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.
Only three lenses ever carried the focal length in M39: a slow (f/4), plain telephoto that spent three decades evolving 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. No collapsible versions were ever made in production. Leitz built collapsible prototypes twice and shelved them both times. Today the collapsible prototypes are five-figure auction pieces and the production Elmar is one of the cheapest ways into a real Leitz 90mm on the used market.
In 1930, as the Elmar 90mm f/4 was arriving, 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 prototype of the 10.5cm f/6.3 "Mountain" Elmar misfiled by later cataloguers is disputed among Leica historians. Either way, Leitz was testing long-lens designs the same year the Leica I gained interchangeable screw-mount lenses.
The production Elmar (code ELANG) arrived in 1930 and 1931, uncoupled at first and rangefinder-coupled from serial 94092, and the early run, what collectors call the "Fat Elmar," was an 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. 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.
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. 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 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 M mount: the collapsible Elmar 90mm f/4 launched alongside the M3 in 1954, while screw-mount bodies were still being built. In LTM, a collapsible 90mm exists only as a small number of five-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 to engineer softness into a lens design. 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.
Leitz Wetzlar built a small screw-mount pre-production run of a 9cm f/2 around 1953 that was never catalogued or marketed; Leitz records show only 12 of those lenses released to the public. Regular production started in 1957 at Leitz Canada in Midland, by which time the M3 had been on sale for three years and the direction of the company was obvious. They built the Summicron 90mm f/2 in screw mount anyway, in two versions. The first (SOOZI, 1957–1958) shared its serial batches with the bayonet version and the split was never recorded, but roughly 500 are estimated to have sold in screw mount. The second (SEOOF) was offered in screw mount from September 1958 until March 1963, about 490 units. That puts screw-mount production at roughly 1,000 lenses across both versions. 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.
More screw-mount Summicrons turn up for sale than that production suggests. The first version's bayonet lens was built as a screw-mount lens with a factory-fitted bayonet adapter, and many "pseudo" screw-mount Summicrons in circulation today were made by removing the adapter. Some sellers of original screw-mount examples say so in the listing.
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 March 1963, 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 production run of nearly four decades covers three genuinely different objects, and blending them into one range produces a number that looks broken, something like $70 to $3,000, because it is broken. Sorting current UsedLensTracker listings by era fixes that. Fair-price data pulled October 4, 2026, using this site's standard method: median as the typical price, the 25th-to-75th percentile as the fair range. The Elmar-C, a different lens, is left out of the M-mount Elmar row.
| Lens and era | Mount | Typical price | Fair range (p25–p75) | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elmar 90mm f/4, early "Fat Elmar" and black-nickel (1931–1933) | LTM | $1,121 | $1,024–$1,440 | 11 |
| Elmar 90mm f/4, standard four-element (1933–1963) | LTM | $198 | $140–$280 | 117 |
| Elmar 90mm f/4, triplet redesign (1964–1968) | LTM | Too few listings (asking $959 and $1,291) | 2 | |
| Thambar 90mm f/2.2 (1935–1949) | LTM | Too few listings (asking $3,499–$6,999) | 4 | |
| Summicron 90mm f/2 (1957–1963) | LTM | $1,368 | $867–$1,890 | 26 |
| Elmar 90mm f/4, standard four-element (1954–1968) | M | $223 | $163–$306 | 99 |
| Elmar 90mm f/4, triplet (1963–1968) | M | $861 | $751–$1,034 | 15 |
| Summicron 90mm f/2 (1957–1998) | M | $950 | $696–$1,200 | 243 |
The standard Elmar is most of the market and the lens most people mean by "Elmar 90." At $198 typical, it is the cheapest way into a Leitz screw-mount telephoto.
The rarer Elmar eras price as separate lenses. Listings identified as the early Fat Elmar or black-nickel version ask $1,121 typical; one 1933 example (serial 165xxx) is listed at $3,000. Only two screw-mount listings identify as the 1964–1968 triplet, too few for a fair price. In M mount, where the triplet is easier to find, it asks $861 against $223 for a standard Elmar.
Screw-mount Summicron 90mm f/2 examples ask $1,368 typical, against $950 for the far more common M-mount version. The Thambar is the most expensive of the three screw-mount lenses: the four current listings ask $3,499 to $6,999, too few for a fair price.
Rarity sets these prices more than optics. The Fat Elmar asks more than five times the price of a standard Elmar with the same four-element design, and the screw-mount Summicron outprices the M-mount version of the same lens.
All Leica 90mm lenses tracked at usedlenstracker.com, including the Elmar 90mm, Summicron-M 90mm, and APO-Summicron-M 90mm.