The Online Photographer

[UPDATE the following morning: That was interesting—the information in the post below, which I wrote yesterday using information from Sigma's and B&H's websites, is now obsolete and no longer correct. Literally overnight, not only have some of B&H Photo's listings for some of the I-Series Contemporary lenses changed, but Sigma's own web page for those lenses has changed as well. Sigma no longer includes the DG DN lenses on the Contemporary lenses page, but has added them to the "Discontinued" page. (It's also possible my search yesterday turned up an outdated page.) And several of the lenses I said were still available at the old prices at B&H Photo are no longer listed or are now listed as "Discontinued." It looks like the 65mm lens is the only one still available in L-mount at the old price. But I didn't check them all. Several of the older DG DN lenses look to still be available in Sony E mount at the old prices also. 

A couple of things I missed: the 45mm ƒ/2.8 DG (new style) (now $619, vs. the old price of $449) does feature a change: it now takes the magnetic lenscap used across the rest of the line, according to DPReview. And the obvious one: these lenses are now available in silver versions, to match the silver BF. —Mike]

I shoot Sigma L-mount now, and the other day I noticed something that outwardly looked weird. Some of the Contemporary series of lenses seemed to have a subtly new designation—the older lenses were "DG DN" and the newer lenses are just "DG." Not just on the sale pages; the change is also printed on the lenses themselves.

(Note: These illustrations show just the lower
part of the lens, not the whole lens)

This is the older and newer Contemporary 35mm ƒ/2. Note the printed lens designations.

Then I noticed something else weird. On the Sigma page for the lenses, both versions are listed and illustrated, but they don't seem to be right next to each other. For example, this 35mm ƒ/2 DG DN is in the middle of one row and plain DG is at the beginning of the next row down. The 24mm ƒ/3.5 has three lenses in between the DG DN and the DG. 

In Sigma-speak, DG is a lens for full-frame, and DN signifies (sigmafies?) a lens for mirrorless. So why did the "DN" disappear? 

I know, the suspense it killing you, so I'll cut to the chase. The old and new lenses are exactly the same. No changes. The new lenses are every bit as much for mirrorless as the original DN-marked lenses are.

Then...oh, duh. A number of the "new" DG-only lenses are more expensive. So do you suppose they put the lenses on the company web page farther away from each other to make it less likely that you'd compare the prices? Or does that sound like a TOP conspiracy theory? 

The ones that have gone up in price are the 17mm ƒ/4, 24mm ƒ/3.5, 24mm ƒ/2, 35mm ƒ/2, and 65mm ƒ/2. 

The ones that have stayed at the same price are the 20mm ƒ/2, 45mm ƒ/2.8, 50mm ƒ/2, and 90mm ƒ/2.8.

It appears that none of the Contemporary zoom lenses are yet available in a DG-only version. 

Should you be interested in snagging something at the old "DG DN" price, B&H Photo still has a couple of the DG DN marked lenses that look like they're based on the lower price: the 17mm ƒ/4 DG DN, L-mount, $599 (same as Sigma list price) and the 65mm ƒ/2 DG DN, L-mount, $599 ($100 less than the Sigma list price for the old one; the new one is $769). The others are discontinued at the former prices. The 65mm has particularly nice bokeh if you're all right with the only mildly longer angle of view.

All those prices are for L-mount. Sony E-mount lenses might be different prices. Some look to be more, some less.

I really like this lens series. They have all-metal casings and very smooth operation, and metal lens hoods, even, and their performance is beyond reproach, at least the two I've tried. I've been meaning to buy a 90mm. Now is probably the time. [UPDATE: too late.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Jim Kofron (partial comment): "Sigma did announce a price increase due to the tariffs. I have a 90mm on backorder from B&H; I think it's supposed to come in September. I doubt that they will 'give it' to me for the original backorder price. The new I-series lenses were all getting the makeover (with magnetic caps, etc). I have a new 45mm and an older 17mm (both for my black Sigma BF). As for the Sigma BF, I'm really enjoying that camera. I've never had a Sigma that was so fast and rock-solid on autofocus—it's quite a treat!"

The fad from my time, in a current lens

It's official: this is an era. The era of what I've snarkily dubbed the great big honkin' normal (BHN) lens. It's a distinct fad or craze that will probably be dated one day. 

Here's DPReview's article about the forthcoming SongRaw Moonlit (15 elements in 10 groups, four ED [extra-low dispersion] elements, seven HR [high refractive index] elements, two aspherical elements). It's alleged to be the first full-frame ƒ/1.2 autofocus lens from a Chinese maker. No specs, prices, or availability in my country yet, that I know of. It appears to be Shenzhen SongRaw's only product so far.

These things don't appeal to me, but there might be a reason for that. In the early 1970s (I was 14 in 1971), Olympus made the first of its popular miniaturized 35mm bodies. Then-mighty Pentax followed suit—ever held an ME Super? Even Nikon, king of pro cameras back then, responded with a few small and svelte models: not just the FM and its similar-bodied stablemates; a few diehard iconoclasts will remember the EM and the Series-E lenses. The Contax 139Q that I went through photography school with was reasonably within the boundaries of the small and light body styles of the day. (I later got the larger, heavier Contax RTS II, and, to my surprise, didn't like it as well. It was promptly stolen from me, which I accepted as a sign from the Universe.) Leica rangefinders had always been small, at least as defined at the time—the Leica CL that my high school buddy Art Elkon had was even smaller. The Leica M lenses and the wonderful OM Zuiko line were mostly very light, small, and compact. The Leica C (for "compact") lenses for the CL even more so. That was the fashion at that time. It would be interesting to put the Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.2 next to the Songraw Moonlit. It might look like an original Austin Mini next to a Hummer*. 

Small and light was the fad that I grew up with, is all. It was what was cool at the time. That's probably mostly why I like it. I got a little endorphin charge when I saw the Pentax 70mm ƒ/2.4 again, that I will be sending out with the Pentax Monochrome body—130g (4.6 oz.) with its built-in hood. That's it in the top illustration—and it's bigger than the 21mm that will also be in the box.

I suspect that today's younger photography and camera enthusiasts are growing up with a different fashion holding sway—and that when they're my age now, they'll be looking back with rosy nostalgia on the great big lenses of now as "the way things are supposed to be." They'll get that little charge when they see a great big oversized lens...like an old SongRaw Moonlit.

Nothing new under the sun.... 

Here's the manufacturer page for the SongRaw Moonlit. Pretty images. And a slick and well-made page, complete with MTF curves for ƒ/1.2 and ƒ/1.4.

Mike

CORRECTION: The first version of this article said the Moonlit is the first ƒ/1.2 lens from a Chinese lensmaker. It is the first full-frame autofocus lens of that speed. Management regrets the error, and will fire the writer as soon as a replacement is found.

*Actually the smallest car I ever saw (and sat in!) was the original Honda Civic. A dealer had one on display. It was a little larger than, say, a suit of armor.

That's an early Doug video, by the way. He's now a YouTube multimillionaire.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Sroyon: "I was born after the Olympus OM/Pentax ME era, but like you I'm a fan of small lenses. Nevertheless I was thinking perhaps we should differentiate between fast BHN (with a max aperture of ƒ/1.2 or wider) like the SongRaw, versus not-so-fast BHN (ƒ/1.4 and smaller). The way I see it, a full-frame autofocus ƒ/1.2 lens is bound to be big, unless they make dramatic compromises in optical quality. Whereas the not-so-fast BHN are generally big because the manufacturers wanted to make a lens which is extraordinarily well-corrected, at the expense of compactness and weight. Thus the motivations of people who buy fast versus not-so-fast BHN are probably somewhat different. Also I feel there are lots of new lenses being produced in general, especially with all the Chinese manufacturers joining the party. Including some very small lenses like the new Fuji 23mm ƒ/2.8, and 7Artisans' new 10mm ƒ/3.5. So there's a market for that too!"

Tom Burke: "Partaking as I do in a (different) forum dedicated for users of the Canon mirrorless camera that I use, I can report that a number of people buy a BHN (or the APS-C equivalent) because they’ve been told that the wider the maximum aperture, the greater the lens is. Having bought the lens, they then use it at that maximum aperture for most of their shots. Until they appeal for advice to the forum, at which point someone advises them to use a smaller aperture. But there’s a definite belief out there that an ƒ/1.4 or wider lens must be better than an ƒ/2 or even ƒ/2.8 lens, at all apertures."

BG: "Big honkin' cameras and big honkin' lenses were popular back in the SLR era, too. It's the macho I'm-a-serious he-man photographer thing. Look at the size of my cameras; it proves I am serious. Nothing changes over time...."

Maggie Osterberg: "When I was a teenager, I wanted everyone to know that I was a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER dammit! So, I had a big Nikon SLR, with a big potato-masher flash, and a big lens. Which looked pretty ridiculous on my then 5'2" frame! But by golly, folks knew I was serious. By the time I got to my forties, I figured out that unless you're shooting sports, big ≠ good. Best thing I ever did was to get a Leica, with nice small lenses, and then an X100. As E.F. Schumacher wrote, 'Small Is Beautiful.'"

James: "You could, instead of complaining, herald the Sigma Contemporary DG DN series. The 45mm is, in particular, a standout."

Mike replies: James, that's my lens.

The new Sigma ART 17–40mm ƒ/1.8 DC was introduced at 1:00 a.m. this morning. It harkens back to the early days of zooms, when many zooms had a range of only 2x. The range of this lens is only a little more at 2.35x. Generally when any lens has a distorted spec—weight and size, overlarge objective element, low range, high or low price, etc., it's a sign that some sort of special feature is present. The special feature of this lens is a fast constant maximum aperture. In a world where ƒ/2 zooms are still considered exotic (like the Canon RF 28–70mm ƒ/2L which is $300 off today and tomorrow in honor of B&H's Bild Show taking place at the Javits Center in NYC as we speak), the ƒ/1.8 maximum aperture of this lens is just that tiny bit faster. 

I question the cost of that. It's an APS-C lens, so the range is 25.5–60mm equivalent. Is that really a useful focal length range?

Slam it or tweak it
It seems to me there are two ways people tend to use zooms. One is where you use it as two lenses. For example, with a 28–85mm on 35mm, you slam it to 28mm when you need a wide angle of view, and wish it went a little wider; or, you slam it to 85mm when you need a telephoto angle of view, and wish it went a little longer. And you use it 80–90% of the time on those two extremes. Or, you use a zoom as an "adjustable normal," whereby you use a zoom lens somewhere in the middle of the range and adjust the zoom function to tailor it to the exact angle of view that you like best, then tweak it to purposes from there. That tends to be how I use zooms. Years ago, Pentax prototyped a lens with an exceedingly narrow range that was deliberately intended to be used that way, but I have a poor memory for numbers and forget the specs now. Hopefully Oracular Oren of Stately Oren Manor will chime in and provide, as he recalls all there is to recall and then a little bit more. The lens never saw production in any event. Although Pentax now has a beautiful 20–40mm (roughly 30–60mm-e) that seems intended to be used that way. 

YMMV, of course.

Slow lens fast
I also (perhaps I am in a contrarian mood today) somewhat question the need for speed. Despite the overpowering popularity of fast lenses now—everybody wants a brag-on lens—I have been photographing on FF with an ƒ/2.8 lens for some while now, and I can honestly say that I cannot remember even one time that I wished the lens was faster. I get the speed I need by ratcheting up the ISO a tad, and never have run out of room there either; ƒ/2.8 is the new ƒ/1.4 if you ask me. Of course I am now a fuddy-duddy, not a photo-ninja, so maybe YMMV there as well.

And I've said before that 60mm, or 60mm-e, is a particularly useless angle of view for me. It's simply a 50mm only worse. To me. When I say so, I hear from people who like and use that focal length. So they're out there. I still keep the Panasonic 12–35mm for Micro 4/3, even though it's been an age since I shot Micro 4/3, and even on that lens, the 70mm-e maximum range was a limitation. I've learned that I like a zoom that goes to at least 120mm-e on the long end for shooting with a zoom where I live now, where a lot of the pictures are farther away. The Panasonic-Leica Vario-Elmarit 12–60mm (24–120mm-e on Micro 4/3) seems perfect, although I have never owned it.

So it all depends on use-cases. Would you buy this lens? Would you try this lens?

Sigma ascendant
I'll bet it's yummy. I've become a big fan of Sigma. I keep kind of dreaming of a Leica SL3 with a set of Sigma Contemporary primes in L-mount. I don't need a camera like that, but the lack of any need or purpose has virtually never stopped me from dreaming about photography equipment. Cameras and especially lenses fire the endorphins for me, like gambling does for a gambling addict. I presume. I never gamble, except perhaps on life decisions. Bah-dum-pah.

The new Sigma ART costs $919, and comes in Fujifilm X, Canon RF, Sony E, and L-mount.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave: "Years ago, Pentax prototyped a lens with an exceedingly narrow range...." Wasn't it something like a 5–10mm range for that lens? (Just going from memory.) Found it here."

Mike replies: That's it. Can't believe I forgot that. The 35mm "Flexi," 33–39mm zoom.

hugh crawford: "These specs would have been really attractive for studio or location photography back when I was doing that sort of thing. You needed a constant aperture because you were using a bunch of pack and head strobes, and absolutely had to have all the exposures consistent because you were probably shooting E6. Moving around was probably difficult on location because there was stuff in the way, and in the studio moving around would get the set from the wrong angle or mess up the lighting so cropping in the camera was the thing, because E6 and art directors. Time was money, and literally if you had a few models. Rock stars and CEOs were even worse. Changing lenses meant that you had to do another clip test on the E6, and change lenses at the end of a roll or better yet have multiple bodies. I don't know if any of that applies today.

"Getting an acceptable 35mm Ectachrome for a printed page seems like crossing the Atlantic on a sailing ship these days."

Jim Simmons: "I shot a ton of architecture with a Pentax 55–100mm ƒ/4 zoom on a Pentax 67. That's a 27–50mm equivalent. Super sharp lens, not to mention huge and heavy. I probably did 90% of my architectural photography with that one lens. Oh, and it was perfectly rectilinear too, which was uncommon with zooms of that time. This Sigma feels like it could be a similarly useful lens."

ASW: "Regarding zoom lenses, I find that I'm a 'slammer' to the extremes with my telephoto zoom lenses, first a 70–210mm and later a 70–300mm, regardless of whether I was using them on my initial APS-C or later full-frame DSLR. Conversely, with my wider zoom lenses, first a combo of 12–24mm and 18–70mm DX lenses and later a combo of 18–35mm and 24–85mm FX lenses, I appreciate and utilize fine-scale adjustment for framing landscape photos and use the entire zoom range at relatively equal proportions."

Daniel: "This lens violates my sacred rule to always have the wrong lens on my camera at any given time."

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And although I'm not a camera expert—cameras are adjacent to my interest, not the center of it—I'm well aware that in the early years of Japanese cameramaking, post WWII, the Japanese also, um, "sincerely flattered" the established German cameramakers. Now the Japanese have at least as good a reputation as their onetime role-models. I'm also aware, broadly, and in a few cases particularly, that the Chinese have not, in the most recent past, had the most sterling reputation when it comes to respecting intellectual property. So should we castigate China for imitating?

It's not like we haven't seen imitation in the up-and-coming Chinese lens industry so far. You might know of many more examples than I do, but one is the Yongnuo copy of the Canon EF 35mm ƒ/2:

(Not quite to scale. I tried.)

The copy didn't appear until the original was out of production, and the copy is very inexpensive—$106 as of now. They're actually perfectly friendly little lenses in terms of results, although I might search for a used Canon original in good condition if I were going that direction myself. 

Now a Chinese lensmaker has introduced a copy of a much more famous lens, the Leica 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron version IV, designed by the most famous of Leica lens designers, Walter Mandler, who also designed the other three early M versions. Wikipedia lists six screwmount lenses, 27 M (rangefinder) lenses, and 16 R (SLR) lenses to Walter's credit, including several of my personal favorites. And the new Chinese copy is called a "Mandler"! It seems that's going to be the company name. A bit cheeky, isn't it? Seeming as it does to appropriate not only the design and form of the long-discontinued lens—it was replaced by the first ASPH. (aspherical) version in 1996, which is why the IV is sometimes referred to as the "pre-ASPH."—but its heritage as well. Of course you could call it an "homage" and just not worry about it any further. But where would be the fun in that? Although called a "Summi-Cron" to avoid triggering trademark tangles, the upcoming lens is obviously intended to be a replica—right down to the box. 

The prototype
I'm quite familiar with the original lens. In fact, I'm afraid I'm the guy who dubbed it "the King of Bokeh," a title that has stuck like glue for Lo these 28 years or so. Jim Kelly, who retired as Managing Editor of Model Railroader magazine, once told me that he'd been in the business so long that he was seeing all his old bullshit come circling back around again. In new articles submitted by young writers to the magazine, he would find telltales—phrases, ideas, metaphors, bon mots, strategies, etc.—in which he readily recognized the source as...himself. I tossed off that "King of Bokeh" thing very casually in a picture caption in 1997, and it has clung ferociously to the lens ever since, like a barnacle from hell. Serves me right. Then again, I coined a thousand other quips, and none of them stuck. Who could have known that one would?

For the record, that Leica lens, while very good—I loved it, foibles and all—is the king of nothing, and certainly not of bokeh. I didn't even use it like enthusiasts do today—I shot with it at middle apertures of subjects mostly in the middle distance—say 6–25 feet—and I liked the gentle way it transitioned to slight out-of-focus blur when used that way. That was very pleasing. But today people would crank it wide open and shoot close up to "maximize the bokeh"...which, by the way, shouldn't even be a thing. Who shoots a 35mm lens for the bokeh?!? That makes no sense at all. I can tell you that I only ever shot that lens wide open TWICE in all the years I owned it—and I remember the occasions, because it stunk wide open. Well, no, not "stunk." Like a lot of spherical lenses in those days, it just wasn't all that good at maximum aperture. Despite what you're about to read about tigers and roses.

Not only has the old lens risen to stratospheric levels on the used market, but all sorts of claims are made for it, some of them not very comprehensible to me. I found one connoisseur site that I'll quote a few tidbits from. Before I do, I'll mention that we should cut the writer some slack—not only might the auto-translation not be the best, but Chinese is a language full of idioms, much more even than English, so I'm told, and we should remember that many of our expressions and phrases that seem perfectly plain to us might be puzzling when rendered verbatim into a foreign tongue—say, for example, "dung of the male bovine." But here are a few quotes from that article I found (note that the author calls the 7-element v.IV lens the "Seven Jade" or "Seven Jades"):

= + = + =

"What color is the sunlight in my mind? What color is the sunlight in the Seven Jades? [...] And I used the F2 aperture, and the Seven Jades were fully opened. The color performance is exactly the color of the sunlight in my mind. I only use F2 because I like that special flavor, imperfect blur, perfect in-focus. The in-focus is as sharp as a tiger, and the out-of-focus is as shy as a rose. The Seven Jades are like a tiger sniffing a rose."

That right there is the best description of image quality I ever read. Utterly delightfully meaningless.

= + = + =

"The Seven Jade has the best blur between F4 and F8, and it was these apertures that earned it the reputation of the king of bokeh."

Got that right, although I would have said ƒ/5.6 to ƒ/11. But there it is—there's my darn "king of bokeh" thing again, rearing its ridiculous head. You'll seldom find any review of the v.IV 35mm Summicron that doesn't go there.

= + = + =

"There is a legendary lens called the king of out-of-focus, which is the fourth version of the Leica Seven Jade M35 F2.

"The photos taken by this lens are indeed very special. Many people said that they have a kind of artistic conception after seeing the photos. This artistic conception is not as straightforward as that given by ordinary SLR telephoto lenses, but rather a kind of implicit hesitation. This artistic conception should actually be what everyone calls the king of out-of-focus. 

"What is the king of out-of-focus? It is the gradual blurring of the distance and the 3D sense. If there is no such gradual blurring and the background is directly blurred, it will create a sense of oppression. Compared with other lenses, the Seven Jade has the sense of space of the theater, and the other lenses have the sense of space of the symposium. Of course, many people think that these two feelings are not better than each other, because the latest Leica lenses have become the sense of space of the symposium. But now that the new lenses have become the symposium, the Grand Theater seems special, and as time goes by, the gradual blurring seems a bit artistic."

We'll just be kind and assume all that (and there's more) makes sense in Chinese.

= + = + =

The replicant 'Seven Jades'
I don't mean to sound, er, jaded. (Sorry!) Although I am jaded, so why not sound that way? It's only honest. 

The Mandler Summi-Cron [sic]

Speaking of honesty, let's admit that I'm not going to instantly become an expert in Chinese off-brand lenses just to write one post. There's a lot I don't know. First of all, is the new Mandler lens the same lens as an earlier 35mm pre-ASPH replica, the Polar Solaron? Dunno. Is the rebranding a licensing, or is the Mandler a completely new attempt by different people altogether? Dunno. Is Mandler the name of the company, or just this one lens? Right—I don't know. We could add more questions here, lining them up to receive the same answer. 

Another suggestion (supposition?) that I saw online was that the Mandler, which is suppose to arrive in a store near you sometime this month, is a craven attempt by the former Polar brand to rename its replica in order to escape reports of poor quality control levied against the Solaron. A case of artful dodging, you might call it. I would guess that that's probably an accusation made in the absence of evidence—but I don't have any evidence of that. And it wouldn't mean it was wrong, either.

Part of the irony of that is that quality control is essentially what made Leica famous in the first place. I knew Arthur Kramer, the longtime lens guru for Modern Photography magazine, who for many years wrote an influential column on optics. Arthur explained that when spherical lenses were made, in those long-ago days before computerized design and manufacturing control, a batch of finished lenses would be tested, and any lenses found to be below a certain spec would be discarded. The all-important question was, what was that specification to be? Makers of cheap lenses set their sights low, and sold most everything they produced. So you might get a good one, you might not. Decades ago, some professionals would buy three copies of a new lens, test them, keep the best one, and return the other two. At the other end, Leica set its standards very high. As Arthur loved to say, that meant Leica threw away a lot of lenses—and that was the reason Leica lenses were so good, because you were assured of getting one with excellent specs. And that was the reason they cost more. The fewer lenses a lensmaker kept from a typical batch, the more each of the remaining ones had to cost. 

And the irony within the irony is that quality control is also the reason I got rid of my own Leica 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron-M version IV, the very lens I dubbed the King of Bokeh all those years ago: poor quality control. On my lens, the black coating on the aperture blades flaked off with use, and deposited a cluster of tiny little chips right in the middle of an inner element. They were hard to see with the naked eye at a foot or 18 inches away, but very visible with a loupe and a good light from up close. I had the lens dismantled and cleaned one time, at what seemed to me then to be considerable expense, but then when I checked it again a number of weeks after the cleaning, there they were—a few more tiny flecks of black deposited inside the lens. I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I realized the problem was still there. My heart fell. I knew I wouldn't be able to live with it. I quietly sold the lens (disclosing everything to the buyer, of course), without writing about it in the pages of any magazine: you can't draw any conclusions about all lenses from one sample, and it's not fair to damn a manufacturer with one anecdotal case. 

Walter Mandler

I still have some pictures I took with that lens, of course. It was a very pretty lens. The pictures were very pretty, is what I mean. The handling was great—I've written whole articles about pre-focusing with that lens—and it was marvelously small. I actually demonstrated pre-focusing to Ralph Gibson at one of the New York shows, with that lens—looking at a target and focusing the lens by feel, with the camera held at my waist—and on that occasion I nailed it perfectly, which was fortunate. (I will admit that Ralph didn't recognize me at the time, even though I had interviewed him in his SoHo studio a few years prior.)

Don't think I wouldn't like that
I don't think it's justified to dismiss or downplay Chinese lens manufacture. Is not China effectively the world's manufactory? I'm quite grateful for many of the things I own that are made in China, starting, I believe, with the keyboard I am typing this on. They don't have the reputation yet of other sources of lenses, but they are collectively learning and improving in leaps and bounds. The category is already so rich that it's its own little corner of the camera and photographing hobby—you could have fun just collecting and trying Chinese lenses. And how can you dislike a category in which the price for playing is generally so low? I'll tell you one thing—f I weren't semi-retired as a lens geek, I'd love to compare the bokeh of the Mandler Leica homage 35mm ƒ/2 to the bokeh of the $106 Yongnuo Canon homage 35mm ƒ/2. Having owned both of the originals, my money's on the Yongnuo for the win. But we'd have to run the actual tests to see. 

So, finally, would I get one of those Mandler copies? The answer is, you bet! Oh, man. Of course I would. Assuming I still shot a Leica M-mount camera as my main axe, that is. Especially if I still shot film. I idolized Walter Mandler once upon a time. And I'm not paying $2,500 for a 30-year-old used lens, sorry. The Mandler is supposed to cost $800 give or take $200, well below the used price of an excellent+ used original, and that makes it accessible. It would be fun to compare it to the real thing, fun to see if it actually replicated all of the old lens's qualities and properties, and fun to explore its image quality in its own right. And I'm just the sort of miscreant iconoclast who would love to have it on my Leica, fooling 99% of the people who looked at it into assuming I was shooting with a Leica lens. I've had a lot of experience in this biz, and I can guess to a very high degree of certainty that a percentage of viewers would expound on the lovely properties of my Leica photographs while looking at my prints. And now I know how I'd respond: I'd nod sagely, stroke my chin, and say, "the in-focus is as sharp as a tiger, and the out-of-focus is as shy as a rose. The Seven Jades are like a tiger sniffing a rose." I'm sure the response would be silence—appreciative, or otherwise.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Luke: "A fun read, and classic TOP!

"I would expect Chinese languages to have many more idioms than English. Their culture has been around much, much longer. These people, when faced with a government ban on posters with certain political phrases, started showing a blank sheet of paper as a form of protest, and everyone understood. It even has its own emoji: 🗌 ."

Warning! Bloviation Alert

It is right and proper that anyone should do whatever they want with photography as long as they aren't hurting anyone. (The second of the two Hopi commandments, as reported in William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways is, "Don't go around hurting people." I met him once, adventitiously, and he made a great impression on me.) How else are we to achieve the great variety and creativity of approach that typifies this medium? 

But one thing people might do—not that it's up to me—is try an old lens.

We are a nation of shoppers. "The thing Americans are best at is selling each other stuff." (The original quote used a stinkier word than stuff.) Some friends of mine like to stop at the Once Again Shoppe (rhymes with hoppy, in my mind) to root for bargains. They don't need to shop there. They don't need the things they buy there. They do it for an excursion—to shop without suffering much in the way of consequences; because they enjoy shopping, but don't want to waste a lot of money. There are great bargains to be found there—I fix my oatmeal every morning in a colorful bowl that goes for $30 or more on eBay. It used to be $50, but they have come down. I found it at the Once Again Shoppy for $5. The problem is that my friends' garage is filling up with the things they bring home from these excursions. Even though they realize that they are shopping just to shop, still it's becoming a problem.

I enjoy shopping too. My problem, though, is that once I research something to completion, I then feel obliged to buy it, as a consummation of all my adroit and skillful, not to say neurotic and obsessive, delectation and discrimination. 

"I shop, therefore I buy."

—The great French philosopher
René Deshoppingcartes

This becomes habitual, and the habit is an excellent way of turning perfectly good cash into nothing. It was a sorry day for me when I got the idea in mind that it's possible to get my money back out of things I put my money into. Usually, you cannot. Sometimes, I could but do not. Shopping and buying, therefore, often turns good money into old junk you feel obliged to hold on to because...well, because you put good money into it! So now I'm careful not to do too much in the way of shopping for random things. That way lies a mild form of ruin.

Although I do love it when I find a bargain. I have an old Eddie Bauer Fall/Spring field jacket that I've been wearing for 33 years. I've tried to replace it three times, and each time was a fail. But recently I asked my friend Chris, who likes shopping for clothes, where I should go to get a Fall/Spring jacket, and she immediately said, "the Columbia store at the Outlet Mall." It's over near Waterloo, which is not on my usual track. But I went there, walked in, and the very first jacket I put my hand on was the one I bought. There was only one left. Tried it on, and it fit perfectly. It was marked down from $140 to $40. Paid and left. Done and dusted in a matter of minutes. And I love it. I will wear it till it wears out. I got my money's worth out of that old Eddie Bauer jacket, too—or I got my mother's money's worth out of it, because it was a Christmas present from her. You just have to overlook those three replacements I bought and de-accessioned.

Columbia Men's Pike Lake II jacket

But as I was saying (I'm wandering today—I worked on taxes yesterday and I have to get back to it as soon as I finish this, which is why I'm making this as long as it's humanly possible to make it)—as I was saying: we're a nation of shoppers, so there's nothing wrong with continually shopping for new lenses and discarding lenses that are now five, ten, or twenty years old as if they were cars or dry staples for the kitchen like wild rice or dried beans. If that's what you wish to do. But I think people get into the mindset that old lenses are outmoded, outdated, insufficient, unacceptable, when lenses are the one thing that don't get outmoded, at least in terms of their optics. And people get a very curious notion about "old." One reader informed me that the Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R lens I talked about recently is 13 years old. It came out in 2012, he wrote. Worse, it was early 2012. He didn't even bother to make his point in words—he just informed me about its age, as if it were self-evident that you can't use a lens that is so unacceptably old. Anybody can draw the correct conclusion once they are informed as to the fact.

Thirteen years, though? That's not old.

Using a truly old lens might be an antidote to this. Just to calm down that neomania in one's mind. Neomania, also called neophilia, is a hallmark of American culture. We Americans can be excused for believing in it. We are, as I said, trained to. So if you suffer from neophilia in lenses, the belief that newer is better, I think you should try as old a lens as you can find just to balance your mind. You might be limited to what will fit on your current lensmount, of course.

What's the oldest lens you currently have in use? For me, actually, it's that XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R. Here's how to put a picture into the Comments.

conrad, johnson, and Goerz
A sad corollary of neomania is that sometimes we have it and lose it again. I recall reading years ago about an audiophile who settled on the perfect system after his first round of shopping and research. With a turntable and carefully chosen cartridge, a conrad-johnson [sic] preamp, a tube amp, and electrostatic speakers, he described it as "a warm wet kiss of a system" and just what he liked—and he settled down to simply listen to music through it. And that he did, for a number of years afterward. But he read so many reviews in the enthusiast literature that he eventually felt like he had to buy something else. So he "upgraded" away from that perfect system, and little by little sold all the original bits and pieces. And began the search anew...for what he'd already had. For years he chased "accuracy" at great expense of time and money, and confessed that he never again enjoyed a system again as much as that first one. He mentioned that he regretted its loss, from time to time.

Double Anastigmat Goerz, a.k.a. Dagor (von Höegh, 1892)

A photographer I know, not an immediate classmate but art-school-adjacent, Patricia Dalzell, devoted herself to portraiture and settled on just the right method for her, with a 4x5 and the ideal old Goerz lens (pronounced "gertz," I believe, though you German speakers may please correct me). I thought the lens she had was perfect for her work. But at some point she mentioned to me that periodically she got a hankering to replace it. How could it be so good when there were newer lenses said to be better? I'm happy to see Pat got a picture in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I wish there were a book of that portraiture of hers. It was classic and calm, respectful, cooperative, modest, lovely. And made with just the right old lens, or so I thought.

You don't need the latest and greatest when it comes to lenses. A photo writer—me—once said, "all lenses give you their gifts." Different lenses, different gifts, perhaps, but use a lens for a while and it will yield to you the best it has to offer. Which reminds me, I still have the revised "History of the Pentax 50" to write, and Part III of Big Honkin' Normals. I've been on a lens kick lately. Unfortunately, though, now I have to get back to taxes. I can't stretch this out any longer. As a most excellent editor of mine, Ana Ercegovac Jones, once ruefully commented, I've said all there is to say, and then some.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Michael: "This 'bloviation' is a perfect example of your W-I-D-E range of interests. If you have never heard the most excellent George Carlin rant about 'stuff,' it is worth a listen. I am a Carlin devotee and feel it is one of his best verbal essays.

"Jackets...I have one that is almost 50 years old and whenever I wear now people ask where I bought it. I tell them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They give me a quizzical look as the jacket is black leather with a Native American motif embroidered on it. Not typical of a fashion in the town that Schlitz beer made famous.

"One final observation if I may. Your comments on the DAGOR lens (by the bye, your pronunciation of Goerz is spot-on) caused me to realize that that lens's initials, DAG, happen to be the initials of, in my humble opinion, the best Leica and Minox technician I ever had the pleasure of meeting. I've used his skills. Mike, being from Wisconsin, you know of whom I speak :-) ."

Mike replies: Don Goldberg...son of Norman Goldberg, who was the longtime Technical Director of Popular Photography magazine and designed their testing lab. Norman G. was also the author of Camera Technology: The Dark Side of the Lens.

Joseph Kashi: "While very recent pro-grade digital lenses are quite excellent, those of us who use both digital and film have experience using really sharp older lenses like Dagors and Zeiss Protars, as well as some 1970s 35mm film optics. Some of the sharper lenses I've used on Micro 4/3 have been adapted M42 Pentax screw-mount telephotos. Even without software corrections, they're crisper than most of the consumer-grade lenses currently available new. The only lens that I still regret selling, 45 years later, is an older 120mm Dagor. It was an uncoated lens that worked very well with modern Kokak color films, giving vibrant color with excellent sharpness. I was never able to find another. More modern Dagors were made in the US, factory-coated, and with the design regularly re-computed and improved. Later Dagors are better. At this point, the oldest lens that I regularly use is a 100+ year old, fully-symmetrical 165mm Pre-WWI Bausch and Lomb/Zeiss Protar VIIa set. With high resolution film, it remains crisp even when scanned and viewed at 1:1 in Lightroom. I calculate that it is capable of making sharp 40x60" prints from 5x7. By the 1980s, nearly all large-format lenses were computer-designed, multi-coated, and made to professional standards. The resolution of such lenses often approached the absolute physical limit of sharpness—diffraction."

John Shriver: "The oldest lens that I use much is one that has family history. Sometime in the late 1920s, my maternal grandfather bought a No. 2A Folding Hawk-Eye Model B. It replaced a previous 116-size camera whose bellows had started to leak. He was quite skilled using it, often posing family members on the roof of the apartment building they lived at in the Bronx to ensure good exposure. He took very good care of it, kept it in a case, and taught his children to be careful of it. My dear mother got the notion that this was a 'very good camera' from how careful her father was with it. He died of MS in 1934, and she wound up taking it with her when she went to graduate school in 1948.

"The reality is that the only camera Kodak made that was cheaper than the Hawk-Eye was the Brownie. Both had the same one-element meniscus achromatic lens. But the Hawk-Eye had a better Kodex shutter, and apertures from ƒ/11 to ƒ/32. Over the years, the bellows started to fail. Hawk-Eyes were cheap, the bellows had no real leather in them. She shot a roll of Kodacolor with it in the 1950s. Unfortunately, only the badly faded prints survive. The negatives got thrown out in the 1980s. She took baby pictures of me with it in 1958, at which point there were pinholes in the bellows, so the pictures are double exposures, one of me through the lens, and one of what the pinhole focused on the film. Very cool, but not very effective baby pictures! By the 1970s, the bellows were totally disintegrated. In 2009, I managed to find a new-old-stock Kodak bellows for the camera, and replaced the bellows. I also found a 20-roll brick of Verichrome Pan 616, frozen since new. I took some family pictures with this, including my mother and one of her cousins. Processed at home and scanned with Epson V750. I most recently used it at my daughter's wedding in 2023, tagging along with the paid photographer (with permission) during the formal shots to take pictures of her with her great-grandfather's camera. They came out great. Well, of course they are fuzzy in the corners. Here's the camera, still looking sharp.

Moose: "Re 'What's the oldest lens you currently have in use?' Canon 50mm ƒ/1.2 in Leica thread mount, 1960 release. 'All lenses give you their gifts.' So true. This one does wondrous things wide open for certain subjects. (Not this dark on the big screen.)

"Here, with subject at some distance from lens and background not too much further, nice OoF transitions and bokeh. Get too close and the transitions get busy/edgy. Close with distant background gives classic Double Gauss edges and bubbles.

"Now, it's getting a run for it's money from the 56-year-younger design Oly 25mm ƒ/1.2 PRO on Micro 4/3. Not quite as dreamy wide open, but delicious transitions and bokeh in all circumstances. Also, wonderful focus stacks—and—EXIF!"

Staffan Carlshamre: "I think that you got the source of the philosophical quote wrong. Surely it is by Arthur Shopping-hour?"

G Dan Mitchell: "Not as 'OT' as you might suggest! The parallels between doing photography and cooking are quite striking, actually. (Yes, I do both.) The same criticism shared about cookbooks (too many instructions, too fussy, too much focus on all the components) translates almost directly to photography. You have to do it a lot, and after you do a lot of the rules and fussy procedures drop away and you start to get a sense of how to make things work. It isn’t 'the rule of thirds'—it is a feeling for how compositional choices affect the result. It isn’t 'use the optimal diffraction-limited aperture'—it is understanding intuitively the effects of aperture choice. It isn’t using the spoon, uh, I mean lens with the very highest specs—it is having a sense of how to use lenses."

I'm still working on the revised version of the "History of the Pentax Fast 50" article. Having just wiped egg off my face, I have to get it right this time. While you wait, a little tidbit to hold you over; still on the topic of Pentax lenses. And why in the world so much perseveration on lenses from a company that now commands .08% of the camera market? Because this is TOP, and I am your knight-errant and loyal servant Don Quixote. Which is to say, I didn't actually mean to do all this, and it's not exactly smart for the blog, but. The hobby first, dollars and sense (sic) second.

The Pentax HD FA 50mm ƒ/1.4 SDM AW ($996) and the Tokina Opera ($699) being the same lens or nearly the same lens optically makes for a weird situation. It means that Nikon and Canon FF shooters can get Pentax's "big honkin' normal" for their cameras...for $300 less than Pentax shooters can get it to use on a K-1 II. Odd state of affairs, no? (A reader pointed out this anomaly; as complex as the blog has gotten this past week or two, I can't locate his name. Thank you, whoever you are.)

Reminds me of my and Carl's articles about the Pentax Limited 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro, my favorite 50mm-equivalent for crop-sensor Pentaxes. It's now pretty cheap, compared to its price when it came out—it was $750 MSRP when new and soon enough thereafter sold for $6xx if I recall. It's got a built-in, extensible lens hood, did I mention that? So you save yet more money.

That one was in a similar situation vis-a-vis the Pentax-Tokina connection, whatever that is. The Tokina version of the 35mm DA Macro lens was the discontinued and now-rare Tokina 35mm ƒ/2.8 AT-X M35 PRO DX Macro available for Canon and Nikon. It will probably be cheap if you do find it. Although the barrel is very different, it's the same lens in terms of construction (number, shape, and arrangement of elements) as the Pentax 35mm DA Macro Limited, which is a beautiful, beautiful lens. However, some reviewers have said the Pentax version has better flare behavior. Since flare behavior is one of the strengths of the Pentax lens, you want that. It's also possible that the Tokina version might not be compatible with your particular Canon or Nikon APS-C camera, so be sure you get return privileges if you do decide to buy one. I wouldn't recommend buying one, actually, for those reasons, but it's cheap enough to be a toy, so people can do as they please.

Last complication—the lens is/was available in two versions. Using official naming-strings now: the Pentax SMCP-DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited (green ring, pictured above) had the older SMC coating, and the HD Pentax DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited (red ring) has the current (post-2012) HD coating. As far as I can see, the two are almost identical. The only possible way to tell them apart would be in a direct comparison: overpoweringly bright light sources in the picture frame might have slightly less ghosting* with the HD than with the SMC. In certain situations. Otherwise it's a wash. (I suspect, on no evidence, that HD is cheaper for them to produce. With .08% of the market, they're not making up in volume what they lack in unit profit. There I go, making assumptions again.) If you find a used SMC version, which might actually have a lower price because it's not the latest one, I personally wouldn't hesitate. But there's also nothing at all wrong with HD. The HD version is the only one available new at this writing.

Just get it
Somehow the 35mm DA Macro got left off the quirky list of "My Favorite Normal Lenses OF ALL TIME." An oversight; the Great Brain is deteriorating with age. It belongs on the list.

If you shoot with a Pentax crop-sensor body such as a K-3 III and want a ~50mm-equivalent normal—yeah, that's .08% x 2%, but you're out there—then get the Pentax 35mm Limited DA Macro by whatever means necessary. I can almost guarantee you'll love it. Its images are lovely to look at. Your eyes will drink them in like cool, clear water.

And it's got a built-in lens hood.

If the lens is so good, then why didn't I keep it? Well, I might have, except 50mm is a bit long for the way I see with a camera. I learned that when I had my M6...I bought a 35mm Summicron and a 50mm Summicron, and I found I was forever suspended squarely in the middle when it came to putting one on the camera and leaving the other one home. That's why my favorite main lenses now are all in the 40–45mm range: the 35mm Summicron vs. 50mm Summicron battle never resolved.

More's the pity for me. A 35mm DA Macro on a K3 III or K3 III Monochrome would be the ant's pants. You could live happily ever after. Assuming you want to shoot with a ~50mm prime.

Remember, you don't have to take closeup pictures with a macro lens! Be like me, or like John Loengard, whose normal lens was a 55mm Micro-Nikkor, and use it as a normal "nifty fifty" that happens to focus real close. Ahh, that way lieth lenticular heaven! (Behold! A windmill! Charge, Rocinante!**)

Mike

*Remember, two basic kinds of flare: veiling glare, which is an overall cast of non-image-forming light, resulting in slightly to greatly reduced overall contrast, and ghosts, which are "object anomalies" like spots, rings, color rays, etc. The picture of Butters in this post has ghosts (color rays) but, surprisingly, not much veiling glare.

**The No. 1 bestselling book of all time, by the way. Excepting religious texts and, possibly, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "For what it's worth, I shot TOP's 2X print offering 'Precipitation' with a Pentax K7 and 35mm DA Macro. Here's a link to a higher resolution version than TypePad can reproduce. It would be silly to suggest that this photo couldn't have been taken with any other camera and normal focal length lens. On the other hand, the fact that this was a SOOC [straight out of camera] JPEG with no image adjustments whatsoever (or at least not on my part) suggests that one could certainly do worse."

Stew Epstein: "Funny you should mention the 55mm Micro Nikkor. That was my general purpose walk around lens for years on an old FE body. I shot Kodachrome 25 in those days, and boy oh boy was that lens sharp. I never found the 'slow aperture' a problem.

"Fast forward to today and I still use a similar style modern lens, the excellent Olympus 30mm Macro for the same purpose. The finest lens I have ever used, my personal favorite, was the Carl Zeiss 45mm Planar for the Contax G—in a word: stunning! I have a penchant for sharp, contrasty and versatile normal lenses."

Mike replies: That Contax 45mm got a lot of love. I believe it was John Kennerdell's favorite lens. He wrote the main article on bokeh for Photo Techniques, and some great articles for TOP.

Jeff Kott: "Any Sony shooters who might want to use Pentax K-mount lenses on their Sony bodies should check into the Monster LA-KE1 autofocus adapter. I was thinking about getting a Leica Q3 43 and wanted to see how I like using just that focal length, so I used the Monster adapter to put my old Pentax Limited 43mm ƒ/1.9 on my Sony A7CR to use for a few weeks. I’ve been loving the images so much that my Q3 lust has fully retreated. Being able to use Sony’s eye AF with my Pentax lenses is a dream come true."

[Withdrawn]

Notice that the comments are still posted. I'll leave those up.

I'll probably post a revised version of this, but I'll need some time. More soon!

Mike

[Part I is here]

And now, time for a wallow in some glorious gear.

Moose said the other day, "Yeah, I know, this is bash contemporary huge, fast lenses month..." Not at all! I come to praise Big Honkin' Normals, not to bury them*. Even if you don't choose to have a fast ~50 in your arsenal, which one would you get if you were to get one? (Prices are from B&H Photo and current as of this writing.)

Here's an honor roll of "The Fantastic [~]50s of '25":

Although these first ones are actually "old style" fast lenses, I think we can make room on our list for these two beauties. They are not modern maxi-element OTT (over the top) statement lenses after the current fashion, but they are the latest in a long, long line of fast modified normal double-Gauss types that have been coming down the pike since forever. Depending on your preferred flavor of camera, they are among the good reasons to still shoot DSLRs today even though DSLRs are on the way out.

Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.2L USM ($1,399)

and

Nikon AF-S Nikkor 58mm ƒ/1.4G ($1,156.95)

I've owned the 58mm Nikkor, and enjoyed it very much—it has a lot of vintage character, improved by modern design—but today I looked through many dozens of pictures made with the Canon ƒ/1.2L lens and I must say it was an exceptionally enjoyable experience. What a treat that lens must be to own; such ravishingly lovely imaging qualities. From what I saw, I would guess it's something really special. Makes me wish I had a Canon DSLR.

This next one might be flying under your radar, but it shouldn't—it's a true BHN, with 15 elements and weighing in at over two pounds. And yet it's relatively a great bargain. Drum roll:

It's the Tokina Opera 50mm ƒ/1.4 FF ($699) for Canon and Nikon DSLRs, introduced in 2018. Stephen S. reminds me that I wrote about it in 2018, here. It bears a strong resemblance to the Pentax lens below. Well, stronger than strong.

Tokina was founded long ago, in 1950, by designers and engineers who once worked for Nikon but were frustrated with Nikon's conservatism in that era and wanted to make more adventurous products. They were one of the manufacturers who made lenses for Vivitar. More recently, Tokina made lenses for Minolta, one of which I used in the early years of digital and loved. The company is now under the same ownership as Hoya, the Japanese maker of optical glass products. The samples from this lens look great, and the price of this lens seems particularly keen compared to the competition—even compared to this next lens, which is much more famous.

Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art ($949 in Nikon mount—there are various other permutations)

The original Sigma "Art" series of DSLR lenses were a landmark in camera lenses, or certainly, at least, a landmark for Sigma, completing the company's transition to major lensmaker status. The Art lenses were as famous as the Tokina Opera is obscure. When I was in art school, in the 1980s (those were such great days—we really had fun), Sigma was the lowest of the low, a maker of happy-crappy budget lenses that were so cheap that I had a great time inventing many ways to ridicule them, such as, they'd go out of alignment if you sneezed while carrying one. With my German Zeiss lenses I was so proud of, I looked down my nose at them. Well, that's been a while. I myself shoot with a Sigma now. A dozen years ago when the Art lenses came along, Roger Cicala famously announced that the 35mm ƒ/1.4 Art was the sharpest lens that he had ever tested (I liked it too), and Ken Rockwell said this lens was the sharpest he had ever tested. These lenses are exceptionally well made, for what were originally relatively modest prices.

But remember that the category of the Big Honkin' Normal is meant to be biggest fastest bestest mostest, or whatever I said the other day. So wait for Part III of this article series before you plunk for one; time has moved on, and there's more news to come.

Zeiss Otus 55mm ƒ/1.4 ZE for Canon EF (a cool $3,990). Also available in Nikon F mount.

We would be remiss not to mention (again) the OG (original gangsta**) of the category, the fabled Zeiss Otus 55mm of 2013.

This was so obviously a statement lens, huge and heavy—12 elements (extreme at the time), five inches long, over 1,000 grams, with a 77mm filter size—that it got hushed respect at the time even from Leicaphiles. And it kicked off the whole BHN fashion, or fad. One major practical problem is that it is manual focus only. But it really appealed to those on a quest for the absolute best. The bloom has faded quite a bit since then; the mighty Otus been discontinued. But B&H Photo still has some brand new ones if you've got the wallet.

The last big honkin' normal lens we'll mention in the now-fading DSLR category is the HD Pentax-D FA* 50mm ƒ/1.4 SDM AW ($997).

Pentaxians in the audience inform me that the scuttlebutt on the Pentax fora is that this is the same lens as the Tokina Opera, which certainly seems to be the case, and that it was designed by a Pentax team but made by Tokina, the two lenses sharing the same optics but each with its own lensmount. (It's less and less known these days, but there are no more steadfast brand loyalists anywhere than Pentaxians—you just don't hear about it much because they're quiet, modest, and down to earth folks.)

In any event it is a true BHN—15 elements and a giant scalloped lens hood, and it weighs in at 955 grams with the hood in place. It's a little smaller in both length and girth than some of the other lenses above. It's an all-new modern design. But what's most remarkable about this lens isn't in the actual lens—it's that it represents a true departure from a traditional lens lineage of fast Pentax normal lenses that's been going since the early 1960s. But that'll have to be another post.

Which one of these would I get, independent of camera considerations? I think for me it would have to be the Canon at the top. Despite a little tizziness (just a little) in the bokeh at times (see Moose's comment in the Comment Section), it's a pretty lens. Its images, I mean, of course.

In Part III, which I'll get to sometime this month (or, er, next), we'll get to the real meat of the category, the mirrorless examples, which are more "of Now."

Mike

[Part I is here]

*The reference and my little twist on it is possibly a little too subtle to go without explanation. Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar says, "I come to bury Caesar, not praise him," but then he uses his eulogy to subtly dig at Brutus and the conspirators; so he speaks with forked tongue. Possibly I do too, as my own personal preference, as I have admitted repeatedly, is for smaller, handier lenses—having been imprinted in my youth by Leica M lenses, Olympus OM Zuikos, tough workhorse AI-S Nikkors, and the Carl Zeiss C/Y lenses for the hybrid Contax cameras (originally, if you are too young to remember firsthand, Contax, as a marque name, was the premium line of cameras from Yashica, and Carl Zeiss in Germany made the lenses). My heroes were photojournalists and, especially, artists who practiced like photojournalists, for instance the Magnum photographers. Gilles Mora even published a book about some of them, and of course there's the commodious Magnum sampler, William Manchester's In Our Time, which is an endless feast for the eyes if also perhaps a contradiction in terms. But on the other hand, I mainly just want photographers to be happy. If a statement normal lens is for you and will make you happy, then that's all to the good. We're just having fun here.

**See for instance Melvin Williams. The link is totally off-topic but it's a fascinating story if you've watched The Wire.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "I was shooting with a full frame Nikon DSLR and remember when that 58mm ƒ/1.4 was announced. Even well-heeled Nikon users were quite shocked at the price, considering the basic same generation 50mm AF-G ƒ/1.4 Nikkor was under $500. The online back and forth was contentious with people that bought it saying how great it was versus people that never used it saying that those people were trying to justify the financial outlay. Me, I spent a lot of hours looking at images online made with the high-end Nikkor and then bought the 58mm ƒ/1.4 Voightlander which also had many fans online who posted a lot of nice images made with that optic. Right or wrong, I tell myself that I have a terrific 58mm f/1.4 lens and many hundreds of dollars still in my wallet."

[Here's that lens —Ed.]

Frank Petronio: "I own the Nikon 58mm ƒ/1.4 (twice now!) and actually bought a Canon 1n to use with the 50mm ƒ/1.2. Both are fantastic lenses only spoilt by the significant amount of plastic and somewhat 'cheap' rattly feeling. But I've been training myself to overcome my aversion to plastic and even replaced my Leica M4 with a $100 Nikon N80 because, contact sheets side by side, my hit rate and success are far higher with plastic fantastic."

It's a special kind of Tessar. Here is its MTF performance—but this looks worse than it is, because it shows measurements for the very stringent standards of 20, 40, and 80 lp/mm, whereas most MTF charts you'll come across are for 10, 20, and 40 or even 5, 10, and 30 lp/mm. The larger the structures they're measuring (i.e., the lower the number of lp/mm or lines per millimeter), the better the measurements look. If you're up on how to read an MTF chart, you might already have guessed what you're looking at before you read the caption:

Performance data of a Tessar lens for a mobile phone camera measures [sic] with 20, 40 and 80 Lp/mm. It is better than the best 35mm lenses—but only for a very small image.

The chart and caption come from a ZEISS white paper on Tessar-types written by H.H. Nasse and published by Carl Zeiss AG Camera Lens Division in March of 2011. The paper also says:

The name Tessar lives on in our state-of-the-art miniature lenses for camera modules in the mobile phones of our partner Nokia. The similarity to the classic Tessar is that four lens elements are usually used. The small size is also a related feature and an absolute must for the small volume [that is, size —Ed.] of a pocket sized device [the phone]. However, the functionality of this tiny lens no longer has anything to do with the original Tessar patent. It is usually designed with four lens elements with aspheric surfaces. The resolution of these small and economical optics is far superior to the best 35mm lenses—but this is due to the short focal length and the small image field.

At the link, look at the remarkable picture with the matchstick in it. Superimposed on a FF sensor, for scale, it shows a cutaway of a Zeiss/Nokia Tessar phone camera lens, in which you can see the extreme and bizarre asphericity of the elements. Talk about mustache curves!

In comparison, here's the MFT chart of the Leica 43mm in the Q3-43 that Ken extolled in yesterday's post, at ƒ/2.8:

Looks better at first glance, doesn't it? But no. Don't get me wrong, it's truly awesome for a FF lens (especially in the extreme corners), but it's nowhere near the Zeiss Nokia Tessar because the frequencies represented here are 5, 10, 20, and 40 lp/mm! That means the lowest set of lines (solid, sagittal; dotted, tangential, a.k.a. meridional) on this chart are for the same structures as the middle line in the Zeiss/Nokia chart. No contest. By the way, I like an MTF chart that gives data for large structures, i.e. 5 and 10 lp/mm. That predicts both contrast and bokeh, which in the case of this Leica lens should be very good indeed.

So it's a bit of a trick answer to the question. But it's kinda neat that no matter what fancy FF lens you might have in your bag, the best lens you have is most likely in your pocket.

Mike

P.S. I might also add that as a general rule, lenses designed for less coverage measure better than lenses with more coverage. For film, 35mm lenses measure better than medium format lenses, which measure better than sheet film lenses. The larger formats make up, or more than make up, the image-quality deficit by requiring less enlargement—an 8x10-inch print from a 35mm negative requires enlargement of 10 diameters, whereas an 8x10-inch print from a 4x5 nagative requires enlargement of only two diameters. So it stands to reason that lenses designed to cover the much smaller typical sensor size for 2011 mobile phones would be better still, and this is what Zeiss confirms in its white paper. The 2011-era iPhone 4s, as an example, had a 1/3.2-inch sensor that was 4.5x3.4mm in size. Current iPhone sensors are considerably larger.

This isn't a hard-and-fast rule; spy satellite lenses (which fell under my father's purview when he was a Director of NASA in the 1970s—I got to see one of those lenses once) covered 10x10", and you can bet they resolved better than consumer camera lenses. Then again, those lenses cost $1,500,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars ($250,000 in 1975).

Another point of interest: I think I heard this from an official of an institution closely identified with Eastman Kodak, but I won't name or describe him to avoid embarrassing him if my memory is off. However, I believe I was told that Eastman Kodak developed, and once owned, the patents to mass-producing tiny press-moulded aspheric elements. But there was at the time no application for such lens elements, and the company couldn't figure out how to make money from them, so, assuming the technology was useless, they essentially gave the patents away. Today there are several such tiny aspheres in every mobile phone camera module.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Stephen Cowdery: "I noticed this phenomenon of the incredible resolution of small-format lenses with my Pentax Q7 and adapted larger-format lenses. With the exception of macro lenses, even the best bigger lenses couldn't compare with the native ones for the Q7."

Ed note: The Q7 was an interchangeable-lens digicam with a 1/1.7-inch type sensor 7.44 x 5.58mm in size.

Geoff Wittig: "I can confirm the Kodak press-molded aspheric element tale. One of my patients back in the day was a Kodak engineer who worked on the project. His team was flabbergasted that Kodak didn't exploit the idea but just threw it away since they couldn't comprehend how to get the kind of profit margins on it they were making from film. And within a couple of years such elements were in every CD/DVD player on the planet."

Forgive me. I know I ought to continue the "Big Honkin' Normals" list before starting another one. But...

Back in the days when the Dallas Cowboys had a player called Ed "Too Tall" Jones, I joked with a football-playing co-worker, whose name happened to be Darrell Green—no relation to the Washington cornerback, although my friend Darrell played cornerback too—that my nickname should be "Too Tired" Johnston. Cracked him up.

Anyway, since he's been sick, Butters barks me awake every morning because he has to go out, and my morning routine, formerly so orderly, is in shambles.

So I'm too tired lately. (He gets his big test tomorrow, which will hopefully result in getting the proper medication to help.)

But to continue on the theme of normal lenses, which is what we've landed on lately, here is a "listicle" of my favorite normal lenses, of all the ones I've ever used. Listicle is a portmanteau of list and article—meaning an article structured as a list. In case you have been sleeping on that.

I've included 40mms on this list but not 35mms. Have to draw the line somewhere. But a number of my favorite lenses have been 35mms, I must admit. And all of these are either lenses I used for a long period of time or owned. A possibly apocryphal quote, attributed to a Leica lens designer: "All lens tests are shortcuts. To really get to know a lens, you have to use it for a year." I agree with that, whoever said it.

This list is purely personal, based entirely on how much I liked the lenses—it's not a list of "best." And I go by pictures, not measurements. With a nod to handling. And in the case of the film-era lenses, my standard films were Kodak Plus-X and Kodak Tri-X, and sometimes Ilford XP2, not color films. For that matter, I use the Sigma lens only on a monochrome camera.

Finally, the tag "of all time," as in the post title, is pretty dumb. Mostly when the phrase is used it's talking about something very time-bound (e.g. "best websites of all time"), where most of "all time" doesn't enter in, and of course they can only be talking about the time up until the list was written. But it does indicate that it's meant to cover everything, without limitation, and that's appropriate for certain lists. Listicles are fundamentally pretty foolish anyway...

...But here goes nothin'. Counting down:

10

Asahi Pentax Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 50mm ƒ/1.4 for M42 screwmount cameras such as the Spotmatics, the one with the metal focus ring—although many of the 7-element 50mm's were very similar, up to the AF FA [Note: the foregoing is corrected from the original version of this post]. The quintessential classic double-Gauss fast normal. Pentax developed multicoating with Zeiss, and given the co-operation with what was then considered the top camera lens maker in the world, the prestige of Japanese optical companies and by extension of Japan itself was felt to be on the line, and Asahi pulled out the stops. This lens was originally a loss-leader, sold for less than it cost to produce. It's a deluxe lens, better than the German competition of the era. Herbert Keppler, perhaps the No. 1 photography "influencer" in the English-speaking world in his heyday, did a whole article supporting this contention in an issue of Modern Photography way back when, complete with graphs and charts. It is also one of the best-built classic lenses—even today its quality can be appreciated in a good sample. You'll never feel a more buttery-smooth focusing helical.

9

Rodenstock APO Sironar-S 150mm ƒ/5.6. Part of the fun of shooting 4x5-inch film is experimenting with the old lenses that are still floating around out there, as long as they have shutters that work. But if you want the very best, this pinnacle of the breed came along just before they all went away. The APO Sironar-S equaled the quality of the more pedestrian Sironar-N's one stop wider open, and covered more (offering more movements on 4x5), and, although sharpness is not going to be your problem with sheet film unless you enlarge it too much, were just that little bit more sharp. The lens is also very compact and light, making a perfect match with many 4x5 field cameras. This is no longer available new, unfortunately. The market just won't support these products any more. Nevertheless, it is an ideal 4x5 lens.

8

Sigma 45mm ƒ/2.8 DG DN Contemporary for L-mount. Hey, I can't leave my current lens off the list, can I? One of only three digital-camera lenses on this list. That's not a knock against today's lenses, just the result of the fact that I was the go-to equipment reviewer for a couple of the camera magazines I worked for when I was young, and I tried everything under the sun. When I wrote something jaded and dismissive about this lens before trying it, I believe it was Ken Tanaka who encouraged me to stay open-minded to it. Luckily for me. It's an almost perfected optic, with no bad habits, no weaknesses that I've found yet, very good build quality, and superb feel to its manual focusing. I guess some people don't like it because it's not big enough or expensive enough, so maybe that's a weakness. You can see examples in my Flickr Photostream.

7

Panasonic Lumix G 20mm ƒ/1.7 II ASPH. for Micro 4/3. I only had the first version, which looks like this. Well, I owned them both but only used the first version extensively. Here's a review of both, with samples. The Mark II version is the only one available new. It seems to have been cheapened a little, but was assured by Panasonic that the optics are identical. To me, this is the ultimate walk-around lens. It's tiny and very light, so it doesn't hurt my neck (I have a permanently sensitive neck from hanging too much heavy camera equipment from it in my youth). The focal length equivalent is 40mm, perfect for me. And its properties are very nice, although its contrast-detect autofocus is on the slow side. I'd guess there is more than the usual sample variation going on as well. I liked this lens's look so much that when I had it, I actually decided to commit to the lens going forward in my life, and use the latest cameras with it. That's what Henri Cartier-Bresson did with the No. 6 lens on my list, below. That commitment lasted eight nanoseconds—I got too antsy waiting for the E-M1 to come along, and switched to Sony. Hey, look at it this way: if I were good at sticking to one thing, this list wouldn't exist.

6

Leica 50mm (or 5 cm) ƒ/2 Collapsible Summicron. The original normal for the Leica M3 in 1953. It was replaced by the "rigid" 7-element Summicron in 1956—same lens but in a non-collapsible lensmount—although the collapsible wasn't officially discontinued until 1960 or so. You can't buy the one I had: mine had been custom multicoated as an expensive aftermarket modification, which, amusingly, reduced the value of the lens. This was Henri Cartier-Bresson's lens, and he stuck with it from the M3 to the M6. I believe his was later multicoated too. The Leica Dual-Range Summicron (the one in Josh Hawkins' picture in the comments the other day) had the same optical cell as the rigid lens, but cherry-picked to be at the very top of the tolerance range. The lens sucked wide open and wasn't much one stop down, but at or near optimum aperture, oh my. Magic. No wonder it was once the most famous lens for 35mm photography in the world. I gave it up for various complicated reasons, and from time to time still hear from the fellow who bought it from me.

5

Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/2 Auto-Macro. Note: not the Zuiko Digital one introduced with 4/3. Olympus was one of the very best lensmaking companies for a long time, although it never enjoyed that reputation, at least not widely. Some of their lenses were absolutely wonderful. One of my absolute favorites was a macro lens that wasn't quite at its best in the macro range—even though Olympus had incomparable expertise in making macros! It's a 1:2 macro, not 1:1. It was at its best used as a normal or standard lens. Of pedestrian specification—50mm, ƒ/2—it had a huge mount with a long helical for precise focusing, a deeply recessed front element obviating the need for a hood, and for optical quality I liked it better than any other 50mm. Extremely satisfying to use; I never stopped marveling at pictures taken with it.

4

Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R for Fuji X cameras. You have to have a sharp eye for optical properties to distinguish pictures made by this lens from those made by similar lenses today, so "bunched at the top" are normals today. But read around within user reviews at sites like B&H, Amazon, and elsewhere, and you'll see that others agree with my feelings about this special lens. It's subtle, I'll admit—many normals now are fine lenses. One caveat: investigate the properties of the bokeh for yourself at various apertures. I tend to use it either all the way open or stopped down to ƒ/4 and smaller; o-o-f specular highlights at ƒ/2 and ƒ/2.8 are a little hinky. YMMV. Of course you use it mostly stopped down; who would use a fast normal lens all the way open unless they had to? That makes no sense from an image quality standpoint. Wide apertures are for emergencies.

3

Schneider-Kreutznach MF Xenotar 80mm ƒ/2.8 for the Exacta 66. Note: MF Xenotar, not any of the several other normal lenses made for that camera. This was a breechlock lens for the rubber-armored Exakta 66 made as a hobby project for Heinrich Mandermann when he owned Schneider, Exakta, and Rollei. It's the same lens optically as the normals made for the Rolleiflex 6000-series cameras when they were the top professional cameras in Europe (Hasselblad had the American market sewn up). Mine was the single best lens I ever used, but I got lucky and got a perfect one: I tried to replace it several times without getting another that had quite the same qualities. True story, after I sold it I saw a picture in a group show on a local gallery wall that just blew me away for optical quality, and I inquired at the desk as to the name of the photographer so I could go ask the person what lens they used for the picture. It turned out to be the guy I had sold my MF Xenotar to! I had recognized my old lens from a picture on the wall.

2 (formerly No. 1*)

Minolta M-Rokkor  for the Minolta CLE. Believe it or not, this was the only lens I ever used that regularly drew comments from non-photographers based purely on image quality in prints. That includes numerous Leica, Zeiss, and Nikon lenses. It's remarkable because we photographers mostly use fine lenses for our own gratification, not because non-photographer viewers care very much. (I once joked that we'll look at a print and be thinking, look at that detail! That microcontrast! That color fidelity! That gorgeous bokeh! while the person we're showing the picture to will be thinking, that's his cat.) This lens was made near the peak of Minolta's co-operation with Leica. The rumor was that the CLE came very close to getting Leica branding. It's another example of a Japanese company striving to be worthy: Minolta knew it was expected to come up to Leica standards. The trouble with the lens is that the CLE had 40mm framelines but the M cameras didn't and don't. Oh well. Get a good one, and I could care less about status and build quality and name brand prestige and measurements: if you need image quality better than this lens provides, image quality isn't your problem. Lovely.

1 (formerly No. 2)

Olympus Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2. C.E.K. Mees and Loyd Jones at Kodak conducted research in the 1930s based on viewer surveys, and discovered that people preferred lenses of high contrast rather than high resolution (now lenses are optimized for both, but the further back you go, the more it tended to be a trade-off). The company designed the famous Commercial Ektar view-camera lenses as a result. The Zuiko 40mm has a similar signature, and I couldn't get enough of it. I just love the way pictures from it look. I've written about this lens several times in various places. Its look was unique; it had loads of character, and pictures from it look like those from no other lens. Its downside is that it was designed to be the smallest lens in a lineup of small lenses, and the aperture ring is on the front of the barrel: in fact, you screw the rubber lens hood into the aperture ring and can change apertures by turning the hood. Not the most robust arrangement, but oh well. On the other hand, it was very small.

Mike

*I changed my mind. I always go back and forth on these.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Chris Rusbridge: "Even though I only had it for six months or so, after doing my OCOLOY (sort of) I was really sorry to part with my M-Rokkor 40mm ƒ/2. Absolutely my favourite lens ever, and helped make my favourite photo. I used it on a Leitz Minolta CL and then a Bessa R3A (I did say sort of!). I credit that exercise for getting me back to where I started, black-and-white film, but I didn't much like the rangefinder experience, and could see that it would get eye-wateringly expensive very quickly. But I was really sorry to sell that lens."

Andrew L: "Nice list! I concur with the Panasonic 20mm being on there, it's a legend. I actually don't think there's as much sample variation as some other Micro 4/3 lenses. I've owned the of the 20mm's through the years, and all three were great. My personal addition would be the Pentax 43mm ƒ/1.9 Limited. It's worth a try if you get your hands on one, with a Pentax DSLR (or, heck, the Leica version with a screw-mount!). The focus transition and color rendering are particularly delightful, as is the great build and small size."

Mark Sampson: "I've owned only one of your ten best lenses, the famous Leica 50mm ƒ/2 DR Summicron. Sadly it will fit but not focus on a digital Leica M, due to that special focusing mount. And I no longer have a (working) film Leica M, so I don't use it any more. It sits and waits.... But the 'normal' lens I've used most in the last 40 years has been the 55mm ƒ/2.8 Micro-Nikkor. Just a superb optic for the industrial, commercial, technical, and reproduction work that has helped pay my rent all these years. It doesn't have an obvious 'signature,' but then again, I wouldn't want it to. Just high resolution, no distortion, clean color rendition, and excellent contrast."

Mike replies: That was LIFE Editor and photographer John Loengard's lens as well. If you've ever seen one of his books you know how in tune with it he was.

Dan Khong: "I have the No. 4 and No. 10 in your list. The No. 4 is so good (at least for its 'bokeh') that—if I am not mistaken—Fuji has not replaced it with something 'improved.'"

Mike replies: They have—with the 33mm ƒ/1.4, a modern "big honkin' normal" 15-element lens more suitable for video. Here's the link:

https://tinyurl.com/3495eykb

However, you and I agree on our assessment and appreciation of the "old" one (and it's only 13 years old, which is nothing).

As old-timers might know and some newcomers and early-days people might not, a "normal" AKA standard lens is the ordinary, everyday, middle-of-the-focal-length-range prime lens ("prime" being a not quite technically accurate term for single focal length) that used to be supplied as a starter lens on cameras before "kit zooms" came along. Its focal length varies with format; normals for press cameras such as Speed Graphics were 135mms—the number here refers to the focal length—which were moderate wides on 4x5-inch sheet film. Whereas the normal lens for the Asahi Pentax Auto 110 (the frame size is roughly the same as a 4/3 sensor) is 24mm. In its canonical state, the normal was a small, cheap-ish, medium-fast 50mm on a 135 (meaning the film format), or 35mm, camera. 135 / 35mm (formats) is now called "full frame," a term which is a status claim and doesn't make sense any other way, and I don't care what anybody says, he mumbled grumpily. There is or used to be a lot of confusion about the term "135," so here ya go:

The term 135 was introduced by Kodak in 1934 as a designation for 35mm film specifically for still photography, perforated with Kodak Standard perforations. It quickly grew in popularity, surpassing 120 film by the late 1960s to become the most popular photographic film size. (Wikipedia.)

The Ur-Leica, Oskar Barnack's prototypes for his miniature camera that eventually became known as the Leica—there might have been two of them originally, but one of them resides in Leica's headquarters in Germany and is possibly the World's Most Valuable Camera—had a 40mm normal lens, not a 50mm. This was discovered by Malcolm Taylor, the British master Leica repairman chosen by the company in the 1990s to service the totemic device, which task he carried out with appropriate reverence and care. Normals for 135 (the format) have also been 55mms and even 60mms on the narrower end and 45mm or even wider on the wide end. 

35mm cameras were once sold with standard
lenses, in this case a Yashinon 55mm ƒ/1.8

Pentax has a 43mm normal in its Limited series of lenses—which, oddly, were never limited—which is as close as can be to the 43.27mm diagonal of a 24x36mm rectangle, which is one definition of "normal." Although it is a wonderful lens and almost 3D-sharp, and, um, "Limited"—it doesn't qualify as a BHN as it's a rather petite almost-pancake lens. It works great to "smallen" and lighten a K-1 II, although it won't do at all for males who think of their lens as a penis substitute. In fact it makes so much sense that you can buy the camera and lens as a kit from B&H Photo. Reviewers by and large give the combo five stars.

A normal lens was once meant to be ordinary, basic, and practical. Most (even the 50mm Summicron designed by Walter Mandler after Leitz moved the M4 tooling to Canada) were (relatively) cheap. Early ones had minimal numbers of elements, because flare—the small percentage of non-image-forming light that is reflected rather than transmitted through an air-glass interface—quickly compounded in multi-element lenses to degrade the quality of the image. Lens coatings liberated lens designers; and yet, still, in the loss-leader normal lenses, corners were cut when they could be, and not every surface was coated. When multicoating came in, not every coated air-glass surface was multicoated. A cheap normal might have a mix of single-coated surfaces, mutlicoated surfaces, and uncoated surfaces. This led to some oddities in the way particular normals handled flare, and some of them would occasionally give strange effects in specific situations. I recall a Yashica lens that was very beautiful with evenly-lit subjects that flared like a mf when you shot against the sunlight. Hugh Crawford, who reportedly owns 50 50's, could tell us more about that. In the 1960s, when 35mm SLRs really got going, the included normal in a camera kit might have been a smallish 50mm with a moderate speed of ƒ/2. This might have been modified to  ƒ/1.9. ƒ/1.8, or ƒ/1.7 because those sounded better; but there was often little real or practical difference—Modern Photography magazine's lens tests used to measure the actual widest aperture of lenses, and it showed that these hopeful designations were somewhat more precise than the actual tolerances. There was a fair amount of slop in the system. I used to think of all of them as ƒ/2's, and you might as well.

The mighty Noctilux, normal ne plus ultra

Those early days are gone! "Normals"—primes of the middlin' focal length—are now some of the biggest, baddest, mostest and bestest lenses a camera company can produce, securing bragging rights for owners. As such they are completely over the top, ridiculous and absurd—hence, wonderful and desirable. The more absurd and extreme the better. In fact, whenever any photographer you know makes a plaintive wheedling little noise that he "needs" one of these lenses, the proper response should be "shaddup!" spoken like a '30s movie tough. There is no actual practical reason to own any of these lenses, so when someone claims a practical use—shaddup. "I need ƒ/1.2 for my theater work"—shaddup. "It gives me the bokeh I want"—shaddup! "I want to be ready for anything"—SHADDUP! Claims that the level of performance possible is actually needed could be a sign that the speaker doesn't have anything like the technique and understanding to get the best out of any lens. Shaddup. Biggest, baddest, mostest, bestest is what these lenses do, and it is what they are for. (Okay, you might also need it for your theater work or like the bokeh. I'm just trying to be amusing.)

The set-aside
When I went to Dartmouth, on the plane I was reading an issue of Vanity Fair magazine that I picked up in the airport, not one of my usual magazines. It happened to have an article about the best drinking schools in the country. At the beginning of the article, the author set Dartmouth aside as being so far ahead of all the others as to be beyond category—the big daddy, the Kahuna, matchless, the standout. If I recall correctly, there was a little liquor store on Nugget Alley in Hanover that was the biggest beer distributorship between Boston and Montreal. Dartmouth was a drinker's paradise, and oh-by-the-way had the highest percentage of alcoholics among its alumni at the time.

Similarly, to list some of these big honkin' normals, we have to first set aside the great-granddaddy of the breed, the original, the O.G. It is sui generis, and beyond ranking. That would be the Leica Noctilux for M-mount rangefinder cameras, an antediluvian holdover from the era when lens speed (i.e., its widest aperture) was the chief bragging point in the lens arms race. There were actually faster lenses made by several companies back in the day, but...too late. The Noctilux already secured the position. We won't rank this one but rather set it aside on a pedestal where it belongs. And lest you think lens worship is not a thing, "Uncle" Arthur Kramer, the longtime lens reviewer for the old Modern Photography magazine, had the very best lens he knew of—the 105mm Apo-El-Nikkor enlarging lens—cast in lucite to use on his desk as a paperweight. He was an executive for an advertising agency—was it Young & Rubicam? I forget, and there is no good bio of Uncle Arthur on the WWW, alas. I believe his was serial number 007. Note that my memory for numbers is not the greatest.

I notice that the new Noctiluxes have bifurcated into two lenses, something which had escaped my attention, and the iconic ƒ/1 has been "improved" to ƒ/0.95. This is nonsense of which I do not approve. One (1) is the numerological sign of identity and unity—"make me one with everything," said the Guru to the hot dog vendor. "ƒ/0.95" doesn't have the same cachet, I'm sorry. One (1) has roundness, wholeness, and perfection. However, our Noctilux (the Noctilux of now) also gets the palm for the most expensive normal, at a cool $13,295. Buy it through my link when you get yours and I will be in your debt—my spiff would be $398.85 and that would make my month right there! Be still, my beating heart*. For those whose Quest is the magic bullet that will automagically impart specialness to their pictures, the Noctilux is the pinnacle solution. One review at B&H Photo is titled, "Outstanding! Images have a special and distinct look." And so they do, so they do. Leica sells three a year.**

There is a smaller, less expensive, slower one too. But never mind. It would be much more practical, and thus is not to the manner born.

Having set the paragon aside, we will next proceed with a brief tour of the Big Honkin' Normals of Now, crowning champions left and right as we wend our way. Overlord lenses. Phat glass. For rangefinders, medium format to Micro 4/3, SLRs and mirrorless. With commentary of, shall we say, a somewhat tart nature. Stay tuned for Part II, maybe next week?

Mike

*I'm being tongue in cheek. If the Universe endures to be quadrillions of years old, no one will ever buy a Noctilux through my links. (AI Overview hilariously states, "The universe is expected to last trillions or even quadrillions of years, but it's difficult to be precise." Made me laugh.)

**I totally made that up.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Nigli: "My favorite 'normal' was the Pentax Super-Takumar 105mm ƒ/2.4. Lovely fall off and super sharp."

Mike adds: For the Pentax 6x7.

Zeiss has introduced two new Otus lenses for mirrorless cameras, a 50mm and an 85mm. The series will be called Otus ML. (Does that stand for mirror and less, perhaps?)

This is not the tip of the iceberg; this is a snowball from the tip of an iceberg. Carl Zeiss AG, branded ZEISS, styled in all capital letters, is an incredibly complex enterprise, making, designing, marketing, branding, or co-branding lenses for: cinema cameras; its own cameras; smartphones from several companies; other companies' cameras—such as Voigtländer, which it acquired in 1956 and later sold to Rollei, the name Voigtländer now belonging to Cosina; and Leica rangefinder-mount cameras (M39—or LTM, Leica thread-mount, as Marc James Small used to call it). At least some of those those rangefinder lenses are made by Cosina. In the past, Carl Zeiss made Contax film SLR lenses in Germany, and licensed and oversaw the manufacture of identical lenses made in Japan by Kyocera. The latter were actually superior to the German-made versions because the machinery and tooling were newer, the opposite of what photography hobbyists back then assumed. The company makes, or made, super-rotator lenses; some of the optical components for the James Webb Space Telescope; enlarger lenses; process lenses; sports optics, including rifle telescopic rifle sights, binoculars, spotting scopes, and distance measuring devices, in three separate lines, one made in Germany, one made in Germany but assembled in the USA, and one made in Asia. Then there's Carl Zeiss Meditec, which makes optics for ENT, spine, ophthalmology/optometry, dentistry, gynecology, neurosurgery, P&R, and radiotherapy equipment and devices. They make eyeglasses and eyeglass technology; virtual reality components; components and technology for the semiconductor industry (Carl Zeiss AG's cash cow) and for industrial metrology; and lenses for five different kinds of microscopes. As far as camera lenses are concerned, there are five different lines not including the Leica rangefinder mount lenses: Otus, Batis, Loxia, Touit, and Milvus. And that doesn't cover the ZA Sony lenses, in two lines, E for APS-C and FE for FF. Just try to figure out who makes what and where with all that. It would take some doing.

The first in years
And I admit that Google-fu has failed me: I haven't been able to really figure out what's been happening with Zeiss's camera lenses in recent years. It appeared that the company might have been leaving the business by attrition—before this, there had been no new Zeiss lenses announced since before COVID-19. Lenses are made in batches, and then can be sold out of NOS, or new old stock—the products are warehoused and sold for as long as they last. Outgo (outflow?) can be accelerated or extended (slowed down) by adjustments to the prices. If you want to exit the lens business quietly, it might take years to go through the NOS, with different products being "discontinued" at different times because that's when they ran out of what they had. Or, a company (presumably—I don't know about this stuff firsthand) can just stop offering new products, but can continue to make new runs of old products as long as they're selling. It's beyond complicated.

All this is the backdrop to the two new Otus ML lenses. Does this mean Zeiss (I'm sorry, I can't shout) is back in the camera lens business? Well, were they ever out of it? Did they ever intend to go out of it? Where are the new lenses made, and by whom? [See Update below.] Are these two lenses it, or will there be more lenses in the Otus ML line? Will there be other lines for mirrorless too?

I don't know the answers to any of that. Probably Zeiss's own representatives don't either. But by way of description: the ZEISS Otus ML Apo-Distagon 50mm ƒ/1.4 ($2,499) (shown above) and ZEISS Otus ML Apo-Sonnar 85mm ($2,999) are "more compact" and "smaller," but that will be true mainly when they're compared to Otuses (Otii?) for DSLRs—taken on their own, the Otus ML pair are on the very large and heavy side compared to their natural competition from other companies. The 50mm weighs a pound and a half (!). Compare that to the old but still available Pentax 50mm ƒ/1.4 FA at 7.6 oz. and $333. The Otus ML however is a Distagon (i.e., retrofocus) design, like a wide angle, because that is more ideal for the ray paths with mirrorless cameras where the lens can be placed nearer the sensor. And the Otus ML has 14 elements, including two with aspherical surfaces and four made with exotic anomalous partial dispersion glass. Versus the Pentax's seven spherical elements. It's not like you're not getting what you pay for. The Otus ML's are available in Nikon-Z, Sony E, and, significantly, Canon RF mounts—meaning Zeiss has paid for access to RF, because many third party lenses, especially from China, are still being blocked from the RF mount. The aperture rings can be switched from clicked to smooth by using a little key that fits into the back of the mount, so they're also intended for videography.

UPDATE: The Otus ML lenses are featured prominently on the Cosina website, so, while it is not directly stated, it can be assumed the new lenses are made by Cosina for Zeiss. It appears Cosina makes far more Zeiss lenses that I had known about.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Regardless of measurements, for visual picture quality the 50mm ƒ/1.4 Zeiss Milvus, also made by Cosina, is one of the best 50mm lenses ever made, assuming you shoot in color. I hope someone, somewhere will compare the Milvus 50mm ƒ/1.4 to the Otus ML 50mm ƒ/1.4, eventually. The Milvus 50mm ƒ/1.4 is generally considered "too expensive" at approximately half the price of the new Otus ML 50mm ƒ/1.4. Of course they fit different cameras.

The Otus ML cross-section (14 elements, 2 aspherical elements) is not even close to the same as the older Otus 55mm (12 elements, 1 asphere), so those two lenses are not directly related.

Both Otus ML lenses in all mounts are manual focus. That's going to be a discussion point, I'd guess. The Otus line is meant to be Zeiss's idea of the best-performing camera lens, according to its idea of the ultimate in performance for pictorial photography. For Zeiss lenses, this means all-metal construction, traditional designs, and fastidious, even fanatical attention to both lens design and build. Lately it has also come to mean high performance at the widest aperture as well. The downsides are weight, size, and expense, and lack of autofocus. Is it what photographers want in fine premium lenses, circa 2025?

Mike

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Interesting bunch of comments about shooting wide open on April 4th. The responses were far more varied than I expected, and the reasons given were more varied as well. That thread bears rereading in its entirety.

I suppose I'm a child of my times when it comes to shooting wide open. I like lenses, and testing lenses was a side-hobby related to photography for me (but only related; you don't have to know much at all about lenses to be a photographer). Naturally I wanted to get the most out of my lenses. Various pieces of advice were common at that time, for example, that every lens is at its best stopped down two stops from wide open. Thus, an ƒ/2 lens yielded its best performance at ƒ/4. While that was a decent rule of thumb that wouldn't lead anyone far wrong, it was far from a universal, hard-and-fast fact. For instance, some spherical ƒ/1.4 lenses reached their peak performance three, four or five stops down. It was also a rule of thumb that slower lenses were better wide open than faster ones, and that they were often better wide open than the faster lens was when stopped down to the same aperture. However, Lewis Baltz (d. 2014), who was identified with the New Topographics movement—and who was apparently part lens geek—made a series of photographs of the built and Man-altered landscape with a 35mm Leica mounted on a heavy tripod, trying to maximize sharpness, and he discovered (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) that an ƒ/1.4 Leica Summilux-M of his day, stopped down to its optimum aperture, was sharper than an ƒ/2 Summicron-M at any aperture, even though it was worse at the wider apertures. But as is the way of such things, that's a specific case, not a general rule. Personally, I noticed that most 35mm lenses (small format, in those days, even called "miniature" early on) were best at ƒ/8, to as close an approximation as could matter. I liked getting the best from my lenses, so I would research or test what the optimum aperture for my specific lenses were, and then "tend toward" using that. Lacking specific tests I tended to shoot at ƒ/8 and depart from it only as needed, which, to be fair, was fairly often. Respecting the overarching rule:

The best aperture to use is the one that suits the picture.

In other words, if you know that diffraction softens lens sharpness at ƒ/16 but a particular picture needs front-to-back sharpness and the only way to get it is to shoot at ƒ/16, then you use ƒ/16. And so on. Finicky little constraints that chase maximum quality are pointless if you're using an aperture that is wrong for the picture. Similarly, the fact that the picture would be sharper on a tripod wouldn't matter if using a tripod meant that you missed the picture.

There was a time when aperture was a useful "sharpness adjustment" tool. I recall a Pentax 85mm ƒ/1.4 that was absolutely marvelous in this respect—wide open the overall image softened very nicely. Then it sharpened up progressively all the way to ƒ/8 as you stopped down. Perfect for portraits, for example, which suited the focal length as well. Often you don't want portrait lenses to be hard-sharp, a fact which has been more or less lost on whole generations of hobbyists.

Countless times in my life I've seen forum messages to the effect of, "I want to do some portraits. What's the sharpest medium-telephoto lens?" Wrong question, though a common one.

Portraitists a hundred years ago weren't chasing sharpness. A
spread from Motion Picture Classic magazine*, February 1916.

There was a time when portrait photographers chased the lenses—most of them large-format lenses—that offered just the perfect degree of un-sharpness according to their tastes. Some had lenses custom-made; some would keep the identity of their lenses secret from their competitors, treating it as a trade secret. If you've ever explored those classic old-time Hollywood portraits, shot on things like tailboard cameras, you know what those lenses looked like. When I was young, that had mostly died out, but there were people still advertising in the classifieds in Shutterbug magazine who knew all about the arcana of those magical old portrait lenses, all of them unsharp to some degree and in some desired way.

When 35mm SLR cameras became a thing after 1959, large maximum apertures took on another use—they let in more light to help with focusing. Groundglass screens were dark in those days, which you might not realize when shooting in daylight. It became all too apparent when shooting in low light, however. An ƒ/2 Summicron was fast for a rangefinder lens, but maybe not fast enough when you were trying to focus on the groundglass of an early SLR. Lenses with a speed of ƒ/1.4 became a popular product that everybody had to have.

Of course it was impossible to suggest that people use the widest aperture only for focusing. And of course if a lens had an ƒ/1.4 maximum aperture, people would use it, mainly because films were so slow in those days. It was no accident that "fast" Kodachrome II (ASA 25) and Kodachrome X (ASA 64)come out in 1961, two years after the first viable SLR, the Nikon F, arrived. (Kodachrome II and Kodachrome X were replaced by Kodachrome 25 and Kodachrome 64 in 1974.) Candid photography and freedom from tripods was becoming ever more popular, and "speed," in both lenses and films, became ever more important. Pentax, the dominant camera manufacturer of the 1960s, would go on to produce over two million SLRs in the decade, and its loss-leader ƒ/1.4 Super-Takumars—there's a long lineage of them, under many names—were the company's flagship lenses. The biggest band of the decade, the Beatles—especially Ringo—were big Pentax fans. There are numerous photos showing them with Pentaxes, and even a picture of a stage setup with a giant "Beatax" camera in front of Ringo's drum set as decoration, although that was used for only one performance. Liveright recently released a book of photos by Paul McCartney from 1964, although it's probable that not all of them were taken with an SLR.

[To Be Continued...]

Mike

*I got rather lost in the articles in those old magazines while searching for old rights-free images. I particularly enjoyed one charming article called "How I Became a Photo Player." At least in Motion Picture Classic, motion picture actors and actresses were referred to as "photoplayers."

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Ned Bunnell [Ed. note: Ned is a past President of Pentax USA]: "Not sure if you know the story behind the Beatles and their Pentax cameras. They arrived in Tokyo in June 1966 to play their first and only concerts in the country at the Nippon Budokan. The marketing manager of Pentax met them at their hotel and presented each of them with a Pentax Spotmatic SP. I was told it was meant as a gesture to welcome them to Japan. The Spotmatics would surely have been successful without this connection to the Beatles, but in hindsight, it was pure marketing genius. I can’t imagine what it would cost today for Pentax to have Taylor Swift carry around the new half-frame film compact, when that’s released later this year."

Tom Burke: "I went to the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London of the Paul McCartney photos. In the exhibition it was said that he used a Pentax 35mm SLR. No lens details, but to my eye the images looked like they were taken with a 50mm."

Mike Plews: "In 1987 Mark Meyer published Classics: U.S. Aircraft of World War II which is one of the best photo books of old warbirds ever. In my opinion it is just fantastic. In its notes Meyer wrote that he shot the book on Kodachrome, much of it at the magic hour. He said he could only do this because he had a 35mm ƒ/1.4 Summilux-R on his Leica. He needed the extra aperture to make Kodachrome work for him. In order to give him a proper platform they took the bubble off the tail gunner position on a B-25. Thirty years later and I am still jealous.

"You can find used copies of this masterpiece online for as little as $10. This isn't an airplane book with nice photography. It's a first-rate fine-art photography book with airplanes. He made these images wide open with slow film and no image stabilization; an awesome achievement. I spent much of my career shooting air-to-air from all manner of aircraft and Classics: U.S. Aircraft of World War II just messes me up. My two cents on shooting wide open."

Just out of curiosity, how often would you say you photograph with any of your lenses wide open?

1. Always
2. Often
3. When conditions indicate
4. I avoid it
5. Never

You don't have to limit yourself to those categories, just trying to be helpful.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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darlene: "Every once in a while for artistic reasons like here:"

s.wolters: "My current favorite set is the OM System 20mm ƒ/1.4, the Olympus 12–45mm ƒ/4, and the Olympus 75mm ƒ/1.8. All three have approximately the same size. For something faster at the midrange I might add the tiny Lumix 42.5mm ƒ/1.7. I prefer to stop them down a bit, depending on the situation.

"But the 12–45mm ƒ/4 is always used wide open, because that way it has its best performance. The other Olympus zooms that start at ƒ/4 are also at their best wide open. A clever way of reducing size and weight without giving in on quality."

Mike adds: That's an awesome trio of lenses. All affordable but of very high quality, none too large, and I imagine the set as a whole would be extremely flexible for general shooting. Nicely chosen.

Herman Krieger: "Only when I use the pinhole or box cameras."

Chris Hunt: "Almost never, due to the various downsides of wide open shooting."

Doug: "I do a lot of night photography and have a couple of ƒ/1.1 and ƒ/1.2 lenses that are rarely if ever stopped down. In fact, I wonder why they have apertures at all. Say 5% of my total photography output is wide open."

Christopher Perez: "I shoot wide open for two reasons: 1.) It's dark. 2.) To separate the subject from the background. This is around, oh, for me, 20 to 30 percent of the time. There are a lot of interesting places around Paris that are poorly illuminated."

Grant: "I don't know, nor do I care to know. Analytics is for pro sports, not for creative endeavours. I use whatever my aging brain or the camera suggests, and adjust if the results require adjustments. I will mention that whenever I put my Pentax K 55mm ƒ/1.8 lens on my Micro 4/3 camera, the aperture ring and I play around like kids in a candy store!"

Sal Santamaura: "Never. Irrespective of film/digital or camera format."

Caleb Courteau: "When conditions indicate. When I first got into photography I shot wide open constantly, until I realized I was using it as a crutch. I was insecure about my compositions, and would blast the background into oblivion to make my photo look 'special.' I also used it to make up for poor framing in which I’d allowed unwanted background objects into the frame. Now I almost always shoot at ƒ/5.6. It’s more forgiving of slight focus errors, and I find that I want more of the frame in focus. Most of my favorite photographs by other photographers have a deep depth of field."

Tony Ayling: "Only occasionally. For my photography, I’m usually looking for more depth of field, and stop down to ƒ/8–ƒ/11."