Pick up a Leica Summarex 85mm f1.5 and the first thing you notice isn't the glass — it's the heft. One reviewer clocked it at roughly the same weight as two cans of beer, and that's before you add the dedicated hood this particular Camera West example comes with. This is not a lens that sneaks into a jacket pocket. It's a lens that announces itself, the way a vintage Rolls-Royce announces itself in a parking lot full of hatchbacks.
The backstory is more interesting than the spec sheet. Max Berek — the same Leitz scientist behind the Elmar and Summar lines — patented the Summarex's symmetrical seven-element, Gauss-derived formula in 1937, and Wilhelm Albert's own design records date a 9cm prototype to September 1939. According to lens historians, Berek coined the name by mashing up Leitz's existing "Summar" trademark with the name of his own pet Alsatian: Rex. It's the kind of detail that sounds too cute to be true, but it's exactly the sort of in-house naming quirk that shows up across old Leitz internal records.
The lens was announced in Leitz's catalogue in 1943 but, per Japan Camera Hunter's research, wasn't actually sold to the general public until 1949 — during the war it was reportedly reserved for German military use. It also holds a genuine technical footnote: it's said to be the first Leica lens to receive anti-reflective coating and the first to carry the modern international aperture scale, features that mattered enormously to the press and magazine photographers Leitz had in mind, since flash was often banned at the theaters and events they covered. It's widely cited as having been the fastest short telephoto Leica made for roughly four decades, a title it's said to have held until the Summilux-M 75mm f1.4 arrived in 1980, though we couldn't independently pin down the original source for that specific claim. One quirk worth flagging for any M-mount purist: the great majority of Summarex lenses were built in screw-mount (LTM), and most M-mount examples you'll see today are LTM lenses fitted with an adapter — though at least one respected Leica history source lists a genuine, far rarer factory M-mount variant, so a blanket "never made in M-mount" claim should be taken with a grain of salt.
How many were actually made is genuinely murky, and sources don't fully agree — production windows cited range from the early 1940s out to somewhere between 1954 and 1960. What is consistent is the rarity: most accounts put total production in the range of roughly 4,300 to under 5,000 units, with the black-paint variant (as opposed to the far more common chrome) numbering only in the low hundreds — one figure commonly cited is 276. That scarcity is why a Summarex prototype from around 1940 sold for €32,000 at a Wetzlar camera auction in October 2025, and why even a garden-variety production chrome copy routinely lands in the $1,500–$2,500 range at specialist dealers today. None of that is really about resolution charts. Owners consistently describe the character wide open as soft, dreamy, and almost impressionistic — a rendering style people either fall hard for or bounce off completely — which is exactly the kind of polarizing, personality-heavy optic that collectors build entire shelves around.
At $1,795 with the hood intact, this one's priced right in the middle of that market band. It won't out-resolve a modern APO lens, and it won't fit in anyone's bag comfortably. But for anyone chasing a tangible piece of Leitz's optical history — brass, glass, a dog's name buried in the marketing copy, and a look nothing currently in production quite replicates — that's precisely the point.