Authored by Admin · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Friday 13 November 2026 · Issue 28 · 5 min read
Leica's hammertone M11-P at €9,950, Sirui's $149 Swift primes, Komodo-X down $2,000
What's hot
leicarumors.com · yesterday
Leica M-A and M11-P Hammertone
Takeaway: €9,950 including VAT
Leica has made official two special-edition rangefinders wearing a grey hammertone coating on solid brass top and base plates, a textured finish the company has used only a handful of times since the 1930s. One is the fully mechanical film M-A, the other the digital M11-P, and neither changes anything inside: specs match the standard models. Both went on sale worldwide on 12 November 2026.
This is collector territory rather than a weekend-kit purchase, but it tells you where Leica is putting its manufacturing attention while everyone else chases sensors — and The Phoblographer notes Leica's limited runs tend to hold their money, which is why these sell out before reviews appear. The M-A Hammertone is €6,650 including VAT and the M11-P Hammertone €9,950 including VAT; the digital one keeps the 60.3MP BSI sensor with 60/36/18MP capture modes, 256GB of internal memory and Content Credentials, plus a colour-matched BP-SCL7 battery.
New gear
Sirui Swift 20mm F2.4 and 40mm F2.2 — are tiny full-frame autofocus primes with stepping-motor focus, a clicked aperture ring, an AF/MF switch, a custom Fn button and weather sealing — controls normally found on far dearer glass. A sealed wide and a walkaround normal at this money is about as low-risk as new glass gets for weekend shooting, and X-mount bodies can use them too. Both cost US$149, share a 58mm filter thread, and weigh 207g and 210g in Sony E; L-mount and Fujifilm X versions are also listed. sonyaddict.com
Vistilen EFR 35mm f/1.8 Pro — is a full-frame autofocus 35mm for Canon RF bodies, sold under the mount name Vistilen invented for itself — EFR — rather than any licence from Canon. RF has been the mount where third-party full-frame primes do not exist; each of these quietly tests whether Canon will act, and whether RF owners finally get cheap glass. It is $399 and shipping, built from 12 elements in 10 groups with three ED elements, and at 404g it is heavier than Canon's own 305g RF 35mm f/1.8 IS STM Macro. canonrumors.com
“Getting around Canon’s grip on the RF mount surely can’t be beaten by simply calling it something else.”
Light Lens Lab M 40mm f/2 "華" — takes 40mm F2 optical groups pulled from 1980s Chinese Huaxia rangefinders, cleans and sorts them, and rebuilds them as a six-element, four-group double Gauss in a modern rangefinder-coupled barrel. Rehoused vintage optics are the cheapest way into genuinely odd rendering on an M body, and Japanese distributor Shoten Kobo has only a fixed batch of a lens originally sold to a Chinese community. Direct price is 49,800 yen in black or silver, 162g, aperture ring with clicks, 0.5m close focus and 39mm filters; it went on sale 12 November. Digital Camera Watch
King CLASSEL — is Asanuma Shokai's novelty compact: you look down into a 2.0-inch screen on the top plate as you would with a twin-lens reflex, and a side crank drives the digital zoom with a mechanical ratchet feel. It is a toy, not a camera to shoot with, but it shows how far the retro-compact boom has run — the segment Fujifilm says is actually growing. Due 20 November at a street price of 9,900 yen, with a 1/3.2-inch 8MP Sony sensor, 28mm-equivalent lens, 4x digital zoom and 2.7K video. Digital Camera Watch
What people are saying
Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift — was put up against an adapted Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II on a Fujifilm GFX100S by Keith Cooper, who shoots the Canon regularly and found the newer lens clearly better at controlling flare and holding corner quality. Shift options that stay clean at the edges on 44x33mm sensors have been thin on the ground, and Cooper shot most of his samples handheld, which kills the tripod-only assumption. It talks to no camera at all, so aperture, tilt and shift never reach EXIF and profiles will not load; nothing holds the tilt at zero either, and one trip in a bag left Cooper with stray tilt softening one side of his frames. fstoppers.com
“correct as much as you can with the lens, and leave post-processing for small adjustments”
Sigma 50-120mm F2.8 DC OS | C — was tested on distant subjects by Asobinet on an X-E5, and wide open the detail comes through with slightly low contrast rather than real bite; closing down one or two stops cleans it up noticeably. If you bought this as the affordable fast tele for a 40MP APS-C body, the review says f/2.8 is for separation, not for landscapes at pixel level. At 50mm the centre jumps at f/4 and peaks through f/8 before diffraction bites; at 120mm stopping down lifts contrast but not fine detail, with corners best around f/5.6 to f/8. asobinet.com
Nikon Z50 II — gets a defence from Digital Camera World's Mike Harris, who argues the plain-looking Z-mount APS-C body is being overlooked while retro-styled rivals soak up attention, and that its 20.9MP files hold up fine unless you crop hard or print big. It sits in the same bracket as the EOS R10 and A6700, and with the FTZ II your old F-mount DSLR lenses go straight on the front. Body-only it is $956.95 at B&H and £839 at Wex, with an OLED finder, 30fps JPEG bursts and cropped 4K 60p. digitalcameraworld.com
Lomography MC-A — came out of four rolls at Fstoppers looking and feeling premium but failing at basics: the LiDAR autofocus repeatedly missed at infinity, loading a film is a fight with a free-spinning take-up spool, and frames overlap on every roll. Worth knowing if the new-film-camera wave has tempted you — the reviewer's verdict is that none of the current crop, this one included, is safe to recommend as a first film camera. It is $549 with a 32mm f/2.8 lens, 332g without battery, and runs on a CR2 cell that charges over USB-C. fstoppers.com
“the results don’t quite match expectations or the $549 price tag”
Industry news
Fujifilm Q2 Q&A — Manager Yuji Igarashi says compacts and instax hybrids are growing while interchangeable-lens cameras decline, with China's economic downturn slowing the wider market.
Canon RF 400mm f/2.8L and RF 600mm f/4L — The Phoblographer reports, unconfirmed by Canon, that both lenses are due before the end of the year with a built-in teleconverter redesigned away from the EF-era version.
RED Komodo-X — Nikon has cut the 19.9MP global-shutter Super 35 body by $2,000 to $4,995 across all three mounts, Z, RF and V.
EOS R8 Mark II cashback — Canon Japan is paying 20,000 yen back on the body and both kits bought between 29 October 2026 and 12 January 2027, with claims closing 26 January.
One takeaway
Find your lens's real peak before the next outing. Two of this week's optical verdicts point the same way: the sharpness you were promised lives a stop or two below maximum aperture, and perspective is cheaper to fix with the lens than with a slider.
You shoot weekends, so you have the time once: put the camera on a tripod, pick a distant detailed subject, and run the full aperture range at your longest focal length. Compare at 100% and note the setting where corners stop improving — that is your working aperture for landscapes, and it is usually not wide open. asobinet.com