Let's clear something up first: the listing tag calling this a "50mm f/2 APO Macro" is doing a little too much. The actual close focus on the M-mount APO-Lanthar 50mm f/2 is a modest 0.7 meters — nice, but not macro. If you're chasing true close-up performance from this family, that's the separate 65mm APO-Lanthar Macro's job. What you're actually holding is Voigtlander's flagship standard lens, and the "APO-Lanthar" name it wears is older than most of the people currently arguing about it on forums.
That name dates back to 1951, when Voigtlander's optical team reworked the classic Heliar formula using lanthanum-containing glass to chase something nobody had really nailed for consumer lenses before: full three-color apochromatic correction. As one lens historian puts it, the redesign wasn't marketed as a Heliar at all because "the new lens was the world's first apochromatic lens, meaning color-corrected for 3 instead of 2 spectral colors." That vintage lineage — the Bessa II 105mm and the large-format Apo-Lanthars especially — is genuinely collector-cult stuff today, prized as much for scarcity as performance. And no, the lanthanum glass itself isn't the radioactive part of old-lens lore; that reputation belongs to thorium-doped glass from the same era, a distinction collectors love to argue about.
Cosina's Cosina-Voigtlander revived the APO-Lanthar name for the digital era, first on Sony E-mount in 2019, where it was pitched as the best-performing standard lens Voigtlander had ever built. The Leica M-mount version followed in early 2021 — announced that December, shipping by January 27 — at a launch price around $999. Under the barrel it's a 10-element, 8-group design with aspherical surfaces, elements of anomalous partial dispersion, and a floating group all working to push axial chromatic aberration toward zero, finished off with a 12-blade diaphragm engineered to keep bokeh circular even stopped down to f/5.6. Look closely at the front element and you'll spot thin red, green, and blue rings — a small, deliberate wink at the RGB correction the whole apochromatic design is built around.
The lens earned its cult status almost immediately by being embarrassingly good relative to its price. Reviewers kept reaching for the same comparison: Leica's own APO-Summicron 50mm, a lens built to the same apochromatic brief, that lists for roughly $8,795–$9,000. One early reviewer, after living with the Voigtlander for a while, admitted he wasn't sure "how anyone could justify buying a Leica 50 APO" at that price gap. Others called it the highest performance-to-cost ratio of any M-mount lens available, all metal, manual-focus-only, with an aperture ring and helicoid that reviewers consistently single out for feeling more refined than lenses costing far more.
So what's actually driving the $700 asking price at a used counter? What's driving it is a small, dense, cleverly named piece of glass that borrowed a 70-year-old apochromatic pedigree, delivered on it in a $999 rangefinder lens, and immediately made collectors start comparing it to lenses nine times the price. That's the whole pitch, and at VG condition for $700, it's a real one.