Dan Kerin

Voigtlander 28mm F/1.5 Nokton ASPH

In recent years, Voigtlander has really stepped up their game from being a very good cheap alternative to Leica lenses to becoming a true competitor to Leica lenses regardless of price. The Voigtlander 28mm f1.5 ASPH can be had for £749 new at the time or writing which is half the price of a used Leica 28mm Summicron ASPH. Cost aside is the Voigtlander worth it? Like with many Voigtlander vintage line lenses this comes in two different designs, type I and type II. The type I (which I used) is made from aluminium and weighs 250g and comes in two different finishes, matt black and silver. The type II is made from brass and comes in black or silver lacquer, but this is slightly heavier at 330g. The lens feels great in the hands and well balanced on the camera. There are half stop aperture clicks and the focus is smooth.

Being a modern lens it is built with 10 elements in 8 groups with a double aspherical design. The lens also features 12 aperture blades to allow for some buttery smooth out of focus areas. The lens was designed for digital use the lens has a minimum focus distance of 50cm which is beyond the rangefinder limits of 70cm on newer Leica M cameras. For me I do not mind this as you can feel on the lens when it disconnects from the rangefinder mechanism so I didn’t encounter any problems with this. In recent months I have been making the use of coloured filters for black and white photography much more and one small design element to point out is the 43mm filter thread. This isn’t the most common filter size but still very small for a f1.5 lens so I am not complaining!

Unfortunately I only had a couple of weeks with this lens and feel I didn’t really push it to its limits. It would have been nice to shoot some finer grain film to see just how sharp this lens is as well as some colour film. I think this lens offers great value for money and should be a consideration to anyone shooting 28mm. For me when I shoot 28mm I am usually stopping down to f8 or f11 but this lens allows you to have much more flexibility and there have been a few times when shooting with my f2.8 Elmarit I am stuck in low light conditions. Overall I think this is a great value for money lens. I owned the Voigtlander 28mm f2 Ultron for a number of years when I first got into the Leica ecosystem and I think this lens, if released at the time would have been a natural progression for me.