Dogs, Dentists, and Democracy

A Review of the Thypoch Simera 50mm F1.4

Manufacturer Website: Thypoch Simera 50 F1.4

Over the last two decades, image quality has gradually stopped becoming the differentiating factor for many camera manufacturers. Autofocus put split-second precision within reach of anyone who could press a shutter button. Megapixels reached stratospheric levels. Advancements in lens manufacturing means sharpness and flare resistance is a given rather than the rule.

If image quality isn't the frontier anymore, what is?

For a long time, that high end camera experience belonged almost exclusively to a handful of low-volume manufacturers, Leica and Hasselblad chief among them. The beauty in their cameras lay in the tactile experience of using the equipment, from the finely tuned resistance of a well-machined rewind lever, to the defined click of an aperture ring or the distinctive sound and feel of the shutter tripping.

But that beauty came at a price kept high by the scarcity inherent in any form of manufacturing process when the final product is painstakingly assembled by hand in low quantities. The result being that high end equipment was inaccessible by most amateur and even working photographers.

Among photographer friends, the running joke was always that the only people who could actually afford a Leica were doctors, dentists, lawyers, and engineers who were using it to photograph their dogs and their kids. The high-end photographic experience a small, exclusive club, walled off by income.That's the club the Thypoch Simera 50mm f/1.4 is dismantling.

How could I resist taking a picture of my dog. Shot at F1.4, notice the sharpness of the lens in the eyes, while the bokeh is smooth. With the subject front. lit, colors are saturated. Note the slight vignetting in the corners, easily corrected in Lightroom.

At USD $749 new the Simera costs about a tenth of Leica's own current 50mm f/1.4 — the Summilux-M ASPH II, at USD $5,500.

The tactile, high-end experience that used to require a four or five-figure kit is now available to almost anyone who wants it and that shift is worth talking about on its own terms independent of all the nitty gritty technical details that normally encompass a lens review.

That said, the Simera 50mm perform beautifully. A 50mm f/1.4 is a lens I rarely reached for on my Leica rangefinders. The size and weight usually pushes me toward the smaller f/2 glass to keep the whole kit light.

It didn't make sense for me to spend Summilux money on a lens I wasn't planning to carry everywhere. Months later, I still reach for f/2 glass more often, specifically to keep the package small, with the Simera coming out when I actually want that extra stop of speed or the shallow depth of field.

I'll admit that Thypoch being a newer manufacturer gave me a moment's pause, even with a design pedigree in the cinema lens space. Having used gear from a lot of manufacturers over the years, I know that even when the glass itself is excellent, rangefinder lenses carry their own category of risk. Rangefinder coupling calibration, back-focus shift, the kind of mechanical quirks that take time to diagnose and correct.

Thankfully, the lens had already been out long enough to build a track record. Plenty of other reviewers had already done the work of finding the bugs, if there were any to find, giving me the confidence to purchase the lens.

Next to the M-mount 50mm f/1.4s I've used before, namely Leica's own Summilux, a few features stood out immediately that sets the Thypoch apart. There's a switch to declick the aperture ring, designed for film makers. Not something I have or will use as a still photographer but certainly increases the application value of the lens to a wider audience.

More useful in my case is the focus notch at 0.7m: Focus closer than that and you can feel the notch indicating the lens has decoupled from the rangefinder mechanism entirely. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing I wish every M-mount lens had because it removes the guesswork of not knowing whether you're still coupled to the rangefinder patch.

I’ve found the easiest way to use this was to use it as an indicator to switch over to the EVF soon as I felt my focus throw had hit the focus notch. Then just set the lens at its closes focusing distance of 0.5M and move my body forward and back while looking through the EVF to get the correct distance.

The focus notch at 0.5m, makes the lens a joy to use for closeups, even with a mechanical rangefinder.

The third distinctive feature of the Simera is the focus throw, which is noticeably shorter than other lenses in this segment. It took some adjustment to get used to it but I ended up developing a technique where I would use the focus tab for the rough adjustment and then switch to fingertips on the knurled focusing ring for fine correction. Once I had that down, the focusing itself is excellent. Smooth, with no wobble anywhere in the focusing mechanism and just the right tension for a f/1.4 lens. It turns out the short focus throw is a pleasure to use especially in street or documentary style photography where focus speed is often is important as accuracy.

An interesting detail which I suspect was more for marketing is the depth of field scale. Thypoch uses a series of holes on the lens which turns red as you turn the aperture dial, the red dots coincide with the distance scale to tell you the depth of field. Especially useful if you use hyperfocal focusing, it’s not really a feature I would use often on a 50mm lens. Perhaps the positive or negative of such a feature would be more prominent on the 21mm or 28mm lens of the same series.

In terms of size and weight, it is on the larger size fora M-mount 50mm f/1.4 lens. Perhaps this is where the price segregation is pkaying out?

I decided early on that I'd shoot this lens mostly wide open — there's not much point buying an f/1.4 to use it at other apertures. At f/1.4, the out-of-focus rendering is smooth with just a touch of character, reminiscent of the older pre-aspherical 50mm Summilux. It's not the kind of bokeh that turns busy or distracting; I like the subtlety of its signature. The lens has ALMOST the same sharpness of the current Summilux aspherical wide open.

A f1.4, I find the colors slightly less saturated and contrasty than my Voigtlander lenses wide open, but it's a useful look to have to soften up the harder edge of digital. A bit of dehaze in Lightroom and image looks modern hard.

Color at f/1.4 comes out slightly less saturated and more pastel than what I get from my Voigtlander lenses in general. Saturation returns once you stop down a touch to around f/2.8. My guess is there's a slight amount of flare happening wide open that's producing that desaturated, higher-key look and I happen to like it. It reminds me a little of the Contax 645 80mm F2 lens which was all the rage among wedding photographers in the early 2000s for that soft pastel high key look in back lit situations. The Thypoch reminds me of that look when flaring at f/1.4.

The lens flares a little at f1.4, but stop down to f5.6 or f8 like this image, and flare becomes very well controlled. with sharpness and saturation preserved in the rest of the image

Vigentting is more than the Leica 50 Summilux Asph, which many photograpehrs consider a reference lens, but roughly on par with the Voigtlander 50 F1.5 Ultron MC. As such, for those seeking optical “perfection”, tagging the images from this lens with the Voigtlander 50mm F1.5 Ultron profile in the lightroom lens correction module seems to be the way to go.

In practice, this lens could be a one and done for me if it wasn’t for the size. When size and weight is the priority I still lean toward something smaller, even if that means giving up a stop down to f/2.

Using the Thypoch for black and white surprised me. The lens did an excellent job of capturing the breadth of tonality critical as a starting point for black and white. The sharpness of the lens at f4 in this picture also seemed to add a certain level of dimensionality to the rocks. Impressive given the price point.

So does the Simera feel like a genuine lower priced alternative to a Leica 50mm? Yes, but much more than price, this lens represents the falling of barriers in photography as an art and the democratization of a high-end photographic experience that used to belong to a much smaller slice of the market. Does it translate to better pictures? I can’t say for sure but it has made the process of using my Leica M enjoyable, with the feel of a high end photographic tool as it's meant to be.

On a macro level, the Thypoch business philosophy isn't an isolated case. Over the last few years, a number of manufacturers have appeared offering alternatives to traditionally expensive lenses, matching the build quality most people associate with legacy brands at a fraction of the price.

As the high end experience becomes more accesible, I think this trend will force legacy brands to find new ways to justify what they charge for the experience and that is a win for photographers.

Beyond the spec sheet, the Simera line is a marker in a genuinely interesting moment in the photographic equipment industry. While the tactile, high-end experience used to define a very small, very expensive club, the latest offerings from Thypoch bucks a macro trend, bringing affordable luxury to the market in the face of the greater K shaped economy which is increasingly segregating the haves and have nots.