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Leica lenses are absurdly expensive and difficult to use. Here's why people buy them anyway

Leica M Monochrome lens
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

Look at the image above. It's not the most interesting shot I've ever taken, but it does a good job of showing off the features the make Leica lenses among the most well-regarded in the world.

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Tech Insider reporter Antonio Villas-Boas, looking at the images from my day shooting with Leica's $7,450 M Monochrome camera and $3,995 manual-focus 90 mm f/2.0 Summicron M lens, commented that the results looked "buttery" — meaning liquid smooth and tactile. That's because Leica lenses accomplish several things at once:

  • Their glass is incredibly sharp, which frees up the camera to do no artificial software sharpening.
  • The fall-off from the in-focus to out-of-focus regions of the image is even and natural-looking.
  • Their "bokeh," or texture of the out-of-focus regions, is incredibly even, and doesn't betray any imperfections in the glass of the camera.
  • They admit light with next to no spillage, resulting in high-contrast shots even when shadows bump up right next to bright highlights.

Look how the focal point of the image above looks when blown up to full size.

Untitled 1
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

Note how sharp it is without any of the obvious markers of digital shooting or artificial enhancement. Even this close, this could almost be a shot made on film. (The Monochrome's excellent sensor is also helping matters in that regard.)

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Let's compare that to an unprocessed shot I made on my Nikon D800 with a professional-tier 80-200 mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.

Partial processed (8 of 12)
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

This is a nice-looking image, but it's very obviously from a digital camera and Nikon lens, albeit high-quality ones. The sharp bits look good, but perfectionists will note that they look a little unnatural. Similarly, the fall-off from the in-focus bits to the out-of-focus bits is a bit uneven and the bokeh a bit...fuzzy. These are differences at the margins, but for photographers who demand aesthetic perfection out of their cameras or plan to make big bucks selling prints to collectors, they matter.

Here's a full-size cutout of the Nikon shot. Compare it to the Leica close-up above.

Untitled 1
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

You'll note that the 36-megapixel D800 actually makes a bigger shot than the 24-megapixel monochrome, further proving that megapixels don't matter to quality.

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The difference between high-quality lenses and cheaper ones is further illustrated in a comparison to this shot on a Samsung Galaxy S7 — ruler of the smartphone camera world, but with glass that distorts and fuzzes far more than Nikon's or Leica's.

HTC 10 camera
Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

The big caveat to all of this is that in the end, the quality of your images comes down to their substance, not the gadgets they were made on. Anuar Patjane Floriuk, the brilliant nature photographer who first turned me on to the Leica M Monochrome, shot his most famous, award-winning image on a point-and-shoot.

But in case you were wondering why people spend months worth of rent money on Leica lenses, now you know.

Photography
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