Light Lens Lab 28mm f/2 ASPH

This entry describes a lens that was announced and then abandoned. On 17 August 2023 Light Lens Lab published a development post for a 28mm f/2 ASPH, saying the design was “currently in early development stage” and that “Projected MTF, lens body design has been modelled”. That is the whole of what was ever shown: a curve and a rendering. No mount, no price, no date, no prototype in metal, and — the detail that matters most here — no original named anywhere in the post. Every other Light Lens Lab announcement of that period says which discontinued lens it is copying. This one presented an optical formula of its own and left the question alone.

A year later the maker answered it in the course of cancelling the project. The post of 27 August 2024 that put the 28mm f/2.8 Nine Element on sale opens by disposing of its predecessor: “Our initial design of the 28mm f/2 ASPH ‘Nine Element’ in our previous announcement has been altered. The change was due to the lens being impractical in physical size during testing.” And it adds that “several design aspects of the initial 28mm f/2 ASPH are being used on the 28mm f/2.8 ‘Nine Element.’” Orders for the slower lens opened the following day.

Two things follow from that sentence. The first is the ordinary one: a fast aspherical 28 for the M was attempted, grew too big to be a rangefinder lens, and came back a stop slower. The second is the interesting one. The 2024 post calls the abandoned design the 28mm f/2 ASPH “Nine Element” — and Nine Element is not a description of the f/2 design, whose element count was never published. It is the collectors’ name for the first Elmarit 28mm f/2.8 of 1965, nine elements in six groups, the lens this catalog holds as the Elmarit’s first version. So the project that named no original in 2023 turns out to have carried the original’s nickname all along. Read that way it was never an independent design competing with Leica; it was a recreation programme that tried to make the 1965 Elmarit a stop faster and could not fit the result on a camera.

Whether the maker would accept that reading is unknown, and it should be treated as this catalog’s inference rather than a claim from the source. What is certain is the shape of the record: one development post, one cancellation, and a shipping lens that inherited some of the geometry. Neither the Macfilos coverage of the 28mm f/2.8 nor Phillip Reeve’s review of it mentions the f/2 project at all, so the only account of what happened is the maker’s own two sentences.

One warning about names. In August 2026 Light Lens Lab was reported to be preparing a 28mm f/2 Apochromatic for 2027 and beyond, as one of five apochromatic M-mount focal lengths. It has the same focal length and the same maximum aperture as this lens and nothing else in common — different decade, different programme, different correction goal, and no continuity claimed by anyone between them. Conflating the two would put a 2023 casualty into a 2027 catalogue of announcements.