Canon's fast rangefinder wide — 35mm f/1.5 in Leica Thread Mount, manual focus.
The Canon 35mm f/1.5 is a very fast wide-angle rangefinder lens made in Japan for the 39mm Leica screw thread. It sat near the top of Canon's rangefinder wide-angle range at the end of the 1950s, when the company competed hard on lens speed. It gave Leica-thread and Canon rangefinder users one of the brighter 35mm options of the era.
This is a manual-focus, rangefinder-coupled Leica Thread Mount lens with a 35mm focal length and a maximum aperture of f/1.5. The mount is the 39mm Leica screw thread (LTM / L39 / M39). Focus and aperture are set by hand on the barrel. Element count, weight and filter thread are omitted here because they are not verified from the gap data.
A 35mm at f/1.5 is built for available-light photography, allowing fast shutter speeds indoors and at night while holding the useful wide field. Wide open, fast rangefinder wides of this vintage show lower contrast and a softer glow before crisping up when stopped down. Focus accuracy is important at this aperture given the shallow depth of field for a wide lens.
Buying used, inspect the glass for haze and fungus and the cemented groups for balsam separation. Check coatings for cleaning marks and wear, look for oil on the aperture blades, and confirm the focus helicoid is smooth. Verify rangefinder-coupling accuracy on a body, which is critical for a fast lens. It adapts well to Leica M via M39-to-M and to mirrorless using M39-to-E, M39-to-Z or M39-to-RF adapters.