Yes traditionally the Planar has just two flat surfaces that are cemented together in the third group, however this looks more like the Summicron IV:
Guess what is it?
Nikkor Auto 50mm f2, introduced in 1964:
http://www.nikkor.com/story/0002/
Regarding the Voigtländer Nokton, I have no direct experience, but "have read on the web" that the lens obscures more of the area seen in the viewfinder. Might be true or not - but worth checking.
I think it's a problem for the Nokton 1.1 that is big (and Ken doesn't like it), the 1.5 looks a more compact lens however even the tiny hood of my Summicron DR eats a corner of the viewfinder.
This was coated, and what was surprising is that coatings were of more colors than typical for the era. This one also had cyan coatings; most coatings of the era are either amber, yellow, blue, or purple.
How can one understand all those funny names? Elmar, Elmarit, Summar, Sumarit, Summaron, Sumittar, Summicron... i'd guess there will be in the future Elmaron, Elmacron, Noctimar, Summalux, etc... And then the "Leica"-branded lenses have funny names like "Vario-Elmar"... Come on, an Elmar design can never be a Zoom... Anyways...
LOL. So much for the myth of 1950s Leitz lenses being the best. And then in the 60s the japanese took over. I think now the LTM leitz glass is mostly bought by collectors; i'd suppose users prefer to go for 1960s Canon or
Nikon lenses.
The big fall of the German camera industry. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Like Flavio Briatore said: "Let's see the japanese now yutaw taw."
Short guide to the Leica names by KR:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/lens-names.htm
In short they depend from the F stop of the lens itself, the faster the more expensive and "noble", on the top of the food chain there is the Noctilux, on the button the Hektor, that used be Barnack's dog.
For the suffix "it" it also indicates a faster lens based on a existing one, so the faster (f2.8) version of the Elmar is the Elmarit, the Summarit was a pumped up version of the Summar (Sonnar like Leitz lens) etc...this page is interesting:
http://blog1.poco.cn/myBlogDetail-htx-id-1211257-userid-42113193-pri--n-0.xhtml
Vario is German for zoom, traditionally Zeiss West and East always called their zooms Vario-something, for instance Vario-sonnar, so a Leiz f2.8 zoom is a Vario-Elmarit. Got that?
For the superiority of Leitz, everybody who knows something about History knows that Zeiss lenses until the 60 outperformed the Leitz counterparts, for instance the Sonnar 1.5 was much better than the Xenon first and Summarit later, the 2.0 performed better than the Summar etc...before the war the best RF was the Contax II and III, not the Leica III. Leitz started to become a "legend" when they introduced the second type of Summicron (the first one was simply a Summitar, like the first Summilux was an evolution of the Summarit that had a bad reputation) then things changed, but before that the best lenses were not Leica.
Think about the Soviets: instead of copying Leitz design they acquire all the Zeiss technology and launched the Jupiter and Industar lines of lenses to be used on Leica II clones.
