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Leica Lens Names
(Trademarks)
© 2009 KenRockwell.com. All rights reserved.

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January 2009    Leica Camera Reviews   Leica Lens Reviews   

Recommended Leica Lenses   How to Afford Anything

One of the ways in which Leica attempts to make its lenses seem more mystical and different from other perfectly good brands of lenses is to use unique trademarks.

Just like other otherwise meaningless trademarks like Kleenex, Biogon and Xerox, Leica's lens trademarks like Summicron and Elmarit mean absolutely nothing other than the f/stop of the lens.

If you know the f/stop, you can skip the stupid Leica trade name.

Leica's trademarks tell you nothing about the lens' design, its age or its history. To refer to a 90mm Summicron means nothing more than to refer to a Leica 90mm f/2 lens. Leica has made at least three totally different 90mm f/2 optical designs housed inside many cosmetically different barrels over the past fifty years, all called Summicron.

The word Summicron is meaningless, other than to say "Leica f/2 lens of indeterminate age, compatibility or design." It is far more meaningful to say "Leica 90mm f/2 from 1987."

Heck, Leica even uses the same trademarks for its SLR (R) and rangefinder (M) lenses, which are completely incompatible and often of completely different optical design.

If you know a Leica lens' f/stop, you already know the trademark. Since Leica's trademarks are meaningless and often refer not only to many different designs, but to several similar apertures, I won't use these names in my reviews or speak them when discussing Leica lenses. This helps cut through the BS.

Once you're familiar with Leica's lens line over the past fifty years, you can forget about the clumsy names and just use the simpler, more meaningful and more precise f/stops instead. It means far more to say "28mm f/2.8 from 1989" than the ambiguous "28mm Elmarit."

Here are Leica's trademarks used for at least the past several decades:

These trademarks mean little because Leica uses them for every lens from new to old and wide to tele. For the sake of comparison, American car names from America's darkest car years, the 1970s, were far more specific.

Just for fun, let's line up car names to Leica lens names. I bet most Americans can picture the cars, but the Leica names are still too ambiguous to be meaningful.

I'll bet no one has registered these trade names for use with lenses, so go ahead and use them if you like.

Historical Exceptions

Leica has been using many of its trademarks since the 1930s. If you go back as far as the 1950s, you'll discover that they also used these names below.

Back in 1954, these names almost would mean something since Leica sometimes had different lenses with the same focal length and f/stop, but not today.

Meaningful Marks

Some of Leica's words are more meaningful, and few, if any of them, are trademarks.

* Because Leica's M camera finders only work at a few fixed focal lengths, Leica's zooms for their rangefinder cameras only stop at three click-stopped values corresponding to the few available frame lines of the M cameras. Since Leica's zooms only stop at three settings, Leica calls them Tri-Elmar to avoid the word zoom.

Pronunciation

The summer 1955 edition of "Leica Photography" tells us how to pronounce the names popular in the 1950s:

ELMAR: ell' mar

HEKTOR: heck'tore

SUMMARON: soom'uh ron

SUMMICRON: soom' ih cron

SUMMITAR: soom'ih tar

SUMMAREX: soom' uh rex

STEMART: seee' mar

TELYT: tell' eat

PLUG

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