High-Quality Wide-Angle Prime. The Voigtlander 50mm f/2 APO-Lanthar Aspherical’s compact build and versatile focal length make it ideal for a broad range of shooting situations, particularly those in which you want your subject to stand out. The reasonably fast f/2 aperture lets you shoot in low light while offering excellent focus control when using shallow depth-of-field techniques, and the rounded twelve-blade diaphragm lets you render smooth bokeh. Using an APS-C camera? You’ll get a 75mm focal length.

Advanced Optics. The 50mm f/2’s eight-group/ten-element optical design includes one aspherical element and two partial-dispersion elements, which give you the exceptional sharpness you need to capture your subjects’ most minute details. The lens’s apochromatic design prevents spherical aberrations, color fringing, and distortion throughout the aperture range. The included hood helps eliminate lens flare and ghosting.

Manual Focus and Aperture. This lens’s manual-focus design gives you silent, smooth, precision control over focus placement. Its stepless, de-clicked manual aperture ring allows for optimum exposure control, and you can configure the ring to use traditional 1/3-stop clicks by simply pulling and rotating it if you want something a little more tactile. Even though this is a manually focusing lens, it transfers EXIF data to the camera so that you can use in-camera stabilization, magnification, focus assistance, and other features.