This newly developed lens with its handy dimensions is distinguished by very high image quality and a very wide image angle - making it a particularly practical wide-angle lens. It is suitable for a very wide range of uses for everything from daytime reportage to landscape and travel photography. Even at the initial f-stop of 3.8, contrast and detail rendering are already excellent. At the medium f-stops, the depth of field is so large that it can even reproduce entire scenes in sharp focus. That makes it excellent for use in combination with the snapshot mode of the LEICA M8.2.

The LEICA ELMAR-M 24mm f/3.8 ASPH. is an extremely compact lens, especially for such a wide angle, which also offers outstanding imaging performance. Even with at full stop, it delivers uniformly excellent reproduction quality over the entire image field, only deteriorating slightly towards the edges in the close-up range. This performance can only be improved slightly by stopping down, which means that you can take photographs with at full stop without concerns, unless your compositional ideas call for a greater depth of field that can only be achieved with smaller apertures. The vignetting characteristic of every optical system is naturally more pronounced on a super wide angle lens than on normal and long focal length lenses. With the diaphragm completely open, it is a maximum - i.e. in the corners of the image - of around 1.9 stops for the 35mm format, or around 1.1 stops on Leica M8 models with their slightly smaller format. Stopping down to 5.6 visibly reduces this light falloff at the image edges - to 1.4 and 0.8 stops respectively. Stopping down further does not bring about any notable reduction since essentially only the natural vignetting remains. The lens' maximum distortion is around 1% and therefore hardly perceptible.The retrofocus-like construction is made up of a total of eight lens elements and the use of an aspherical surface and glass types with anomalous color dispersion (partial dispersion) make a crucial contribution towards restricting aberrations to an absolute minimum.

Summary: The LEICA ELMAR-M 24mm f/3.8 ASPH. not only offers optimum imaging performance but also - for its focal length - compact dimensions and also provides all Leica M users with an affordable introduction to the world of super wide angle photography.