Leica Elmar-C 90mm f/4

Head and shoulders at two meters, wide open, on a Leica CL: put a 90 on that camera and that is the picture you will make most often. Leitz started the long lens of the CL outfit at f/4, which is about where the CL's rangefinder stops being trustworthy up close. CameraQuest reckons the effective base at roughly 18.9 mm, enough to place a 90 at f/4 at that distance. A faster 90 wide open there is a gamble, so a Tele-Elmarit on a CL tends to end up at f/4 anyway.

Production ran from 1973 to 1977 under order number 11540, and the barrel is engraved LEITZ WETZLAR. Four elements in four groups sit behind a ten-blade iris. It stops down to f/22, focuses to 1 m and weighs 270 g. Like the Summicron-C it couples through the inclined cam designed for the CL's own rangefinder, and Leitz warned buyers it might not focus correctly on an M body. Some call that protection for dearer M lenses, and CameraQuest's Stephen Gandy says he has yet to see a CL lens misfocus on an M. In Japan the Leitz Minolta CL came with an M-Rokkor 90mm f/4 that was this same Leitz-made lens wearing a Rokkor name.

The drawing is gentle. Jörg-Peter Rau, testing a CL kit on film and digital Leicas for Macfilos, found good resolution of fine detail and counted color among its strengths. Bokeh is pleasing, and the lens holds together with the sun roughly in front of it. Contrast is where it gives ground. Rau rated it average, and in backlight clearly flatter than modern glass. On film, wide open and close, he called sharpness a bit of a lottery, though he allowed that a portrait can live without brutal sharpness.

For black-and-white his fix is a yellow filter as standard, and the CL system makes you work for it. The Elmar-C shares the Summicron-C's odd 39 x 0.75 mm hood thread, whose diameter invites an ordinary E39 filter. Don't: the pitch is different, and forcing one is a good way to strip the thread. A threadless Series 5.5 filter sits in front of the glass instead, clamped by the screwed-in hood, so a copy without its hood is a copy without filters. The yellow costs light too. The CL's through-the-lens cell reads through it, if yours still works. A handheld meter does not, so enter the filter in Zone Light Meter and let the app fold its factor in, about a stop for a medium yellow.

On an adapted mirrorless body the cam argument disappears, since focus is judged on the screen. The corners are the trouble on digital generally: Rau saw heavy vignetting on an SL wide open, less on an M10, and almost none on film by f/5.6. He called the lens the least convincing part of the CL outfit, mostly because it carries the Summicron-C's filter and front-cap quirks while being neither tiny nor especially light.

Leica Wiki put street prices near $185 in 2010, and in November 2026 Leica Store Geneva listed a 1973 copy at CHF 398. Rau points patient buyers to a fairly priced Tele-Elmarit or Elmarit-M 90mm f/2.8, the far better lens, or to the lighter Macro-Elmar-M 90mm f/4, in his words lightyears ahead optically. On an M body I would follow him. A CL owner does different sums, because that short base makes the extra stop hard to use up close and the Elmar-C was cut for the camera's own cam. Buy one with the hood attached, or plan on hunting for it.