Light Lens Lab 135mm f/2 "Apochromatic"

This entry describes an announcement, not a lens. Leica Rumors listed a 135mm f/2 “Apochromatic” on 11 August 2026 as one of five apochromatic M-mount lenses attributed to Light Lens Lab — 28mm, 50mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm, all at f/2 — coming, in the site’s words, “in 2027 and beyond”. That list is the whole of the public record for this focal length: no prototype, no optical formula, no price, no date.

Light Lens Lab’s own announcement, published a week earlier on 4 August 2026, is narrower and does not contain it. That document commits to the 35mm f/2 “Apochromatic” — eleven elements in six groups with four aspherical surfaces, ultra-low-dispersion and anomalous partial-dispersion glass, pre-orders from 10 August, shipping from the end of September — and to a 50mm beginning in 2027. A 135mm appears nowhere in it. So the five-lens list is a rumour site’s reporting of a range the maker has said will continue, not a specification the maker has published.

It is worth being more careful about this one than about the others, and the reason sits in the rest of the catalog. A 135mm f/2 would be a stop faster than anything ever sold for the M mount at that focal length. The fastest is Leitz’s Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8 of 1963, and it needed magnifying spectacles over the finder windows — turning the M’s 0.72× view into something nearer 0.9× — simply to be focused accurately at f/2.8. Everything else at 135mm on this mount, from the Hektor f/4.5 to the APO-Telyt-M f/3.4, is limited by the rangefinder’s precision rather than by its own glass. Adding a stop makes the depth of field shallower still and the focusing problem correspondingly worse, which is a mechanical difficulty rather than an optical one, and it has not been addressed in anything published so far. The 135mm name in that list is a reason for caution, not for excitement.

The other thing to say is what this lens is not. Every Light Lens Lab product that has shipped exists because an older one does — the eight-element Summicron, the ELCAN 50mm f/2, the Noctilux 50mm f/1.2, the Summarit 50mm f/1.5, the Hologon — and the question worth asking of each is how much of the original survived the copy. There is no discontinued 135mm f/2 rangefinder lens to copy. The apochromatic series is the Shangrao workshop designing rather than reproducing, and this entry records the announcement of a design, from one rumour post, with no confirmation from the maker whose name is on it.