Welcome back,

In this installment, I’m taking a look at the Leitz Cine Hektor prime lenses.

The BTS Video of the shoot.

Recently, I shot a commissioned dance film project for Leitz called “Mojave Dream” Directed by Bhavani Lee.

I spoke with the folks at Leitz Cine last spring, and they revealed an upcoming set of lenses called the HEKTOR Cine Primes. It’s a set of six lenses with full-frame coverage and a constant T2.1 aperture across the board: 18mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, 73mm, and 100mm focal lengths. They’re priced at around $42,500 for the six-lens set. That’s about the cost of a serious modern cine lens set, but roughly half the price of a usable vintage cine prime set—think K35s, Super Speeds, or KOWA Cine Prominars. My knee-jerk reaction was that this felt expensive for a set of mirrorless-only mount lenses. They currently come in Sony E, Canon RF, Nikon Z, and L mount, with other mounts potentially on the horizon. But no PL?! WHAT?! That’s insane!!!

Then I thought about it for a while.

The majority of cine camera manufacturers—Sony, Canon, RED, Blackmagic, Fujifilm—all ship their cameras with native mirrorless mounts as the base mount. PL mounts are adapters. So why not cut to the chase and use the camera’s native mount? The mounts are already there and are user-interchangeable. This also means you can use these top-notch lenses natively on any mirrorless camera for smaller builds. You’re not locked into a PL adapter and cage just to support the lenses. You can throw them on an A7S II, S1 II, R5, etc., for motion or stills. Using the mirrorless mount as intended also allows Leitz to achieve the optical performance they want with minimal compromises. That said, this does leave you out of luck for ARRI cameras. As far as I know, the Alexa 35 is PL or LPL only, and it can’t mount legacy DSLR mounts like EF, Nikon F, or Sony A. That also takes RED DSMC2 bodies and older EF-mount Blackmagic cameras out of the equation.

However, if you’re in the Sony ecosystem, running Gen 3+ RED cameras, L-mount Blackmagic bodies, or modern Canon cameras, the Hektors should work great.

I did not have a ton of time with them for Mojave Dream, only a few days.   That said, they left quite an impression.

The Look:

The essence of the set is that the goal was to create lenses with “real” vintage characteristics. To be clear, these lenses are an entirely new design, but the optical formula, coatings, and engineered look were borrowed from classic lenses in the Leica/Leitz lineage.

Honestly, they had me fooled. If you hadn’t told me they were new, I would have believed they were an actual vintage set that had been rehoused. The combination of Petzval-style bokeh, shower flares, and a gentle roll-off of resolution toward the corners felt completely authentic. The effects are pronounced, but not overwhelming. Unlike some modern “vintage-inspired” sets—where the flaws can feel exaggerated, almost like a caricature of what real vintage glass looks like—the Hektors strike a balance where the imperfections feel genuine. That’s what makes them special. While shooting with them, you almost wish there were more flaws—but if there were, the look would become overpowering, too intentional, and ultimately fake.  The in-focus areas of the image, especially in the center, still retain plenty of resolution, yet they carry that classic Leica/Leitz “creamy” rendering of skin and skin tones. It’s reminiscent of older Leica Summicron, Summitar, and Elmarit lenses. These lenses exhibit more “creaminess” than any lens I’ve personally used—more than S4s, more than Summilux-C, and more than Angénieux zooms.

Take a look at the qualities I’m talking about in these screenshots, taken directly from footage exported from Resolve:

No skin softening effects or any “beauty” tools were needed.  I basically just applied my REALWORLD_11 look, balanced the exposure shot to shot and that was it. The colors are all there and in the footage.

The set I used consisted of only three lenses: 25mm, 50mm, and 73mm. At the time, the full set was not yet available. What was interesting was that each lens had its own character. The 73mm exhibited the most pronounced Petzval effect. The 25mm had the most contrast, but its corner resolution softened with slightly more exaggeration than the 50mm or 73mm. The 50mm and 73mm produced the most pronounced shower flares. All of the lenses also showed a 1/4 to 1/3 stop illumination falloff from the center to the edges of the frame. That was intentional—Leitz Cine designed them this way.

Ergonomics:

The entire set is designed specifically for cinema use: fully manual and built to be extremely robust. While the purchase price may seem high at first, when you compare the mechanical consistency, standard cine workflow features—such as common focus and iris ring positions—absurdly high build quality, and gorgeous optics to a 50-year-old lens set that still costs twice as much (and carries the mechanical wear of five decades of use), the Hektors start to look like a very good value. Especially if you’re looking for top-end optical performance that still has a soul. They are small, light, and butter-smooth. In fact, that’s something Leitz is known for—there are few lenses that turn as smoothly as a Leitz. Your hand barely feels resistance, yet everything remains precise. The feel is, for lack of a better word, a luxury experience. It’s like the way a Mercedes or Lexus door closes—it just feels right. That’s how the Hektors feel to the touch. The entire film you saw above was manually focused by hand. The barrels are designed specifically for handheld use, with 180-degree focus throws. That used to be considered a “dirty word,” but with modern wireless follow-focus systems, you can expand that throw to a full rotation on the handset. This gives the user (or AC) the best of both worlds: an easy, hand-manipulated experience combined with the precision of a wireless focus system.

The fronts are a standard 80mm and work perfectly with my existing setup and accessories—cage, matte box, screw-on filters, etc. The only downside is that some of the longer focal lengths are physically slightly longer, requiring a small matte box adjustment on the rails. It would have been great if they were all the same size, but achieving that would mean increasing every lens to something closer to traditional cine dimensions, with 95mm or 110mm fronts. All of the lenses would need to grow in size to accommodate every focal length within a single housing. I’d much rather take the compactness and light weight. This makes them viable on everything from small Sony A7 builds all the way up to Sony VENICE 2 cinema rigs. It’s very nice to have a set of lenses that works from run-and-gun handheld shooting all the way up to top-end feature film work, and everything in between. The investment is significant, but the usability of the lenses gives them a very broad range of applications. They have character, but not so much that they won’t work for corporate interviews or cleaner, more polished commercial work. You just have to watch for flares and keep light sources off the front of the lens.

Under clean conditions, you’ll get a warm, pleasant, relatively clean image with interesting bokeh and good contrast. If you intentionally place hard light sources in the frame, you’ll get wild lens flares and lively optical effects in the image.  Its up to you.

Conclusion:

I’m doing everything in my power to buy a set of these. I believe they’re a lens set that can serve me for nearly any purpose, and with the backing of Leitz Cine, I know I’ll be able to have them maintained and repaired for many years to come. Until you get a chance to use them, it’s hard to fully appreciate how forgiving they are to skin and fine detail while still resolving a sharp image. That delicate balancing act is something Leitz Cine has truly mastered. I’ve been a die-hard Cooke S4 fan for 20 years—and I still am. That said, the Hektors are my favorite set to shoot with for my work, both personal and professional. When using them for beauty, cosmetics, hair care, or really any situation where a human is on camera, there’s honestly no better option. They just make people look great. For more creative projects, like Mojave Dream, being able to use the flares and overall look to add texture to the image at will is a fantastic creative option. I also loved shooting with rented Leica R sets adapted to EF, fitted with Duclos mod gear rings for many projects. The classic Leica look has always been highly sought after by me. This set—the Hektors—reminds me of the Leica R lenses, but in a proper cine form factor.  They have plenty of character and charm for more experimental or stylized shoots, yet they’re well-behaved enough to take into the boardroom and shoot clean, professional talking heads as well.

Thanks for reading!

Coming up next I’m going to take a look at the GVM AIO 1200w Bicolor Light.   A new light that I recently got thats really been a game changer for power, size and ease of use.