Leica Super APO Summicron SL 21mm F 2 ASPH Review | 54 Data compared

The ePhotozine review highly recommends the Leica Super-Apo-Summicron-SL 21mm f/2 ASPH, praising it as a magnificent, exceptionally sharp ultra-wide prime lens suitable for landscapes and architecture. It features robust, weather-sealed construction, fast silent autofocus, and excellent chromatic aberration control with minimal distortion, offering superb image quality. While providing a close-focusing design and smooth bokeh, the lens is noted for its prohibitively high price, significant heft, and moderate vignetting. It is deemed a highly recommended investment for those seeking peak optical performance and the "Leica look" despite these limitations.

The Leica 21mm Super-APO-Summicron-SL f/2 is the sixth wide-angle addition to Leica’s unified SL prime lens lineup, maintaining the exact same physical body size (102mm x 73mm) and E67 filter thread as its siblings. Reviewer Jonathan Slack highlights the lens’s exceptional image quality for landscape and architectural photography, noting its superb contrast, vibrant color rendition, and minimal distortion. A key performance strength is its advanced optical design—consisting of 14 elements in 3 groups with 3 aspherical elements—which drastically reduces longitudinal chromatic aberrations both in and out of focus. This correction delivers intense contrast at the point of focus that rolls off smoothly into a gentle, creamy bokeh, making it highly effective even when shooting wide open at f/2 at its close minimum focusing distance of 0.21 meters. Furthermore, its Dual Synchro Drive autofocus system is notably fast and efficient due to the use of two very light internal focusing elements. Despite its stellar performance, the review identifies a few drawbacks to consider. On the downside, the lens is heavy for a wide-angle prime, weighing in at 789 grams without the...

The Digital Journal of Photography review highlights the Leica Super-APO-Summicron-SL 21 mm F2 ASPH as a premium, high-speed wide-angle lens utilizing a complex 14-element design to achieve exceptional optical clarity. Key advantages include superior build quality, advanced optical elements, and a specialized digital correction profile that ensures minimal distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberrations directly out of the camera. Conversely, the review identifies significant drawbacks, including Leica's lack of transparency regarding the specific number of anomalous partial dispersion elements used. A major point of criticism is the heavy reliance on a mandatory "digital element" profile to correct inherent raw optical flaws, which the reviewer finds disappointing for a lens in this ultra-premium price bracket.

The Leica 21mm Super-APO-Summicron-SL f/2 ASPH is a highly anticipated wide-angle lens that delivers outstanding optical performance and perfectly matches the uniform form factor of the existing SL Summicron lineup. Reviewer Jonathan Slack highlights several key pros, including its brilliant contrast, vibrant colour rendering, and minimal distortion, which make it exceptional for landscape and architectural photography. A standout feature is its impressive close-up performance, offering a minimum focus distance of just 0.21 metres with a 1:5.3 maximum magnification ratio. Mechanically, the lens benefits from an incredibly fast and light Dual Synchro Drive autofocus system, and its modern APO design ensures a signature "gentle" look with high detail at the focus point and a smooth, creamy bokeh transition that avoids the nervous look common to many wide-angle lenses. However, the review also notes a few potential cons and limitations for prospective buyers. The most prominent drawback was the prolonged waiting period for its release, which was caused by pandemic-related material sourcing delays. Additionally, some users may find the lens physically heavy, as it weighs 789 grams without its hood. From an...