[62 mm (Front)] I am a film photographer, still using my 45 year old Pentax MX, so when I got my Nikon Z fc I wanted the full retro experience. The kit lens doesn't really deliver on this, but this little gem from Voigtlander certainly does. A real distance scale. An aperture ring with third stop clicks. And a DOF scale, the silver ring with color coded markers is a nice touch, harkening back to Nikon's beautiful AI-s lenses. Ken Rockwell has referred to Leica lenses as being like a piece of jewellery, and in my opinion the same could be said of this lens. The pictures don't do it justice, in the flesh (metal?) it is simply exquisite. It transforms my Z fc to another level, something I can't say about the kit lens.
I have only had this lens a short time so am not yet in a position to comment extensively on its optical performance. Having said that though, I am not a pixel peeper, so I am not overly concerned as to whether it is razor sharp in the corners at f/1.2, one of the many considerations I think too many people obsess about. This lens has only been available for a year so it's a modern design, so given Voigtlander's reputation I am quite sure it will be more than adequate for my landscape photography.

[62 mm (Front)] Amazing image quality across the frame. Maximal image sharpness f2.8-5.6 but amazing sharp 1.4-2. It is a bit big and heavy relative to Leica M lenses but great value.

[1.94 lb] This is really a one of a kind lens. I have a lot of vintage manual focus lenses and some modern fast lenses like the Olympus Pro f1.2 lenses. Unlike a lot of the vintage lenses, this lens is really well optimized wide open. This is like the Olympus Pro f1.2 lenses that are made to be very sharp wide open. Many of my faster vintage lenses have a completely different character wide open. This lens keeps a consistent character and feel as you stop it down just like the Olympus Pro f1.2 lenses do. A lot of modern manual focus lenses don't have a hard focus stop at infinity and a lot of the cheaper ones don't have accurate distance scales on the lens barrel, but this lens does. It's just like my vintage lenses that you can focus with careful measurement and stop at infinity. While a lens like this is good for shallow depth of field, these are especially good for hand held nightscapes since they work so well wide open, and if you have them focused at infinity you can get all the stars. On my Olympus bodies, I set one of my function buttons to magnify. I also set the option LV close up mode 1. This way when you half press the shutter button, it closes the zoom view and brings you back into your regular view so you can check your composition before you release the shutter. With magnify, I feel like it's so much easier to get sharp focus even with lenses where it's hard to see what's in focus such as the f8 bodycap lenses. It's a really versatile lens, but if you want to try some handheld starscapes, I recommend trying it. For my regular photography I do tend to stop it down for more depth of field, but I do like how the character of the lens shines through even when stopped down. I also shoot large, medium, and full frame miniature format, but I love the way this lens looks and I think it's worth getting a micro 4/3 body just to be able to use this and try it out.

[12] As a photographer who uses Leica cameras and lenses regularly, I've come to expect a high level of performance from the equipment I choose. I've been generally pleased with the quality I get from Voigtlander lenses in the past. However, I wasn't prepared for the level of detail I could capture with this lens. In my opinion, this lens is very sharp, even at wide apertures. While there is minor vignetting when shooting wide open, it is not distracting, and can easily be fixed in post-processing. For the price paid, I couldn't be more pleased. Highly recommended if you are looking for a 21mm focal length.

[Manual Focus] Love this lens. Really well made. For the price you can not beat it. I would recommend pairing it with a macro adapter so that you can focus close.

[42.75°] As soon as I knew about this lens I had determined to get one. Since this is not a cheap lens, decision-making took quite a while. At f/0.8 this Voigtlander Super Nokton is in the Zeiss Planar f/0.7 territory. However, unlike the Zeiss lens used by Stanley Kubrick to shoot the candlelight scenes in Barry Lyndon, this Super Nokton is a production lens. Of course, one could argue: Modern-day digital cameras allow higher ISOs with negligible noise, so why pay so much for an f/0.8 lens when a much cheaper f/0.95 lens would do? But f/0.8 is significantly half a stop brighter than f/0.95. This gives filmmakers much flexible technical and artistic considerations.

[f/0.8] I’ve used this lens on my full frame Nikon Z5 with great effect. I just set the camera to DX mode and off I go. I’ve used it in all types of light and had great results. I like the manual nature of it too - it helps to illustrate the relationship between aperture and focus distance.

[1.94 lb] Almost indistinguishable from its higher-priced Leica counterpart, but still quite capable and rewarding

[1.94 lb] Allot of fun, F1.4 is great, very versatile for portraits and travel.

[1.94 lb] Right off the bat I was already super impressed with the color rendering of this lens when paired with my Leica SL3 via M adapter.
Using Natural Color profile on the SL3, I even had the Sharpness turned down to -1 because this lens is naturally sharp with end-to-end resolution (with the middle being the sharpest) at F1.4 and stopped down to F2.8 everything becomes pristine corner-to-corner.


I use this lens for both Photos and 4K videos. Paired with LiDAR from PDMOVIE Air Smart 3, now this lens behave like a modern AF machine which I absolutely loved.


The only cons for my usage case scenario is that the lens being a rangefinder, the closest focusing distance is at 50cm which means it wasn't able to do close up shots. I needed to make sure that my subjects are at over my arm length to get everything into focus.


For the price, it is an amazing value considering the M options from Leica costs at least 3x, yet the Nokton 21mm F1.4 lived up to expectations delivering quality SL3 is capable of!