List of all M-mount lenses that can be acquired and used on all Leica M, Zeiss Ikon, Voightänder Bessa and some other quirky cameras. M-mount lenses are also favorite among digital mirrorless camera using adapters.
Researching M-mount lenses is sometimes not as easy as it should be for a couple of reasons:
- There is a lot of old and not well-documented lenses that work perfectly well on any M-mount camera today.
- M-mount is very popular and easy to adopt by many companies, these several vendors are making fully compatible lenses.
- Even Leica is not great at having maintained a public database of all lenses they make.
There is a couple of requirements for the lens to make this list:
- It has to work on both, digital and film, cameras.
- It has to be bayonet M-mount lens (or very popular conversion. e.g., Canon "Dream Lens").
- It has to be rangefinder coupled.
- Leitz 21mm f/4 Super-Angulon works on digital M as it doesn't damage the camera in any way. However, rear lens is too close to the sensor resulting false colors around the perimeter of photo. This is not an issue when using film.
- This lens has integrated "googles" for the rangefinder.
- FL (or FLE) is not part of the official name. FL/FLE stands for floating elements.
- Not originally M-Mount lens, but very popular conversion. Relatively easy to buy in M-mount online.
- Specialty lens. Unconventional bokeh.
- Can be used on digital, but without metering.
- Technically, not a different lenses. SC and MC stand for single and multi coated versions. Single coated version is supposed to have vintage rendering.
Unlike Zeiss lenses, Leica lens names usually indicate their maximum aperture rather than design. Below is a rough explanation on what those strange words mean.
- Summicron — F/2.0 lenses.
- Summilux — F/1.4 lenses.
- Summarit — F/2.4 or F/2.5 lenses (see note below).
- Noctilux — Anything faster than F/1.4. Most famous being F/0.95 50mm lens.
- Elmarit — F/2.8 lenses.
- Elmar and Super-Elmar — Between F/3.4 to F/4.0.
- Hector — F/4.5 and above.
- Thambar — Vintage design, soft-focusing lenses.
If you are looking into lenses made before 1960, those names above might make no sense since they were used differently. For example, Summarit lenses were F/1.5 instead of F/2.4–2.5.
Note that, on other mounts and camera systems those names are sometimes used more generously. Leica Q with 28mm F/1.7 Summilux (not F/1.4) comes to mind.
All above are trademarks of Leica Camera AG.
Modern Summarit lenses were primarily made for digital cameras in the mid-2000s. While they are optically excellent and work on film, most have noticeable barrel distortion which is easy to fix in a digital workflow.
Codes are given left to right when holding lens bayonet and rear element facing you and code positioned at the top (12 o'clock) of the lens.
- 1 = Black dot
- 0 = White dot
- ASPH. — The lens has at least one aspherical element.
- APO — The lens is chromatically corrected.
- Tri- — The lens has three focal lengths, quasi-zoom lens.
Zeiss lens names are historical design names.
Contribution to this list are very welcome and are the pretty much sole purpose of this database/list. There is many websites that have similar lists of Leica or M-mount lenses, but they all suffer the same issue—they get outdated. The goal of this repo is to keep most accurate and up-to-date list of this kind.
Both, lens (row) and datatype (column), contributions are welcome!
This list was collected from public sources from all over the internet and offline material. Nothing in this list is anything but advertised specifications from lens manufacturers. While attribution and referencing this list appreciated, it is not required.