[Leica] Wow, the last word on Bokeh, from Zeiss

[benedenia at gmail.com (Marty Deveney)]

The newer asph lenses - the 50 Summilux, 75 Summicron, 21 & 24
Summiluxes and the 0.95 Nocti have what Doug Herr refers to aptly as
neutral bokeh.  The 35s, the 21 and 24 2.8s and the 90 AA have what I
would call harsh bokeh.  The 28 is somewhere in between.  I don't have
them all, but I currently have 4 and I've used them all, including
specific testing for bokeh.

References to the 50 1.4 asph being harsh are usually only in
comparison to the previous versions.  It seems particularly hard to
design a good 50 with good out of focus rendition.  The nicest are the
seven element Summicrons, and, outside Leica land, the Planar types
where the doublets have curved surfaces, not cemented flat surfaces -
the Pentax 50 1.4s are like this, as are a pile of other, lesser known
lenses.  But they're no use on a Leica M.

Bokeh is subjective and doesn't matter to some people, but I like my
out of focus areas to be smooth.  I also don't like the focus feel on
the newer Leica lenses with floating elements, but not badly enough to
drive me away from them completely, as it did to at least one LuGger a
few years ago.

Marty


On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 5:51 AM, Jeff Moore <jbm at jbm.org> wrote:
> 2010-04-14-11:44:40 Tim Gray:
>> So which Leica ASPH lenses have 'harsh' bokeh? ?Particularly when
>> compared to their pre-ASPH ancestors.
>
> I remember soon after I got my 35mm Summilux ASPH (around 15 years
> ago, maybe?) looking at a picture I'd taken with it and really wishing
> I'd had my 35mm Summicron on the camera at the time instead. ?It was a
> photo with a person in the foreground and some tree leaves in the
> background, and the partly-out-of-focus leaves had created a
> hard-edged "jangly" geometric pattern which I found really distracting
> and annoying, drawing attention away from the primary subject.
>
> Did I stop using the lens? ?Oh, no -- because it's so good at
> rendering crisp detail of things in focus, and its worst-looking bokeh
> turns out to occur in a way which really jumps out and slaps you in
> only a small minority of conditions. ?It's continued to be one of my
> most-used lenses, especially on the M8. ?But... the older 35 Summicron
> never did that kind of stuff as it went out of focus. ?It was also
> never nearly as detailed, especially somewhere near wide open.
>
> ?-Jeff
>
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