rscheffler
Well-known
When I look at Voiglander I see that their fast lenses of old style design are often over extended a bit, vignette a lot, and do not have the color (and sometimes OOF) characteristics of the Leica they imitate. For me this is a deal breaker for many of the the fast lenses they make.
My vote goes straight to the big ones: Following the 8E Cron and V1 Noct I think its should be the 50mm F1.0 Noct and the 75mm f1.4 Lux. Then the Pre-Aspherical 35 Lux all in M-Mount. These are the pride of Leica so why wouldn't we go straight there before hitting all the weird ones. I am also in agreement with replicating any of the ELCAN lenses as well. That just makes sense to me...The 90mm F1 ELCAN would be the coolest thing I can dream up.
Great post!
I agree about the various Voigtlander lenses you mentioned in respect to how they compare against the Leica designs they apparently copy. I have or had a number of those and none of them stuck around, other than the 40/1.4 (because of its rendering quirks). On the other hand, Cosina's recent 'modern' designs have been technically very impressive. I use the 35/1.7 M version regularly and have no desire to replace it with a Leica equivalent.
Where the LLL project is so promising, as you suggest, is how carefully and closely it appears to truly clone the original Cron 8E, both in ergonomics and optics. Even if Cosina successfully cloned some of the Leica classics, they'd probably house them in ergonomically inferior bodies, as they've done with the aforementioned 35/1.7, or the second version 50/1.5.
Regarding the ELCAN lenses: I believe Kevin mentioned earlier that because those are so rare (and therefore expensive), and the potential difficulty digging up their patents (if any exist), it is much more challenging for LLL to precisely duplicate them. From the sounds of it, LLL's process includes disassembling at least one copy of the original Leica lens for careful measurement and testing of the parts.