Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens review (with the Leica M10)

Leica M10 lens report: Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens

General

 

The Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens ($699) is a good choice for portrait and general people photography as well as low light photography (see the sample photos further down in this post). No matter how experienced you are with a rangefinder camera, manually focusing at 75mm f/1.8 M lens is not an easy task and I highly recommend using a viewfinder magnifier (I do not own one and I did have many photos where I missed the focus when shooting the lens wide open). The total depth of field of a 75mm f/1.8 lens wide open at 10m/32ft is almost 2m/6.5ft. Compare this to the 1.5m/5ft depth of field of a 90mm f/2 lens and you may see another advantage of using 75mm focal length instead of 90mm on a rangefinder. Here is a picture of the focusing scale – you can see that the difference between f/1.9 and f/16 is just a few millimeters:

I do not like the lens hood design – it’s using a screw to tighten the lens hood (hopefully one day Voigtlander will refresh this lens hood design):

Here is what you get with the lens: lens hood (reversible), lens cap and a rear cap:

This is the “Classic” (usually a code word for “low contrast”) lens design of the Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens:

The weight (15 oz/427 g) of the Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens is almost identical to the weight of the $3,795 Leica Summicron M 75mm f/2 lens (15.2 oz/430 g). Here is a quick size comparison between the Voigtlander 75mm f/1.8 VM, the Leica Summicron 90mm f/2 ASPH and the Iberit 75mm f/2.4 (sorry, I do not own the 75mm Summicron):

Next is a picture of the lens obstruction in the viewfinder of a Leica M10 camera:

Technical specs

The Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens has 6 elements in 3 groups Heliar optical design which provides very sharp and color accurate images. The aperture is made out of 10 blades for a smooth bokeh. The minimum focusing distance is 0.9m/3ft. Here are the rest of the specs:

Sharpness (100% crops)

Those are two 100% crops from images taken with the Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens on a Leica M10 camera:

Vignetting

Some vignetting can be seen at f/1.8 and it is almost gone at f/2.8 (lens detection/correction off):

f/1.8

f/2.8

f/4

Barrel distortion, lens flare, purple fringing

Barrel distortion is practically non-existent. I didn’t notice any lens flare:

Some purple fringing is noticeable (top left corner):

Bokeh

Sample photos

A few sample photos from the Voigtlander Heliar 75mm f/1.8 VM lens mounted on a Leica M10 camera (the jpg files are straight from the camera, no correction or post processing applied, full resolution JPG files available on flickr):

Here is the entire flickr album (I turned off lens correction for all sample photos):

Conclusion

Pros:

• Price: $699 – cheap for a f/1.8 lens (compared to the Leica 75mm Summicron at $3,795)
• Sharp
• Smooth focusing ring (no focusing tab)
• Smooth bokeh
• Lens hood included
• All-metal body construction

Cons:

• Difficult to focus wide open (at least for me)
• Lens hood design not optimal