Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/09/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On the topic of the "Leica glow," I just wanted to say that my various Leica lenses have really very different looks to their out-of-focus regions, even when open to the same apertures. My older 28/2.8 Elmarit-R has what Photo Techniques would call "complex bokeh," and while I like the look of its out-of-focus regions very much, they are a very distinctive element of photographs and must be accounted for in composition. They aren't anything like the very smooth out-of-focus regions that my screw-mount 50/1.5 Summarit yields. I would say that at f/4 the Summarit has the most pleasing out-of-focus rendition of any of my lenses, certainly more so than the sharper 50/2 Summicron-R. The half-dozen or so other lenses I use regularly all have quite different characteristics. I don't have enough experience with Japanese lenses to know where they would come in on this spectrum except that since I started paying attention to out-of-focus rendition, I've come to dislike the very obvious pentagons and hexagons one gets with lenses that have only five or six diaphragm blades, as is true of most newer Japanese lenses (and some Leica lenses). But in rendition of out-of-focus regions there's so much variation among Leica lenses that I'd expect the same to be true with Japanese lenses.