The British manufacturer, Skyllaney Opto-Mechanics, has just announced a new line of pre-converted lenses. They are starting with the 50mm planar, which is available immediately. They are currently shipping all pre-orders from batch 1, and the remaining few lenses left from batch 1 are supposed to appear on their web store soon. Batch 2 is supposed to be ready in a few weeks.

Skyllaney takes the existing Contax 50mm Planar, removes the glass, aperture, and front bits, then install them into a new RF coupled lens body that is native Leica M mount.

In order to get the lenses to focus properly on Leica cameras, it required changing the optical formula slightly. These converted lenses don’t have the glass the elements in the original locations as it was necessary to shrink the effective focal length of the lens formula. The glass elements are inside new sub-blocks that are partially weather sealed. The converted Planar’s have a very slightly wider field of view than the original versions for CY mount because of these changes.

Their 5cm f/2 Bertele lens is also almost complete, but they aren’t releasing any new info about this until 2021, aside from what they put on their IG and FB pages. It supposed to be ready for sale in mid-2021. They have redesigned the body, it is now all brass.

More pictures of the Skyllaney’s MkII conversion of the Carl Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 Planar T* lens:

The commissioning of a Planar conversion to be created will be sold at £1249 plus shipping and includes a synthetic leatherette option, if you send your Planar lens the conversion costs £999 plus shipping.

More info on Skyllaney’s website.