THE LEICA 35 SUMMICRON LENS REVIEW

PAGE 1 - The Legendary 35 Cron with the Leica M7 and M8.

PAGE 2 - Some full size out of camera samples with the Leica M9.

PAGE 3 - More of my M9 and 35 Summicron processed samples.

PAGE 4 - My final thoughts and opinions. Is this THE 35 to get with a Leica M9?

PAGE 2 - Some full size out of camera samples with the M9

I must say that once I started shooting the 35 Summicron on the M9, I was floored by the quality. This lens on the M9 is a match made in heaven IF you like your images to POP, have amazing detail for large prints, and like a little bit more contrast punch. This lens, even at F2, is so sharp you will have no issues shooting wide open for any application. I have images from some Nikon lenses and a D700 that are no where near this kind of quality at F2. Leica lenses are the real deal and the 35 Summicron is in fact one of their Legendary lenses. But, you need to ask yourself what do you prefer, as some will prefer the creamier Summilux, even with the focus shifts.

One thing I like to shoot is rural landscape scenes. Old barns, abandoned houses, rusty trucks, and good old nostalgic Americana. With the M8, the 28 Elmarit or 28 Summicron did the trick. On the M9, my somewhat trusty 35 Summilux did NOT do the trick. With its focus shift at F2-F5.6, I could not get the look I needed. The images were soft and it kind of killed it for what I was shooting. For people, the summilux is perfect, but for landscape a summicron can take your breath away and mine would have been if I was able to shoot at Yosemite during the past two weeks :) Instead, I got to shoot more rural scenes.

This page will feature 3 FULL SIZE out of camera samples for you to download. These are large files and straight from Adobe Camera Raw 5 conversion. I just upgraded to CS4 today and I am finding a nice quality increase with ACR5 over the version I was using with CS3.

Here are the samples. Just click any image to download the full-size, out-of-camera shot so you can see how the lens does on the full frame M9.

I took this shot handheld at F2 at ISO 160 to test detail and bokeh. The barn was in the background and the focus point is hyper-sharp, and this is F2! This is right out of an Adobe Camera Raw 5 conversion. Click image for the full size image and check out the detail and bokeh up close at 100%.

This one was shot handheld at F8, ISO 160 as I have found you can coax every ounce of detail from the 35 at F8. It’s really not much better than F2, but it does seem to be the magic aperture with this lens if sharpness if your thing. Check out the full size image. Again, direct from ACR5. The M9 chose a very warm White Balance here, but it was a very warm, golden light so its pretty close to how it looked.

This next shot may look like I processed it in Photoshop, but I wanted to show you how easy it is to get a great looking file from the M9 right out of the camera just during the RAW conversion. All I did was hit “AUTO” on the white balance and exposure in the ACR slider. That’s it! When the DNG was processed, it came out exactly as you see it below. Just click on the image for the full size image. BTW, this one was shot handheld at F2. You can see my processed version on the next page.

So again, the first two images are the straight from camera color, white balance and it may be a tad warm. In the third image, I used the Adobe Camera Raw 5 “auto” buttons just to see what would happen.

Click here to go to page 3: Processed image samples with the 35 Summicron and M9.