Review: Leica Thambar 90mm f/2.2 Lens

Overview: Leica Thambar 90mm

The Leica 90mm f/2.2 Thambar-M first came to our attention back in 2017—largely due to its astronomical price tag. Of course, this is typical of Leica. They get everyone talking about how niche, expensive and out-there they can get. But Leica doesn’t do things by halves. To match the lofty price tags, they’ll usually give their gear astounding attention to detail and unique design aesthetics or function. Sometimes even both.

This is effectively a soft-focus lens—revived from a 1930s design—with up-to-date construction methods and a tweaked exterior, as well as better coatings on the glass elements. It provides a unique look, which it achieves by purposely under-correcting the spherical lens elements, creating a soft signature to the edges of anything you point it at. The more you open up the lens, the stronger the look it gives.

As you might expect, It’s beautifully well-made with a beautiful black paint finish. With time, this will wear and expose wonderful brassing—a byproduct of a process Leica tend to charge more for. The focus ring is smooth and precise. The lens’ rear cap is a solid block of aluminium, so it’s very weighty but reassuringly so. The top cap sits atop the lens hood, which is also finished in the glossy black paint and will presumably get that signature brassing effect over time as well.

Our Review

I didn’t have much time with the Leica Thambar—just a short weekend—but luckily, I had a few portraits planned.

I was going for a slightly vintage look, using flash, and wanted to just allude to the model and make a colour composition. I used a Leica M10-D and Canon flash set to manual bounce off the rear wall. The aperture was set at f/4 for this one. As you can see, although the model is defocused and the lens is not opened up fully, it still has a very dreamlike look with a very soft fall-off and a soft-focus feel.

Fully open, the lens is very unique. From my limited experience using soft-focus filters, it renders an image similar to a Zeiss Softar. There’s a glow, and not just in areas with strong light. While we call these lenses ‘soft-focus’, I find they render sharp images ‘underneath’ the strong look they create. In other words—if you were to print this image larger than what you see here, it would just look like a bigger version of the above rather than losing detail due to the perceived lack of sharpness.

The Leica Thambar’s characteristics lend themselves well to portraiture. But, I’m not sure about its effectiveness for other applications. I find it most effective as a lens to create highly stylised and artistic images—a vibe, if you will—rather than a lens to capture reportage or a documentary style.

Slightly stopped down the lens, it begins to behave more like a normal lens. By f/8, the effect is almost gone—making it more useable as a normal short telephoto.

It’s tricky to capture detail when it’s close to fully open, partly due to the fact that the glow the lens creates can sometimes rob images of specific detail. In this case, the contrast in each petal of the rose. Examining the image closely, we can see the detail is there—but the lens will always opt for glow over detail.

I loved my time with the Leica Thambar. It’s not often you get to shoot with such a unique lens, but a short weekend isn’t enough time to fully understand what this lens can do. Obviously, portraiture is one of its strong points—especially for anyone who likes the vintage and cinematic style. If I had more time with it, I’d love to explore other possibilities—abstract photography being one of them—creating images that are all about feeling and atmosphere rather than minute detail. While you can get a similar effect with soft-focus filters and some Lightroom magic, the Leica Thambar offers something very unique that is hard to truly replicate.