Light Lens Lab 50mm f/2 "Apochromatic"
Light Lens Lab · Leica M · 2026
Also known as: LLL 50mm f/2 APO · Light Lens Lab 50mm f2 Apochromatic · Light Lens Lab APO 50
Variants & identification
| Variant | Mount | Years | Serial ranges | Production |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Announced for 2027 (nothing shown) | Leica M | 2026 | — | — |
- 2026 is the year the lens was announced, not a production year. The maker puts the work in 2027; Leica Rumors places the five follow-on focal lengths "in 2027 and beyond". No month has been given and no price quoted.
- Photo Rumors, writing the series up on 10 August 2026, gives the release year as 2007 — a plain typo for 2027, since the lens was announced in 2026 and the maker's own text says the work begins the following year. Noted because the figure is wrong at the source and will propagate.
- Of the five apochromatic focal lengths Leica Rumors lists — 28mm, 50mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm, all f/2 — this is the only one the maker itself names.
- THE APERTURE IS NOT THE MAKER'S FIGURE. Light Lens Lab's announcement of 4 August 2026 commits only to "a newly developed 50mm lens" beginning in 2027. It gives no maximum aperture. The f/2 in this entry's name and specification comes from Leica Rumors' list, where all five focal lengths are given at f/2, and it is carried here because the catalog requires a maximum aperture to file a lens at all. Treat it as a rumour-site figure until the maker publishes one.
How to tell them apart
Announced for 2027 (nothing shown):
- No prototype, drawing, MTF curve or price has been published as of September 2026
- Announced for 2027 (nothing shown): The only one of the five apochromatic focal lengths that the maker has confirmed in writing. Its series announcement of 4 August 2026 places the work in 2027 and states that the lens will have an optical design of its own rather than a recreated one.
Specifications
- Aperture range
- f/2
- Years manufactured
- 2026
- Country
- China
What reviewers say
No reviews aggregated yet — this family is still in the research queue. Written one? We'd love to index it.
History
Of the five apochromatic focal lengths attributed to Light Lens Lab for 2027 and beyond, this is the one the maker has actually written down. The series announcement of 4 August 2026 says that “Beginning in 2027, this work will expand with a newly developed 50mm lens” and that it “will feature its own new, independent optical design”. Leica Rumors listed it a week later among five, alongside a 28mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm that the announcement does not mention. That difference is the whole reason this page carries more weight than its siblings: one first-party sentence, rather than a name on a rumour site’s list.
What the sentence commits to is thin but specific. A 50mm, from 2027, apochromatically corrected, and designed rather than copied. The announcement frames the series as an attempt to “independently develop high-performance optical designs”, with the 35mm f/2 as “the first lens created under this project” — so the 50mm is the second, and the phrase about an independent design appears to be there precisely to head off the assumption a reader of this catalog would otherwise make.
That assumption is worth spelling out, because it is the whole context for the entry. Light Lens Lab is known for recreations: the eight-element Summicron, the Noctilux 50mm f/1.2, the Summarit 50mm f/1.5, the ELCAN 50mm f/2, the Hologon — several of which this catalog holds as originals, and each of which can be read against the copy. The workshop has made more 50mm recreations than anything else, which is exactly why a new 50mm from it invites the question of which old lens it is. The answer here is none. Nothing in this catalog is its ancestor, and nothing is linked as one.
What it will meet instead is a current lens. A 50mm f/2 apochromatic for the M mount is the specification of Leica’s own APO-Summicron-M 50mm f/2 ASPH, in production since 2013 and among the most expensive 50mm lenses made. Competing with a lens still on sale is a different proposition from reissuing one discontinued fifty years ago: there is a benchmark, it is measurable, and apochromatic is a claim that testing can settle. Nothing has yet been shown that could be tested. Until a prototype appears, the year, the focal length and the aperture are all this page can honestly assert.
This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.
Example photos
Sample photo wanted — shot with a Light Lens Lab 50mm f/2 "Apochromatic"? We'd love to feature it (with credit).
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