TheyвЂ™re holding their value well so the financial risk is minimal and if youвЂ™re like me, you might just find yourself totally smitten and committed to it as a lens for life. If you want a small, modern and fun lens for your Leica or compatible camera without breaking the bank theВ Snapshot Skopar is an excellent choice. No other lens I own comes close to the quality/usability/value ratio of the Snapshot Skopar 25, especially considering the premium you normally pay for anything in LTM mount. A black Snapshot Skopar goes for around ВЈ225 on the used market in good, complete condition, typically a little less for the chrome version. I repeat, if youвЂ™re looking for a lens that imposes its personality on your pictures youвЂ™re better off looking elsewhere. ItвЂ™s the kind of lens that gets out of the way and lets your film and processing choices take the limelight. Images from it sometimes remind me of the look I get when I hit the sweetspot on a high end smartphone (but with lots more resolution and way less plasticky digital enhancement of course). In other words itвЂ™s a modern lens with very few obvious flaws apart from a little flare in extreme situations. TheВ Snapshot Skopar is sharp, has lots of contrast, relatively little vignetting (none at all by f8), not much distortion, and renders remarkably evenly from the centre to the edges. With the optional LH-1 hood attached Snapshot Skopar Optics This viewfinder is bright and true optically and exceptionally light but does add a bit of size to the hotshoe of a small camera вЂ“ not enough to bother me most of the time but do bear it in mind because smaller 25mm or 28mm viewfinders of the same optical quality are rare and expensive. The only plastic in the package is the separate 25mm viewfinder. It has a 39mm thread so most Leica users wonвЂ™t have to adapt their stash of existing filters. The focus is smooth and those distance click stops are just the right balance between definitive to prevent accidental slippage and loose enough for easy adjustment.ДЄs an added bonus there is no annoying infinity lock to fiddle around with. ItвЂ™s not up to Leitz or Zeiss engineering standards but is significantly better built than youвЂ™d expect for the price. The Snapshot Skopar is an all-metal lens вЂ“ body, lens cap, hood. It really is like using a point and shoot most of the time. By setting the focus at 3m IвЂ™m good from infinity down to about 1.5 meters. In practice I mainly use this lens in daylight at f8. There is a later version of this lens in Leica M mount which is rangefinder coupled вЂ“ from what IвЂ™ve read itвЂ™s very similar but does not feature these click-stops. With that in mind the really lovely feature of this lens for those of us who like to point and shoot is that the three most useful focal distances (1m, 1.5m and 3m) are marked with physical click-stops as you move the focus tab. The Snapshot Skopar on a Leica III in the middle of some other famously small cameras Snapshot by name, snapshot by natureДЄt 25mm focal length and with a minimum aperture of f4 fine focus is rarely needed вЂ“ youвЂ™ll be within a workable range for zone focusing pretty much every time.

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