Following initial announcements earlier this year, Voigtländer has officially confirmed that its highly anticipated APO-Lanthar 90mm F4 Close Focus VM lens is now available to purchase. Initially scheduled to make its market debut in August, the lens experienced a slight delay before finally clearing the final distribution hurdles. Photographers operating full-frame Leica M-mount rangefinder cameras can now secure the new medium-telephoto prime through major specialty retailers, including B&H in the United States and Wex Photo Video in the United Kingdom.
The lens is offered in a choice of classic black or sleek silver finishes, maintaining an accessible price point of $749 in the US and £599 in the UK. This pricing strategy places the new optic competitively within the premium manual-focus rangefinder market, appealing to both traditionalists and contemporary street, travel, and portrait photographers looking to expand their creative toolkit without investing in native Leica-branded glass.
The designation "APO-Lanthar" signifies that this optic is built upon an advanced apochromatic design philosophy. Originally engineered to virtually eliminate chromatic aberration and color fringing in film photography, apochromatic technology remains equally vital in the digital age. Modern digital sensors are notoriously sensitive to purple fringing and chromatic artifacts, particularly around high-contrast edges and specular highlights. By utilizing sophisticated glass formulations and precise optical alignment, the APO-Lanthar design aims to deliver clean, crisp transitions and truer color reproduction across the entire frame.
Inside the compact barrel of the APO-Lanthar 90mm F4 Close Focus VM, Voigtländer has packed an optical construction consisting of eight elements arranged in seven distinct groups. Notably, six of these elements are crafted from anomalous partial dispersion glass. This specialized glass type is chosen specifically for its ability to bend light rays in a controlled manner, correcting the secondary spectrums that standard optical glass often fails to manage. According to the manufacturer, this meticulous optical arrangement yields exceptionally high resolution, strong contrast, and consistent performance from the center all the way out to the extreme corners of the frame, even when shooting wide open at its maximum aperture.
Despite the complexity of its internal architecture and the inclusion of numerous specialized glass elements, the lens remains remarkably diminutive. It measures just 54.8mm in length and tips the scales at a mere 235 grams. This high degree of portability is largely attributable to the modest f/4 maximum aperture. By opting for an f/4 aperture rather than a faster f/2.8 or f/2 design, Voigtländer successfully avoided the necessity for the massive, heavy glass elements that faster medium-telephoto primes demand.
Beyond reducing overall size and weight, the smaller barrel diameter delivers a significant practical advantage for rangefinder shooters: it minimizes optical viewfinder blockage. When longer focal length lenses are mounted to mechanical rangefinder cameras, the physical barrel often intrudes into the corner of the optical viewfinder, obscuring the photographer’s view of the scene outside the framing lines. The slim profile of the 90mm F4 ensures that the viewfinder remains largely unobstructed, preserving situational awareness and making composition much more natural and fluid.
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Close-focusing performance represents another major pillar of the lens’s appeal, setting it apart from many traditional rangefinder-coupled optics. While standard rangefinder-coupled lenses typically force photographers to stop focusing at a minimum distance of 0.7 meters due to the mechanical limitations of the rangefinder cam, the APO-Lanthar 90mm F4 Close Focus VM shatters this barrier by allowing users to focus down to just 0.5 meters.
At this closest focusing distance, the lens achieves a maximum reproduction magnification of 0.28x. Voigtländer emphasizes that the sophisticated apochromatic correction works effectively even at close working distances, ensuring that image sharpness, contrast, and color fidelity do not degrade when shooting detailed close-ups, still lifes, or intimate macro-style subjects.
To facilitate precise manual focusing at such close distances, the lens incorporates a high-precision rangefinder coupling mechanism alongside an all-metal helicoid designed for smooth, fluid resistance. Furthermore, the focusing ring features a distinct mechanical cue—a subtle click—to identify the precise transition point where focusing moves beyond the standard coupled range of the rangefinder mechanism. This tactile feedback allows digital photographers utilizing live view or electronic viewfinders to seamlessly transition between standard rangefinder-coupled shooting and extended close-up framing.
Completing the package is a dedicated, compact metal lens hood that is included in the box. Designed specifically for this focal length and aperture, the hood extends by only about 9 millimeters. This subtle extension provides effective protection against stray light and lens flare while remaining carefully engineered to avoid interfering significantly with the camera’s internal or external framelines.
