Bill Rosauer wrote a new post, The Bokeh Kings: A Look at 50mm M Lenses 10 years, 2 months ago
Wikipedia defines “Bokeh (usually pronounced Boc-ah) as the blur or aesthetic quality of the blur, in the out-of-focus areas of an image. The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze […]
I just bought a late (491xxx) Xenon 5cm f1.5, tested it on the M Monochrom- this lens is optimized for F1.5 across range. The Summarit- optimized for F2.8 at 1m, and f1.5 at infinity. Of the 5 Summarits that I've disassembled (to clean), all were scribed “51.1”on the barrel, viewed when removed from the focus mount. The Xenon aperture seems to be designed to minimize focus shift due to spherical aberration, the Summarit Focal Length seems to take it into account.
We tested the 50 APO along with about 20 other 50mm lenses at the LHSA (The International Leica Society) meeting in Detroit this past weekend. Bill and I did a live bokeh shootout, tethering the M240 to Lightroom on my computer, which was connected to a projector. It was very interesting to see such noticeable differences in the lenses. Long story short: the 50 APO was among the very best performers, if not the best of all the lenses we tested.
There is noctilux 0.95, which I shoot very often. But my favorite is the Canon 50/1. 2 M39 from 1963. In my opinion, this lens has an exceptional pattern.