Rare and Uncommon 50 mm Lenses
They’re all ‘normal’ all right but seldom seen online or in the metal.
The unlikely saga of the 50mm normal lens.
Even when the Leica was only a promising prototype, and its non-interchangeable lens didn’t even have a name, its focal length was (nominally) set at 50mm, a tradition that has continued to the present day. While Leitz was certainly instrumental in helping to establish 50mm as the normal focal length lens for the 24 x 36mm still picture format, the concept really goes back to the pioneer cinematographers of the 1890s, who standardized the 18x24mm motion picture format, and established the 50mm lens as the de facto “normal.” Theoretically, the normal lens for the cine format would be 30mm, the diagonal of the rectangular format that corresponds to the image circle. However, the earliest movies were essentially recordings of stage productions, and using a 50mm moderate telephoto made it easier to confine the coverage to what was happening on the proscenium stage from a convenient shooting distance without including a lot of distracting elements that were off-center. Early 35mm still picture cameras, such as the 1914 Multi-Exposure Simplex Model B, which provided both 18x24mm and 24x36mm formats, used a 50mm (f/3.5 or f/6) normal lens, and Oskar Barnack and countless others followed suit. The enduring irony is that the normal lens for the 24x36mm format should really be closer to the diagonal of the image rectangle, namely 43.27mm, but 50mm has predominated for well over a century.
What’s the rarest interchangeable 50mm lens ever made by Leitz? Easy. In fact, there are two—the 50mm f/3.5 Leitz Anastigmat fitted to the earliest Leica I (Model A) cameras, and its immediate pre-Elmar successor, the 50mm f/3.5 Elmax, named in honor of the great Max Berek, who designed them. Both employ Berek’s idiosyncratic 5-element, 3-group design with a cemented triplet bringing up the rear, and both are said to be a tad sharper in the corners at f/3.5-4 than the iconic 50mm f/3.5 Elmar but a bit lower in overall contrast. The reason they’re exceedingly rare is because Leitz never offered them as interchangeable lenses. They were first offered only as permanently affixed to a Leica I (A). If you can find one in an LTM (screw mount) it means that a Leica I owner had it factory upgraded to Leica II (Model D) or Leica III (Model F) specs, meaning, among other things, that it gained the ability to use interchangeable lenses. In retrospect, leaving their ultra-rare early Leicas intact may have been a better value proposition, but for sheer unobtainable rarity a factory-converted 50mm f/3.5 Leitz Anastigmat or Elmax in screw-mount is hard to beat. Your chances of finding one for sale are slim to none, and if you have one, you can name your price.
