By Ked · July 2026
July 2026
My interest in LTM 90 is rooted in a fascination with Leica's collapsible lenses. Well, that and the fact that I shoot an IIIg regularly. The IIIg happens to have 90mm framelines, always visible, inside the 50mm framelines. Even so, I'm not much of a long lens shooter. I'll shoot a portrait with whatever's on the camera at the moment, and that's a skill in its own right, portraits without portrait lenses (75mm, 90mm, 135mm...).
Spending a lot of time outdoors, hiking and sailing, I've found that 90mm is a pretty good landscape focal length. You have to think about some details rather than just shooting the grand panorama and hoping. I like that challenge.
So here I am with an IIIg, 90mm framelines always there, and no LTM 90. What I want is a collapsible LTM 90, but surprisingly none are available. Leitz prototyped them but never took it to production. I think a collapsible 90 in LTM would have kept beautifully in the spirit of the Barnack cameras. I have the Macro-Elmar-M 90mm, which is collapsible and a wonderful compact 90 for my M cameras. Learning that no collapsible option exists for my Barnack left me wondering exactly what is available. After all, the framelines are already there, Leica must have supported them with lenses. Keep reading to understand the LTM 90mm lineup.
Turns out the lineup is smaller and stranger than the 50mm or 35mm lines, and it never did the thing most people assume it did. Only three lenses ever carried the focal length in M39: a slow, plain telephoto that spent three decades quietly getting lighter and cheaper to build; a soft-focus portrait lens so deliberately imperfect that Leitz had to publish instructions on how not to use it correctly; and a fast Summicron built in such small numbers in screw mount that most collectors will never handle one. And no, none of them ever collapsed in production either. Leitz built the prototypes twice and shelved the idea both times. Today the collapsible ones are six-figure auction pieces and the production Elmar is one of the cheapest ways into a real Leitz telephoto on the used market.
Before the Elmar 90mm f/4 existed, Leitz built an f/6.3 experiment: pyramid-shaped, uncoupled, unnumbered, only a handful of specimens, never sold. Whether it's a true 90mm design or an early 10.5cm prototype misfiled by later cataloguers is genuinely disputed among Leica historians. Either way, it puts Leitz testing telephoto designs at this focal length within a few years of the Leica I's 1930 screw-mount debut, well before the lens that would define the range for the next three decades.
The production Elmar arrived in 1931 (serial 94092, code ELANG), and the early run, what collectors call the "Fat Elmar," was a genuinely awkward object: 314 grams, a 42mm base wide enough to clash with standard Leica accessories. By late 1932 a redesigned mount, first in black nickel then black chrome, dropped the weight to 268 grams and set the diameter and base measurements the lens would keep for the next twenty years. Everything after that was refinement, not reinvention.
Coating arrived comparatively late for Leitz, at serial 592451 in February 1946, postwar and years behind some of the company's shorter lenses. The finish cycled through matte black, back to glossy, and settled on all-matte chrome by 1949. In 1951 Leitz reversed the f-stop scale to run counterclockwise and added a black leatherette base, then in 1954 redesigned the lens for the E39 filter standard, the configuration that carried it through most of its remaining life. None of this changed what the lens was: a simple, honest four-element telephoto that Leitz kept selling, essentially unchanged in concept, from the early 1930s into the 1960s.
It ended, finally, as something else. The 1964-1968 run replaced the four-element formula with a three-element triplet, built around what Leitz's own marketing called "recently developed optical glasses," and dropped the weight to 188 grams. That's worth pausing on: this redesign shipped a full decade after the M3 had already introduced the bayonet mount, into a shrinking market of Barnack-body owners who still wanted new screw-mount glass. Leitz kept building it anyway, right up until 1968.
Every account of Leitz's mid-century lens catalog tends to assume the 90mm collapsed, the way the 50mm Elmar and the Summar did. It didn't, not in production. Leitz built collapsible prototypes twice, in 1939 and again in 1945, both uncoated, both shelved. A small pre-series batch followed after the war, and a handful of individual examples have surfaced at auction since: one sold at WestLicht in 2012 for €66,000, described as an "extremely rare prototype," and a related pre-series example sold in 2020 for €45,600. The idea eventually became a real product, but only in the M-mount era, years after screw-mount production had effectively ended. In LTM, a collapsible 90mm exists only as a small number of six-figure collector pieces, not as something you could ever have bought new.
Nothing else in the screw-mount catalog resembles the Thambar. Max Berek designed it for Leica's 1935 tenth anniversary as a direct answer to a specific complaint from portrait photographers: that Leitz lenses were too sharp and too contrasty for flattering faces. Leitz's fix was not to make a soft lens by accident, it was to engineer softness on purpose. A removable spot filter blocks the axial light rays running straight down the barrel while letting the outer, deliberately uncorrected rays through, and a stepless aperture ring lets the photographer dial the amount of glow continuously rather than in click-stops. Take the filter off and stop down past f/9, and the same lens turns into an ordinary, well-corrected anastigmat, because the aberration that caused the glow lived entirely at the edges of the aperture. Leitz's own instructions warned against using it below f/2.2 without the filter mounted, and the lens shipped with its own leather case, a copy-stand focusing head, a reversing hood, and a dedicated spot-over filter, an entire accessory ecosystem built around a lens whose whole purpose was to not be sharp.
Production ran from 1935 to 1949, roughly 3,000 units total, most of it shipped uncoated. Leitz New York coated a small batch on request in the late 1940s, which improved contrast and defeated the entire point of the lens.
By 1957, when Leitz brought the Summicron 90mm f/2 to screw mount, the M3 had been on sale for three years and the direction of the company was obvious. They built it anyway, through 1962, in numbers dwarfed by the M-mount version: roughly 490 LTM units against something like 4,430 in bayonet mount. It's the rarest of the three screw-mount 90mm lenses by a wide margin, sold mainly to photographers with older Barnack bodies who wanted current optical performance without switching camera systems entirely.
The M3's 1954 debut didn't kill screw mount overnight. LTM production ran alongside the new bayonet system for years, and the final screw-mount body, the Leica IIIg, shipped from 1956 to 1960. But the direction was never in doubt: the M3 alone sold more than 220,000 units by 1966, still the best-selling M-mount camera Leica has ever built. Screw-mount 90mm production followed the wider system down on its own schedule, the Summicron ending in 1962, the last Elmar triplet running out in 1968. The Elmar name itself outlived the mount: a separate, M-only lens called the Elmar-C carried it forward from 1973 to 1977, built for the Leica CL, sharing nothing but a name with the lens this piece is actually about.
A single "Elmar 90mm f/4" price doesn't mean much: a 37-year production run covers three genuinely different objects, and blending them into one range just produces a number that looks broken, something like $90 to $3,000, because it is broken. Sorting current UsedLensTracker listings by which era of Elmar they're actually from fixes that. Figures below use the same fair-price method as the rest of this site: median as the typical price, and the 25th-to-75th percentile (the middle half of the market) as the fair range, with duplicate listings, multi-lens sets, and special editions excluded from the pool.
| Elmar 90mm f/4 segment | Mount | Typical price | Fair range (p25–p75) | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard postwar ("thin Elmar," 1946–1963) | LTM | $204 | $159–$274 | 85 |
| Early "Fat Elmar" (1931–1933, black-nickel) | LTM | $1,147 | $1,029–$1,281 | 6 |
| Late triplet redesign (1964–1968, 3-element) | LTM | $797 | $590–$1,048 | 4 |
| Standard | M | $264 | $199–$374 | 80 |
| 3-element/triplet-tagged | M | $923 | $746–$978 | 14 |
The standard postwar Elmar is the bulk of the market and the lens most people mean when they say "Elmar 90." Typical price $204, fair range $159–$274. This is the cheap, honest entry point into real Leitz screw-mount glass, less than most people spend on a lens hood.
The early "Fat Elmar" is a completely different market. Sellers who correctly identify their lens as a Fat Elmar ask $1,147 typical, fair range $1,029–$1,281, and one individually listed 1933 example with a documented low serial number (165xxx) was asking $2,999.95 on its own, well above even this tier's fair range, more likely aggressive individual pricing than a documented premium.
The final triplet redesign is also a distinct, thinner market: listings that identify themselves as the 3-element version ask $797 typical, fair range $590–$1,048. The M-mount Elmar shows the same split, an ordinary M-mount Elmar runs $264 typical (fair range $199–$374), while M-mount listings that identify as the 3-element/triplet version, evidently sold well into the M-mount era despite this piece being about the screw-mount line, jump to $923 typical (fair range $746–$978). Whatever this design actually was in M-mount, the market treats it as a different, pricier lens than the standard 4-element Elmar-M, same pattern as in LTM.
The Summicron and Thambar don't need this treatment; their listings cluster tightly with no comparable era split. Screw-mount Summicron 90mm f/2 examples ask $1,632 typical (n=11, fair range $1,325–$1,911, a thin market matching the roughly 490 units Leitz ever built in LTM), against $1,019 for the far more common M-mount version (n=179, fair range $755–$1,409), scarcity in the original mount outpricing abundance in the mount everyone actually wants to shoot. The Thambar 90mm f/2.2 is the most expensive and least available of the three by a wide margin, asking $4,620 typical (fair range $4,509–$4,974), consistent with a lens Leitz only ever built about 3,000 of.
The pattern across all of it: rarity, not optical performance, sets the price, and rarity has to be measured by actual production era, not by lens name alone. A "cheap" Elmar and a "four-figure" Elmar can be the exact same optical formula wearing a different decade's finish.
Methodology note: era buckets were sorted by keyword matching on listing titles ("Fat," "3 element"/"3-Element"/"triplet"/"Ver.II"), which catches lenses sellers correctly identified but will miss or mislabel some others, a few generic "black" or "nickel" listings that don't use these specific terms were left in the standard-postwar bucket rather than guessed into a rarer tier. Fair price and fair range (p25–p75) follow this site's standard methodology: median-based, duplicates and lens sets excluded, condition not adjusted for.
All Leica 90mm lenses tracked at usedlenstracker.com, including the Elmar 90mm, Summicron-M 90mm, and APO-Summicron-M 90mm.