Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 II VM review
When I saw the rumours about the imminent announcement of the Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 II VM lens I was excited. I had a bloody, tortured history with its predecessor, the first Nokton 50mm 1.5 VM: not because of its optical performance but because of the 1950s styling and ergonomics of the lens barrel. Such a good optic wasted in an ergonomical disaster. For me that lens is plainly unpleasant to handle. You can read the review here. That Voigtlander finally decided to remake the lens with an ergonomically sound design was great news to me. The new optical design was an unknown factor, but I trusted Cosina, the owner of the Voigtlander brand and manufacturer of its lenses, to know what they were doing. The latest products from Voigtlander have been fantastic lenses with high performance. I wasn’t worried.
Why am I talking about Voigtlander only? What about Leica? They have a fast 50mm as well, haven’t they? They do indeed: it’s called the Summilux-M 50mm 1.4 ASPH. and it has a really high level of performance. Why have I been trading blows with the “ergonomically crippled” Nokton 50mm 1.5 VM while the Leica lens was available? And with vastly better ergonomics and most likely better optics to boot? Well, the black version of the Nokton 50mm 1.5 VM costs £647 brand new. The black version of the Leica costs £3350 new. Do you see a slight difference? Both lenses are offered in a chromed brass barrel version as well: silver colour and noticeably heavier. £755 for the Nokton, £3550 for the Leica. In black, the German lens costs just over 5 times the Japanese one. Not everybody has thousands of £ (or whatever currency) burning holes in their pockets. That’s why the Voigtlander has been delighting and frustrating me in equal measure.
But now Cosina has released the new Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 II and I had it in my eager paws for a while, allowing me to form a better idea of its strengths and weaknesses and wether it’s a worthy upgrade from the older sibling. I will do a direct comparison between the old and new Nokton 50mm 1.5 VM lenses in a future article, stay tuned! In the meantime, check my comparison of 10 different 50mm lenses for Leica M, including the two Noktons and the Summilux!
A lot of the information you will find here is, unavoidably, a repetition of what is found in the aforementioned big lens comparison. The analysis in this article will be more detailed on the new lens. It’s full name is actually Voigtlander Nokton Vintage Line 50mm F1.5 II VM. Quite a mouthful. We will call the lens Nokton 1.5 II for simplicity from now on.
How’s the handling?
The ergonomics are exactly what I was hoping for. With a couple of niggles!
The good:
The size is absolutely tiny. It’s smaller than the current Leica Summicron-M 50mm f2, smaller than the Zeiss C Sonnar T* 50mm 1.5 ZM. It’s 36.9mm long and 52.3mm wide at the focusing ring. It’s only 8.4mm longer than the tiny Voigtlander Nokton 35mm 1.4 II VM (review here). And it’s light: I ordered the silver aluminium alloy version, which weighs a puny 198g, just 10g heavier than the Nokton 35mm 1.4 II. The brass version weighs 255g, which is 5g more than the aluminium alloy built C Sonnar 1.5. It’s the lightest lens in the big comparison I mentioned, and to my knowledge it might be the lightest fast 50mm prime lens in current production for the Leica M system. The lightness of the lens also makes the camera balance perfectly, almost becoming too light: the lens is pointing slightly up when the camera hangs off the strap. Beautiful.
Is the size a hindrance? Not at all! Contrary to the previous version of the Nokton 1.5, the new lens has great handling when mounted on the camera. I point out “when mounted on the camera” because of one of its niggles: more on it later.
The focus ring is ribbed and very smooth to turn, big enough and easy to find: you will never fumble trying to locate it. It is quite dampened, taking away the possibility of focusing with just a fingertip but making it really easy to focus fast and precisely even wide open. Its travel is around 90 degrees.
The aperture ring is tabbed. The tabs are a small nuisance and we will talk about that in the negatives section. The detents are definitely positive and the ring doesn’t move unless asked to. The aperture values go from F2 to F16 in half stops intervals and in a single click from F1.5 to F2. This works absolutely fine for me: it’s a 2/3 of a stop jump instead of 1/2. No confusion there, very straightforward.
The lens hood is round and vented in typical rangefinder style and is mounted with a bayonet mechanism. Personally I love this solution for two reasons: I never use the lens hood unless it rains, only to protect the front element from water droplets. It comes on and off easily and stays on securely. No fiddling there, should you need to change a lens filter just get the hood off, swap filter, hood on in a flash. Really practical. If you keep the hood always on it will stay on securely. Some criticism comes from the fact that the hood can’t be reversed for storage. Although true, this doesn’t affect me, but I think there is a good reason for that: if the bayonet mechanism had to be made for both directions there are two ways I can see. Like Leica, double up the mechanism on both sides of the mount, making it bulkier and blocking more of the viewfinder, or like any plastic fantastic lens made today make the lens and hood mounts of plastic and there you go, problem solved. I don’t see a plastic front ring being welcomed by the rangefinder audience, me included. I like the compromise Cosina makes.
Talking about viewfinder blockage, the Nokton 1.5 II has none without hood at infinity, minimal at minimum focusing distance (MFD) and with hood at infinity, moderate with hood at MFD. The hood really makes a difference there, but I still think this is a good solution. Leica has been particularly bad with hoods in the past, making horrible contraptions in some cases that dramatically worsened the viewfinder blockage of otherwise pretty small lenses. They improved, but they still do it in some cases (Leica Elmarit-M 28mm 2.8 II anyone? Tiny lens, twice the size with hood on. Why?).
Consider that in the pictures above the aperture is in the wide open position, which puts the left aperture tab exactly in the viewfinder path. As such, that is a worst case scenario without hood. Turn the aperture to F2 and voilà, no viewfinder blockage at MFD!
The build of the lens is really good. It doesn’t feel as dense as a Summilux 1.4 or a Nokton 1.2, but this is just because it’s so delightfully light. It’s well built and solid. It sports a 12 straight bladed diaphragm. The silver version I have looks great on my silver Leica M-P 240.
The bad:
I only found three things that are not ideal in the Nokton 1.5 II ergonomics. Two of them are minor, one is something that does annoy me.
The first and least important is the focus ring dampening: it is a bit stiffer than I would ideally want, but I only notice when handling the lens at home. When out shooting I never noticed. Which makes it a non issue for me, but it needs to be mentioned.
The second thing is the tabbed aperture ring: although perfectly functional, it could be better. The two tabs are something that you have to look for when shooting and looking through the viewfinder. I often find I need to adjust the exposure on the fly: I shoot manual, which means that the aperture ring might be moved quite often according to what I need to achieve. A ring knurled around all or most of its circumference gives you a reliable reference point to reach for to move it, like the 6 o’clock position of the lens. The tabs are in a different position at each aperture value. That makes you fumble a bit, which I don’t appreciate. Why did Cosina design the lens this way? I think this is due to two reasons. Primarily cost saving: they are using exactly the same part (together with the chromed brass filter ring) as the Nokton 35mm 1.4 II. Second reason, in common with the 35mm, has to be historical reference. Some people defend this choice saying that when the lens hood is mounted it would be hard to find a knurled ring and the tabs allow you to find them more easily. I think that’s nonsense: Cosina, the manufacturer and owner of the Voigtlander brand and lenses, also manufactures most Zeiss ZM lenses. ZM and many VM lenses share parts, most noticeably the filter/hood bayonet chromed brass ring in the front. They also do share the hood bayonet mechanism, making the Zeiss and Voigtlander hoods perfectly interchangeable if the filter size is the same: for example the Zeiss Planar T* 50mm F2 ZM and the Nokton 1.5 II both have a 43mm filter size and can share the lens hood from either manufacturer. But the Planar F2 has a knurled aperture ring! And lo and behold, it works perfectly with the hood on and is easy to find and operate.
The third and probably only design choice that is really detracting from the ergonomics is something that you notice just before using the lens: it is really annoying when mounting the lens on the camera. The lens has no clearly visible reference marker on the side to align it to the camera flange when mounting it. Instead of a raised, usually red hemispheric dot that is clearly visible and easy to find even with your finger pad in the dark like most Leica M mount lenses from the German and also other manufacturers, the Nokton 1.5 II only has a tiny red line on the side of the mounting flange that is very difficult to feel with your finger unless you are able to read Braille. This means that when you are changing lenses you have to turn the thing in your hand looking carefully for that small red mark. Forget about it in the dark. You just fumble and go by trial and error. This is just a historical reference without regard to ergonomics in my opinion. Do you think is is nitpicking? My swearing when changing lenses begs to differ.
Let’s talk about sharpness
Sharpness is only one of the many optical characteristics of a lens but it seems to be the most important in the minds of amateur photographers. So much so that we are seeing bigger and heavier lenses than ever, with many, many glass elements to hyper-correct the optical aberrations as much as possible and have MTF bragging rights.The Zeiss Otus series lenses, followed by the Sigma Art lenses, started the trend. Then everybody followed suit, and now the standard lenses on the new full frame mirrorless cameras are enormous. Luckily the manufacturers are hearing the small chorus of voices of those who actually take pictures with their photographic equipment, and it seems that a few smaller lenses are appearing again. Panasonic is releasing a series of fast F1.8 prime lenses for the S system, Sony has a set of smaller fast prime lenses, hopefully soon others as well will do. A big strength of the Leica M system in my opinion is the size of its lenses. They are invariably smaller than the other manufacturer’s autofocus systems counterparts, eschewing autofocus and auto-aperture for small size and high build quality based on aluminium alloy and brass, no matter the brand making them. That is one of the main reasons why I shoot the Leica M system. I mean, have you seen the size of the Nokton 1.5 II? If the quality is high we have a real winner here (spoiler alert, in the comparison it did really well!).
Is it sharp then?
We will start with the infinity sharpness test, with centre, mid-frame and corner crops. Here is the full image:
DISCLAIMER: the crops we will be analysing are 300% crops. Why 300%? Because it’s nice to see the castle filling the crop. This is pixel-peeping to the extreme. Take it for what it is, in real photography you will hardly see the minute problems we will be talking about here!
With that out of the way, let’s have a look at the crops:
Clicking on the grid will open a new tab with the Flickr version which is less compressed and easier to enlarge.
The difference in exposure is given by the fact that the Mid-frame and corner crops are obtained reframing the scene to position the castle in the appropriate place in the image. Because the camera was pointing lower and left, into the grass, the exposure was a bit lighter - I left the camera on aperture-priority for the test assuming it would be saving me some work. I was wrong, I should have done it manually as usual!
Now, the centre crops:
I’m seeing a little softness and spherical aberration wide open, but the lens is far from “glowy”. Contrast is not extremely high. At F2 the character is already changing, with a lot more contrast and a higher amount of detail being rendered. The spherical aberration has already nearly disappeared and it’s definitely gone at F2.8, where the contrast is even higher and we are increasing the detail recorded. The sharpness seems to peak at F5.6.
Mid-frame:
There is a clear mid-frame dip in definition caused by the wavy field curvature, a typical characteristic of aspherical lenses. The contrast is lower at F1.5 and F2, it really picks up at F2.8, at which point the detail recorded is increasing dramatically. At F5.6 it is sharp as tack, with a very clean image devoid of chromatic aberrations.
Corner:
These crops are at the far end of the upper right corner of the image: the right side of these crops is pixels away from the image edges. This is the weakest point of any lens. That there is more detail recorded here than in mid-frame wide open is impressive. There is a surprising lack of monochromatic aberrations apart from spherical and no chromatic aberrations are visible. The image is quite dark at F1.5 and F2, indicating strong vignetting. At F2.8 the image definition is picking up noticeably and the contrast levels go up a notch. The faint traces of lateral chromatic aberration (LaCA) appearing as the spherical aberration goes away are irrelevant. The corners peak at F4 and look excellent, with the same amount of detail as the rest of the frame. That is a really incredible corner performance.
Let’s put all the shots together:
This should help seeing the progression from centre to corner at each aperture. Now, repeat after me: “these are 300% crops, we are pixel-peeping. These are 300% crops, we are pixel-peeping. These are 300%…” - please repeat ten times! A real photographer will never look at an image with this amount of magnification. If you need to print a landscape so big that this detail is necessary you are not going to shoot wide open, and by F4 you have detail aplenty.
What do I mean by “real” photographer? I mean those people that use photographic gear to create images and look at content, not pixels. We are spoiled for gear quality nowadays, the limit is the chump behind the camera. Every single time.
Let’s look at the Minimum Focusing Distance and magnification: this lens has a MFD of 0.7m, which might not sound great but it’s standard in the rangefinder world. The actual rangefinder mechanism doesn’t go closer than 0.7m because of parallax issues. The MFD is just standard, neither positive or negative as a lens characteristic for the Leica M system.
The subject of the test is a camera battery measuring 55x37mm. I carefully refocused the lens for each shot to avoid possible focus shift issues, which we will examine later. The first image is the full frame, followed by 100% crops.
Wide open we are seeing uncorrected spherical aberration (unavoidable for a well balanced lens without a floating lens group/element, aka FLE, to correct for the close distance aberrations) but also green-magenta fringing caused by longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA). At F2 it seems that we are looking at a different lens, with plenty of detail and no spherical aberration, no LoCA. From F2.8 the image is tack sharp and the quality peaks at F4, where it’s spectacular.
Focus shift
Focus shift is the second characteristic of a lens that is inherent in optical devices. It is caused by the unavoidable spherical aberration. To understand more please refer to this article. It can be mitigated with a FLE, which the Nokton 1.5 II lacks, but is found on the Leica Summilux 50mm 1.4 ASPH for example. This means that our Nokton 1.5 II will have focus shift. No question. But how much of it? Is is relevant in real use? Let’s have a look!
Clicking on the grid will open a new tab with the Flickr version which is less compressed and easier to enlarge.
Let’s see the centre crop:
The same spherical aberration we saw wide open at MFD is robbing the image of definition and contrast here, but the improvement is dramatic again at F2. The target never loses sharpness, although at F2.8 and F4 it finds itself at the margin of the depth of field (DOF) while remaining sharp and defined. At F2 there is no noticeable shift. At F5.6 the DOF is expanding towards the lens again. Overall focus shift is present but not an issue with this lens: if your intended point of focus is blurred it’s your fault, not the lens. Spherochromatism (SC), the out of focus colour shift due to LoCA and visible as green beyond and magenta in front of the plane of focus, is certainly visible from wide open to F2.8. It disappears from F4.
How about mid-frame?
Same same wide open, improved but not great yet at F2, impeccable from F2.8. The mid-frame dip seems to be noticeable only at F2, then no issues at all. Again, not practical problems due to focus shift in mid-frame.
Corner:
I could copy and paste the mid-frame behaviour, wide open and F2 are not great on target but this is due to some positive field curvature towards the edge here. From F2.8 the target gets sharp and is great afterwards. No detectable focus shift in the corner.
Coma, astigmatism and sunstars
This test shows the upper left corner of an image with fairy lights. It shows well what we need to see.
Wide open the Nokton 1.5 II is already showing off: we can detect a little external coma, traces of tangential astigmatism and a little green fringing from LoCA, but already a high quality image. At F2 only a trace of LoCA remains, and from F2.8 it is just impeccable. The sunstars start appearing already at F2 thanks to the 12 straight aperture blades, and are defined and beautiful from F2.8.
Chromatic aberrations
We will be looking at LoCA, LaCA (lateral chromatic aberrations) and purple fringing, either optical or digital. What is the difference, you might ask? The most common form of purple fringing (PF), seen in high contrast transitions like branches or leaves against a very bright sky, is caused by a secondary spectrum colour that is focused in front of the other colours and is not well corrected even in apochromatic designs. The digital PF (DPF) is caused in the same high contrast transitions but it seems to be a digital sensor dependent artefact, caused by the bright light spilling into neighbouring micro lenses and sensels, thus producing a pink-purple fringe.
The first series shows centre crops of a big fence:
Traces of DPF and a little PF in the area of highest contrast wide open. The PF disappears at F2.8, the DPF needs F5.6 to be almost invisible. This is a great performance overall, with no LaCA or LoCA disturbing the scene.
Corner:
There is a small amount of green-purple LaCA fringing throughout the aperture range but it’s barely visible and you have to be looking for it. The worst chromatic aberration is some bluish fringing in the very far edge/corner, but it’s such a small area to become irrelevant.
Flare handling
The series is taken wide open to get the worst case scenarios. The source of light is a LED powerful torch, shone straight into the lens, then obliquely around 45 degrees, then at almost 90 degrees. I repeat: these are worst case scenarios!
The flare resistance is exceptional apart from one instance: when the light source is hitting the lens elements obliquely from outside of the frame. This is a weak point for most lenses, but the blooming is quite prominent here. Let’s see a real world example, images straight out of camera:
As you can see the sun position is something that needs to taken into account. But it’s quite predictable, so you know when to pay attention. I had no hood with me but shading the lens with my left hand (I could see through the viewfinder when the lens was in the shade!) worked like a charm, as you can see in the second image.
Vignetting and distortion
The Nokton 1.5 II vignettes a lot. No question about it. Have a look:
This amount of vignetting can definitely be obnoxious when wide open. I certainly noticed it in some pictures and wanted to compensate for it: I generally never feel the need to with any lens. I guess the strong vignetting might be due to the tiny size of the lens coupled with the fairly small filter ring diameter of 43mm.
The distortion is of the pincushion kind and it’s mild to moderate:
Shall we talk about bokeh?
Bokeh tends to be a very fashionable subject, and it is, in my opinion, a vastly overrated characteristic of a lens. It can be more or less smooth, it can be a bit nervous or wiry, outlined, colour fringed, but it is still the unfocused area of the image. We are supposed to put something interesting as a subject in that image, so the quality of the bokeh really won’t matter. But alas, the bokeh debate is heated indeed, and a lot of amateur photographers seem to be obsessed with its quality (as in mix of characteristics). There seems to be no bokeh quality that is commonly understood as good, opinions are varied and personal. Let’s dive in!
We will see three series: close focus bokeh with point light sources in the background, 3m and 6m distance focus with foliage in the background. This should offer a good mix to see how the defocused area of the image is rendered by the Nokton 1.5 II.
This grid shows all the images we will be analysing:
Clicking on the grid will open a new tab with the Flickr version which is less compressed and easier to enlarge.
Close focus:
Wide open there is a little outlining and visible spherochromatism (SC) around the out of focus highlights (OOFH). Off centre the OOFH show a strong tendency towards what is commonly referred to as cat’s eye bokeh, the rugby ball shaped OOFH. This is due to the prominent mechanical vignetting caused by the small filter ring. This lens is an aspherical lens, and aspherical designs will commonly show what is known as onion ring bokeh in the OOFH, a phenomenon caused by the grinding process for the aspherical surface that presents itself as a series of concentric rings, like the inside of an onion, in the OOFH. The Nokton 1.5 II is exceptional for the fact that it has no such artefact at all. In fact, is OOFH look like those of a spherical design. Fantastic. As soon as the aperture is stopped down the OOFH take on a polygonal, 12 sided shape due to the straight bladed aperture mechanism design. The SC and mild outlining are gone by F4.
Focus at 3m:
Wide open the bokeh appears very smooth with no outlining. The SC is mild and doesn’t influence the rendering. There is a hint of swirling, most likely due to the pronounced cat’s eye bokeh of this lens. At F2 the bokeh is still smooth and the swirling has almost disappeared. At F2.8 the swirl is no more and the image remains absolutely neutral in the defocused areas till F8, at which point it becomes difficult to see any bokeh!
Focus at 6m:
Smooth background from wide open again, no change in the bokeh character with the subject and background distances. It is a reliable lens for that. SC is still present and prominent if we pixel-peep but irrelevant in the actual image. The corners are quite sharp, showing some negative field curvature at this focus distance. From F2 it becomes futile to talk about bokeh anymore, it is barely visible but still smooth.
The Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 II VM has an excellent bokeh rendering.
Portrait
I set up a studio-like kind of portrait with a light 45 degrees angle to the right and above the subject, my beautiful wife Daniela. There was a reflector on her left to lift the shadows. No rim light around the hair because I could not produce a decent one with my extremely limited lighting equipment.
Daniela is not smiling much because this series is a small part of a much bigger one shot in the same session for the big 50mm Leica M lens comparison: she couldn’t keep the smile for such a long time! I want to thank her for being patient throughout a very long session.
The wide open first shot is mis-focused, the focus plane is slightly behind the closest eye. This doesn’t detract from the usefulness of the image. The uncorrected spherical aberration is softening the image slightly. From F2 the eyelashes and eyes are sharp and the image is “sparkling”, with a beautiful rendering. At F4 the detail is razor-sharp.
Conclusions
The Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 II VM is a beautiful lens. It could be the only 50mm lens you will ever need. Let’s have a look at its pros and cons:
PROS
Great handling, small and a pleasure to use
Good performance at infinity
Fantastic performance at MFD from F2
Really well controlled focus shift
Great coma and astigmatism control
Outstanding chromatic aberration handling
Excellent flare performance overall
Beautiful sunstars
Soft and beautiful bokeh
Great choice for portrait work
CONS
Vignetting is obtrusive
Spherical aberration wide open at close distance
Flare with sun outside of frame
That little niggle with the lens mount alignment mark
No lens can be perfect optically. Normally the more well corrected the lens is, the more lens elements in the design and the larger it is. The Nokton 1.5 II goes the opposite way and becomes the smallest production lens for full frame at that speed, while maintaining an incredibly high imaging performance. That is impressive.
The price of £849 for the aluminium version and £899 for the nickel brass version might seem a lot outside of the rangefinder world, but in the Leica M system it is an absolute bargain given the performance.
This lens is a winner and I highly recommend it. It has found a stable place in my camera bag. Actually, it almost never leaves the camera itself!
I will leave you with a few sample images. Please note these are just that, samples. No artistic achievement there, I just wanted to show a few instances where the performance can be seen for rendering and other optical characteristics.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!