Character by Design

The Leitz ELSIE lenses are purpose-built for cinematography with character-rich, beyond full frame performance to serve a broad range of productions. They exhibit a gentle fall off of focus, resolution, and illumination toward the edges of the frame that draws the viewer’s attention toward the subject creating a dimensional feel that is more pronounced than the lenses in our Performance series, but more subtle than the more extreme lenses in our Legacy series. Their warm color temperature makes sure that talent looks beautiful and colors remain accurate.

The ELSIE lenses offer cinematographers a look with personality, but without getting boxed into something too intense or limiting in scope. While the lenses can exhibit dynamic lenticular flares wide open, they can be controlled easily by stopping down so that scenes with windows and hot practical sources are easily manageable.

They exhibit a relatively high contrast which combines with their unique focus fall off to create separation that gives the appearance of a faster lens without the drawbacks of working at an ultra-fast aperture. The bokeh quality was fine-tuned in conjunction with Leica Camera to be smooth yet maintain structure to out-of-focus elements that maintains a sense of place without sacrificing the feeling of depth, separation, and dimensionality.