4 days ago
4
An f/1.4 lens can make portraits look calm and intentional, but it can also punish mistakes in focus, corners, and color fringing. If you are considering a manual-focus short telephoto, the real question is what you gain in look and feel and what you quietly give up.
Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this methodical video puts the Thypoch Simera 75mm f/1.4 ASPH under a practical set of checks instead of romantic marketing language. It is a full frame, manual-focus lens built for Leica M mount, with the expectation that many people will adapt it to other systems. Frost spends real time on handling, because with manual focus the mechanics are part of the outcome. The focus ring is described as very smooth, but the throw is not especially long, so precision at f/1.4 becomes a learned skill. There is also clear focus breathing, which matters if you shoot video or if you rely on consistent framing while pulling focus.
The build section gets specific. The lens is metal, includes a hood, and uses a de-click option on the aperture ring, which is useful if you sometimes shoot video. A small visual depth-of-field indicator changes color as you stop down, which is more clever than necessary but easy to read at a glance. Frost also notes uneven spacing of the marked aperture clicks, a small detail that can be annoying if you set exposure by feel. Weather-sealing is not part of the deal, and the barrel design leaves openings that make bad weather a hard no, which is a real constraint if you shoot outside in mixed conditions.
Image quality is where the tension shows up, and it is not the simplistic “sharp or not” kind. Testing is done on a high-resolution Sony a7CR using a Leica M-mount adapter, and Frost flags that adapters can influence corner results at very wide apertures. In the center, sharpness and contrast are strong at f/1.4, but you will see purple fringing on high-contrast edges. Stop down to around f/2 and it tightens up quickly in the middle. The corners are the tradeoff: wide open they look soft, and they need more stopping down before they look convincingly crisp across the frame. If you like to place key detail near the edges at f/1.4, this is the part you need to hear directly.
The video also goes beyond the basic sharpness chart experience and gets into the behavior that affects real images. There is heavy vignetting at f/1.4 that eases as you stop down, and distortion is minimal. Close focus stays surprisingly strong for contrast and detail, but the color fringing can spike again at f/1.4 before it cleans up when you close the aperture a bit. Flare control is described as average, not disastrous, with the sort of occasional reflection you will either notice immediately or never see until you zoom in later. Then there is the reason this lens exists: backgrounds. Frost describes the out-of-focus rendering as soft with clean specular highlights, while also calling out strong longitudinal chromatic aberration wide open that does not fully disappear until you are stopped down further, which can show up as colored halos in high-contrast blur transitions. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Frost.
English (US) ·