Zeiss ZM 35mm F2 Biogon Review
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Technical Assessment
The lens delivers impressive characteristics on modern digital cameras:
Creates digital images that "feel like film"
Features detail and sharpness tempered by a "veiling halation" when shot wide open
Displays some chromatic aberration but with minimal color fringing
Shows uneven rendering across the frame that adds to its character
Performs at high quality but with a distinctly non-modern rendering
Recommended Use Cases
I recommend this lens for photographers who:
Prioritize character and unique rendering over technical perfection
Can work around the lack of weather sealing
Don't require reliable autofocus performance
Want a lens with nostalgic qualities for personal work
Photography Philosophy
Photography shouldn't just be about technical perfection but about creating images with character and personal meaning. I hope that manufacturers like Zeiss will develop more lenses that combine vintage character with modern autofocus capabilities specifically designed for contemporary camera systems.
A Little History
The Zeiss 35mm F2 Biogon in Leica M mount was actually one of the first lenses I bought when I was getting into film photography. Way back in 2013, my wife had convinced me to buy a Leica M2 as like an early wedding present to myself. And at the time, I couldn't afford Leica lenses.
All I could afford was the Zeiss optics, so I ended up buying the 50mm f2 planar in Leica M mount and then later, a photographer I admired for most of my career, Parker Fitzgerald had posted on Instagram that he was selling one of his lenses. And that lens was the 35mm F2 Biogon. So I paid him the money, he shipped the lens over to the UK, and it got stuck in customs.
I ended up paying an extra £300 to get the lens out of customs and finally I had it in my hands.
Imperfect = Reality?
It was around this time that the Leica M2 that I bought started showing its first problems. The camera is super old, the shutter is made of cloth and it turns out in my copy the shutter had started to separate. There were little holes in the shutter curtain that made these really interesting light leaks and bokeh balls as I was using the lens. Basically, the longer between frames, the more pronounced the effect. I can dig out the shot, so I'll just post them here so you can see some of the examples. These are all with the 35mm f2 Biogon.
After getting the Leica repaired, I put maybe another 8 or 9 rolls through it before I realised that this camera wasn't going to work for me. At that point, I needed to earn more money. We wanted to move out of the small flat we were living in at the time, so I sold the camera, bought my first proper digital camera - the Nikon D750 -and that felt painful.
Losing these wonderful, characterful lenses that had story and interest , it ended up feeling very difficult. It was hard to imagine what it was going to be like not having that character anymore.
Back to What Matters
And this started me down a process of buying things that made sense for the work I was doing, and that continued on and on and on. And fast forward to now, I've gone through my wedding career, I've gone through commercial photography and now...
I'm in a position where I'm advising people, and more and more these days the intention that we should have as photographers is not to make the best image possible or the cleanest image possible. It should be to say something that means something to us, something characterful, something genuinely interesting, something that somebody else next to you wouldn't think to say or say it in a way that's more interesting.
Coming Full Circle: Why I'm Back With These Lenses
I picked these lenses up along with the TechArt M-Mount to Z-Mount Pro Adapter. I've fallen back in love with them, if I'm being honest. The adapter is awful. It doesn't focus very well, but then again it's also a miracle in the sense that these manual focus lenses now have autofocus.
I can focus in closer and if I decide not to use the autofocus I can manually focus these on the Nikon and they look great. They don't look quite as nice as they would in a Leica camera. In the corners this does display some very strange vignetting and a lack of sharpness.
As I understand it, it has to do with the depth of the cover glass and the sensor, and if you were to use these on a Leica camera, such as the M11 or the SL3, that wouldn't be a problem because they use this special microlens array to fix that. But anyway, that's not about the lens, it's just the backstory about why I picked it up, and I think it's interesting to understand why we're having this conversation.
What Makes This Lens Actually Special
But the images in this review should speak for themselves. This lens is genuinely special to me. It's got the history that we talked about earlier, but even beyond that it makes digital images feel like film. On the Nikon ZF, it is an absolute triviality to use it. It's so simple to use. You can check your focus really easily.
The lens has detail, it has sharpness, but it's tempered by this really interesting veiling halation that you get wide open, which really lends an organic quality to the out of focus areas. The image has character. It is not even across the frame. Different light sources will highlight different amounts.
There is chromatic aberration, but strangely there's actually not very much color to it. So you can see on the edges of details that there are things there that show that there would have been color fringing on the lenses, but Zeiss have engineered it away with color correction.
It doesn't try to hide its flaws, but the flaws that it has can be appealing. It works on the way that they present so they are not offensive.
It's like a character flaw that you can turn into an asset. For example, if you hyper-focus on things, that can be a distraction if it's in the wrong situation, but it can be a benefit if you manage to channel that energy in a way that's interesting. This lens feels like it does a lot of that.
What I Wish Modern Lens Makers Would Learn From This
I genuinely wish that optics like this were still being made with autofocus, but the vast majority of the people making these really characterful lenses... It will be perfect, it will be super sharp, it will render infinite detail. More and more often, I think we're going to be moving away from that. And I'm looking intently to companies to produce lenses just like this, that basically have autofocus in them, that's designed for the cameras that they mount onto.
I hope Zeiss do this more often. I'm not particularly a fan of Sony cameras, but if Zeiss use their partnership with Sony to more frequently make autofocus lenses... It might actually be enough to tempt me back.
The Bottom Line on This Lens
Anyway, that's kind of my overview thoughts on this. This isn't particularly comparison. That'll come later. I'll show some images from this lens to kind of give you an idea.
But if I had to give you the bottom line on it, I think it's this. If you're looking for a 35mm lens that has an interesting character that isn't overly affected, it doesn't look... low quality or cheap or budget. This was the best thing that Zeiss could make at the time and it shows. It's a very high performance lens, it's just not a modern lens.
If that's what you're looking for and you're willing to put up with some of the imperfections introduced by using this on a modern mirrorless camera with a thicker cover glass and none of that sensor array. I think pairing these Leica ZM lenses in general and this Leica 35mm f2.0 Biogon in specific with that camera can yield some really interesting results.
In this post you've seen some of my personal work because that's where I feel like this this really shines. If you need autofocus performance this isn't the one. If you need any kind of weather sealing this isn't the one. But if you want character over everything, a lens that you feel comfortable walking around with and something that just feels nostalgic and cool, I'm not sure you can do much better than this 35mm F2 Biogon.
I really wish that they would make lenses like this...
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I’m Tom Wright, I’m like a therapist for your photography business.
I call it therapy because it’s about helping you work out obstacles. I help professional photographers overcome creative block, learn new skills, build systems, experiment with new mediums and provide support on an ongoing basis.If your backup system keeps you awake at night. You can't get over the latest bout of creative burnout. Or, you need to make a change to your style, you need a photo therapist.
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