations (article to come about this form of religion). In 1961 Leica released the new Summilux 50mm 1.4, also known as version 2 or E43 (from the filter size of 43mm, shared with its predecessor). The 50mm 1.4 lens would be released in 1959 with the very first version of the Leica Summilux 50mm 1.4, the shortest lived Leica lens with just two years on the market. There were already two M bayonet 50mm lenses available at launch, the Leica Summicron 50mm F2 (the very first version, in collapsible mount, a lens used by Henri Cartier-Bresson) and the Leica Summarit 50mm F1.5 - a slight variation of the Leica Xenon 50mm F1.5 designed by Taylor,Taylor & Hobson in 1936. It was the first Leica camera with a bayonet mount, and it had a viewfinder with framelines for 50mm, 90mm and 135mm. The Leica M system was born in 1954 with the Leica M3.