Not a Replica of the Leica Clas­sic: The Mand­ler 7-Element 35mm f/2 re­ima­gined

Life has a strange way of of­fer­ing up new op­por­tun­it­ies. It star­ted with a dis­cus­sion between two pho­to­graph­ers com­par­ing their dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same lens, a 35mm ASPH Sum­mi­cron. It ended with a broken lens hood, a good re­place­ment, and a long con­ver­sa­tion with the co-founder of a new Chinese com­pany called Mandler mak­ing homage versions of clas­sic Leica lenses.

Stub­bing your toe on the tip of an ice­berg is not al­ways a bad thing. I first came across the Mand­ler lens com­pany when I needed a replacement for a 1970s-vintage square plastic lens hood. There was a small mis­hap with the trans­ac­tion, so I con­tac­ted Mand­ler’s cus­tom­er ser­vice.

Be­ing end­lessly curi­ous about everything Leica, I struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with the des­ig­nated Mand­ler spokes­per­son. One thing led to anoth­er, and be­fore I knew it, I had in my pos­ses­sion Mand­ler’s own in­ter­pret­a­tion of the clas­sic Leica 7-ele­ment Sum­mi­cron. It’s the lens of­ten nick­named the “bokeh king”.

Meet­ing Mr Liu

Mr Liu, the Mand­ler spokes­man, stressed one point above all: the lenses Mand­ler makes are not cop­ies or rep­licas. They are, he told me, a mod­ern in­ter­pret­a­tion of the clas­sic Leica design. It has been subtly tweaked op­tic­ally and re-en­gin­eered mech­an­ic­ally to make their ver­sion of the 7-ele­ment Sum­mi­cron the best it can be, at a reas­on­able price.

To find out more, a Zoom call was arranged with Mr Liu ahead of writ­ing this piece. With a loc­al Chinese-ori­gin Leica en­thu­si­ast act­ing as translat­or, we spent well over an hour and a half in con­ver­sa­tion. Af­ter­wards, Mr Liu fol­lowed up with a lengthy writ­ten sum­mary cov­er­ing everything we had dis­cussed.

Two col­lege friends

The Mand­ler story starts at col­lege, where the com­pany’s two founders stud­ied pho­to­graphy to­geth­er. They dis­covered a shared pas­sion for Leica along the way. Like many young pho­to­graph­ers, they ran into the fa­mil­i­ar prob­lems of scarcity and higher prices that keep the “Leica experience” at arms length for some en­thu­si­asts. For example, the most desirable clas­sic Leica lenses are in­creas­ingly hard to find, and so retain robust pricing in the pre-owned market. The new Mandler 7-Element 35mm lens costs from $348 USD which is a frac­tion of an ori­gin­al Mandler designed lens (Version 4) produced between 1979–1996. That original lens can reach up to $6,500 on the used market.

Mand­ler was formed to bring high-qual­ity, mod­ern fac­sim­iles of clas­sic Leica lens designs to a wider audi­ence. Un­like some oth­er Chinese lens makers, such as Light Lens Lab, Mand­ler has no in­terest in re­viving designs that nev­er ap­peared in Leica’s own cata­logue. For now, the com­pany in­tends to stick strictly to es­tab­lished Leica M fo­cal lengths, choos­ing only lenses long out of pro­duc­tion to avoid any ques­tion of copy­right in­fringe­ment. By us­ing mod­ern op­tic­al glass and pro­duc­tion en­gin­eering, Mand­ler aims for the highest qual­ity it can man­age. For its two founders, this is very much a pas­sion pro­ject.

Key data from Mandler

How Mandler lenses are designed and constructed

Our con­ver­sa­tion ranged widely, and I took the chance to ask some ba­sic questions about how these lenses are ac­tu­ally made. I had heard that many new Chinese lenses are de­signed by dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies but built in the same fact­ory. That turned out not to be the case, or at least not uni­ver­sally. Mand­ler claims it runs its own assembly line and that it sources raw ma­ter­i­als from spe­cial­ist sup­pli­ers. I was told that broadly the same ap­plies to oth­er Chinese man­u­fac­turers too. Nobody, it seems, is simply badge-en­gin­eer­ing some­body else’s pro­duction run.

On the scales

Mand­ler sup­plied a full set of spec sheets and tech­nic­al data for its 7-Ele­ment 35mm f/2 lens. As part of my eval­u­ation, I weighed the Mandler lens, plus an origin­al Leica 7-ele­ment ex­ample bor­rowed from Bill Ro­s­auer, on my an­cient triple beam dark­room scale. The Leica lens weighed 159.6 grams, close to its pub­lished spec of 160 grams.

My Mand­ler test lens weighed 148.5 grams. How­ever, Mand­ler’s own spec sheet cites a weight of just 138 grams, a dis­crep­ancy I had to ask about. The answer was an im­age show­ing two vari­ants of the lens’s in­tern­al struc­ture. The earli­er ver­sion was single-piece, light­er, and without the matte black coating used to con­trol in­tern­al flare. In fact, the lens went through five sig­ni­fic­ant redesigns be­fore Mand­ler was sat­is­fied with the qual­ity. The ex­tra ten grams are the res­ult of a more ro­bust build.

Specifications

Parameter	Detail
Lens name	Mandler 35mm f/2
Lens type	Prime
Focal length	35mm
Construction	5 groups, 7 elements
Filter size	E39 (39mm)
Aperture type	Preset, with click stops; supports half-stop adjustments
Aperture range	f/2–f/16
Aperture blades	10
Focusing range	0.7m–infinity
Lens mount	M / LTM
Material	Aluminium, chrome-plated brass
Dimensions	Length 34mm · Diameter 52mm
Weight	138g (aluminium) / 210g (brass)

Mandler lenses as gate­ways

Mand­ler un­der­stands that some en­thu­si­asts will treat its lenses as “gateway” lenses. That doesn’t seem to trouble the com­pany’s own­ers. If any­thing, they are pleased to hear stor­ies of cus­tom­ers later “graduating” to genu­ine Leica glass.

Wheth­er bought as a step­ping stone or simply as a high-qual­ity lens for a Leica body, Mand­ler has con­vinced me that it is very fo­cused, no pun in­ten­ded, on every as­pect of the lens’s qual­ity. Over and over, Mr Liu on behalf of Mand­ler stresses that 7-element is not a rep­lica or reproduction. It might re­semble the ori­gin­al, but he claims in­side it is new and dif­fer­ent.

The stated goal is a 35mm that is slightly sharp­er and more con­trasty in the centre. At the same time, Mand­ler wanted to pre­serve the ori­gin­al Leica design’s beau­ti­ful, subtle fall-off to­wards the edges. That com­bin­a­tion, on pa­per at least, is the whole pitch.

Field-testing

To put these claims to the test, I went out shoot­ing on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions, al­ways with a pair of match­ing M10-R bod­ies. Occasionally, I car­ried the Mand­ler lens alongside my own first-ver­sion 35mm ASPH Sum­mi­cron. On oth­er days, I took both bodies out with the Mand­ler lens and a bor­rowed ori­gin­al Leica 7-Ele­ment Sum­mi­cron.

I pho­to­graphed the ISO 12233 test chart, an X-Rite Col­or­Check­er, and a wide range of real-world sub­jects with all three lenses. The res­ult was three very nice, subtly dif­fer­ent sets of im­ages. None was bet­ter or worse, just a little dif­fer­ent.

It will sur­prise nobody that my fa­vour­ite re­mains the ASPH Sum­mi­cron. However, between the Mand­ler and the ori­gin­al 7-ele­ment, there were small pluses and minuses in ton­al sep­ar­a­tion, edge fall-off, and shad­ow de­tail. Col­our fi­del­ity across all three lenses was ex­cel­lent.

Real-world com­par­is­ons

Fire hydrant:

Park bench and foun­tain:

Both lenses pro­duced crisp, clear im­ages with ex­ception­al de­tail and lovely col­our. The most significant difference was that the Mand­ler showed slightly more con­trast and a little less shad­ow de­tail on the left of the frame.

Botan­ic Garden land­scape:

Centre sharp­ness was splendid with both lenses. The Mand­ler showed a slightly more subtle fall-off in back­ground de­tail.

A cen­tury-old bun­ga­low:

Both lenses pro­duced flat, dis­tor­tion-free im­ages that were ex­cep­tion­ally sharp. Any col­our dif­fer­ence here came down to my post-processing rather than the glass.

A bed of bright flowers:

Both lenses de­livered sharp, bril­liant col­our in the fore­ground blooms. Once again, the Mand­ler was a touch dark­er and softer in the background shad­ows.

The ver­dict

In a world with Adobe Cam­era Raw, ON1 NoN­oise, and every oth­er mod­ern post-pro­duc­tion tool, I could hap­pily travel with any of these three lenses and come home pleased with the res­ults. That said, if you want a ba­sic 35mm f/2 that runs from pleas­antly soft-edged wide open, to sharp, mod­ern per­form­ance stopped down, I would still lean to­wards the ori­gin­al Leica 7-ele­ment. Un­for­tu­nately, good ex­amples are be­com­ing scarce.

Where to buy

If that vin­tage “look” is what you are after, the Mand­ler 35mm 7-Ele­ment will do the job. Mand­ler only sells dir­ectly to con­sumers through its web­site, Mand­ler­.shop. As a reminder, the new lens costs from $348 USD, which is a frac­tion of an ori­gin­al Mandler designed 35mm ASPH Sum­mi­cron, Version 4, produced 1979–1996. That lens can reach up to $6,500 on the used market. For many en­thu­si­asts, that trade-off alone will settle the ar­gu­ment.

Fur­ther read­ing

A table of re­lated read­ing, on Mand­ler and on the wider world of third-party M-mount lenses, fol­lows be­low. It mixes press cov­er­age and man­u­fac­turer sites with pieces already pub­lished on Mac­filos.

Macfilos Articles	Other Links
M Files (24): M-Mount lenses from China, an overview – Macfilos’s survey of the Chinese M-mount scene	Mandler official shop – Buy direct from the maker
The Story of Light Lens Lab: An interview with its founder, the enigmatic Mr Zhou – A comparable founder interview, Light Lens Lab’s Mr Zhou	Walter Mandler – The Leica designer whose name the company borrowed
LLL 50mm f/1.2 review: The march of the Nocticlones – Macfilos tests a Light Lens Lab homage lens	Another Leica 35mm f/2 Cron 7-element replica from China – Leica Rumors on the Mandler launch
This is Outrageous: The TTArtisan 35mm f/1.4 lens for L-Mount – Another budget manual-focus challenger	The Mandler 35mm f/2 M-Mount Lens Borrows Much More than Leica’s Optical Design – PetaPixel’s take on the lens and its origins
7Artisans 55mm f/1.4 TL unboxing – Macfilos’s first look at 7Artisans glass	Mandler’s First Recreated Classic Leica Lens Sold Out Almost Immediately – Demand for the 7-Element since launch
Review: Leica APO-Summicron-M 35 f/2 – The current, ultra-corrected Leica 35mm Summicron	Mandler Lenses — Leica Lens List – Full specification and pricing archive
M Files (14): Voigtländer APO 35, 50 and 90 — the attack on Leica’s heart? – Voigtländer’s own challenge to Leica primes	Light Lens Lab – Another Chinese maker of homage Leica optics
Eyes wide-open: A review of the Summilux range of Leica lenses – Context on Leica’s own faster M-mount lineage	Cosina Voigtländer – Background on the longest-running third-party M-mount maker

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