Wide-angle lenses and rangefinders have always had an awkward relationship — you're focusing and framing through an optical viewfinder that has no idea what a 21mm lens actually sees. Leica's answer, first sold as a Schneider-designed Super-Angulon and then as its own Canadian-made Elmarit, worked fine for two decades. But by the mid-1990s Leica decided the design needed a real overhaul, and in 1997 it replaced that older Canadian lens with an all-new Elmarit-M 21mm f/2.8 ASPH, designed and built in Germany rather than Canada.
The headline change was optical, not cosmetic. The new lens jumped to nine elements in seven groups, including one aspherical surface, three elements of high-refractive glass, and two with partial anomalous dispersion — a noticeably more complex recipe than its predecessor. Leica's own literature at the time framed it plainly: the goal was uniform sharpness and low distortion across the whole frame, even wide open, in a lens that was actually smaller than the one it replaced. It's the kind of engineering flex that doesn't show up in a spec sheet so much as in how clean the corners look on film shot at f/2.8.
Collectors like this lens for reasons beyond pure optics, too. It was produced for a long stretch — roughly 1997 to 2010 — in both black anodized and silver chrome finishes, with Leica-wiki's serial number tracking suggesting a run north of 7,250 units, which is not a huge number for a lens that stuck around that long. It also inherited one of the M-system's stranger quirks: the rangefinder's built-in viewfinder has never had 21mm frame lines, so anyone shooting this lens seriously ends up buying (or already owning) a separate external finder just to compose. And the older pre-ASPH Elmarit it replaced has its own bit of lore — it was reportedly criticized by respected Leica lens historian Erwin Puts, a knock that ironically kept its used prices low for years among people who actually preferred its rendering.
What you're looking at with the Camera West listing is essentially the lens that made 21mm 'normal' for M shooters — a focal length that used to mean bulky Schneider glass or awkward compromises, repackaged into something Ken Rockwell has called Leica's best modern 21mm, with what he describes as extraordinary performance even on a full-frame digital M9 (I tried it on Leica M10 and M11 and results were still amazing!). $1,575 for a lens still regarded as the sharp, low-distortion standard-bearer of Leica's wide-angle line is the kind of number that gets people at a camera show to lean in and ask to hold it. If I didn’t have a Voigtlander 21/1.4 already, I’d snap it!