Leica... Old glass or new glass

[mandocaster]

So I just bought a user M2 body. I don't have a lot of cash left over. I'm torn between spending my $400 on a 35mm color-skopar (or less used), a cleanish 5cm Summitar, some LTM Canon or whatever. What say you?

 

[summicron1]

Leica made very little of what anyone would call bad glass -- I get excellent images from even 70 year old lenses.

The biggest factor is you, not the lens. a 35mm color skopar will do excellent work, as will a cleanish summitar. LTM canon are also good.

A 50mm elmar is one of the best of Leica's excellent lenses.

Oh hell, just buy the cleanest lens you can afford and start taking pictures.

 

[Patrick Robert James]

Lots of great lenses for the Leica. If you are cash strapped, get a cheaper Canon lens, or even a Russian lens. It really will depend on what you want your pictures to look like. I have never been a fan of modern Voigtlander lenses. I think they are a compromise that results in a boring look. Older Canon lenses can be quite good. If you are looking for a 35mm try the Canon 35mm f/2. You should be able to pick one up for around $400 last time I looked, maybe even a bit below that. It will be even cheaper for a Canon 35mm f/1.8 or a 2.8. You might even be able to find a Leica Summaron around your budget which is a really nice lens. For 50mm the Canon 1.8 is fantastic for it's age. If you are handy you can convert a Pentax 50mm f/1.4 to Leica mount for around $200. I did that about 5 years ago and haven't looked back. The Pentax lens is one of the best 50s ever made. One thing to point out though is there really aren't any "bad" lenses that will fit on your Leica. Get what you can afford and what you will like.

Hope that helps you.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Just a reminder, M2 is not just 35 camera or accessory. We have dedicated sub-forum for rangefinders. Overwise, $400 for lens in sub-forum where it is now sounds silly. And you already get advice to use SLR lens, which is at 50mm and f1.4 is going to be useless because it has no rangefinder coupling.
So, I would take it as in rangefinder land and in rich man hat. $400 will give you buttom priced LTM 35 2.5 Skopar and Canon 50 1.8 LTM lens. Plus, get Fotodiox LTM-M adapter for 35 and 50. Silly in SLR land, but for RF this is cheap by price, not by performance lenses. Dirt cheap is Jupiter-12 for 35 and Jupiter-8 for 50. But those lenses will need CLA and checking for focus shift with re-shimming most likely. If CLA is done and focus is aligned they are OK lenses. For $200 you could get not just Pentax, but Jupiter-3 50 1.5 lens. But I don't like lenses this fast on cloth curtains. I burned curtain by Jupiter-3 f1.5, likely it was my FED-2, not Leica.
With old Leitz glass, which you call as cleanish Summitar, it is priced same way as houses in Toronto. Same insane price for condition close to "actually ruined", but sold as "renovated." If you like to deal with fog, fungus and separation go for all $400 for it.

 

[Ian Grant]

Why not go for a 50mm Summicron, I bought mine for a very reasonable price, it's about the same age as my M3 and a superb performer.

Ian

 

[BMbikerider]

Leica made very little of what anyone would call bad glass -- I get excellent images from even 70 year old lenses.

The biggest factor is you, not the lens. a 35mm color skopar will do excellent work, as will a cleanish summitar. LTM canon are also good.

A 50mm elmar is one of the best of Leica's excellent lenses.

Oh hell, just buy the cleanest lens you can afford and start taking pictures.

There was an A5 sized magazine printed in UK called "35mm Magazine" I still have a copy dated from June 1966 and in it was a test of the F3.5 50mm Elmar. (Ceased publication in the late 60's so i remember.)

This was long before tests were carried out using computer style electronics to test them on a bench. It shows a full negative 1" x 1.5" and a section from a 20x16 pint that fills a full page of the magazine. It is as sharp an image as I have seen anywhere from a 35mm neg. The film was Ilford Pan F and developed in ID11. That says it all for me.
Later on I owned a Leica 111f fitted with a 50mm Summitar lens and that too was sharp, clearly defining metal fence posts from over 1/4 mile away. Yes it was low(er) in contrast, but if the contrast of the lens could be boosted, possibly by using modern day coating it probably would be as good as todays Summicrons.

Hands up those who think bench testing a lens does not give a true picture of how it will perform under every day taking conditions. Personally I think they give a false impression of how good/bad a lens may be.

 

[darkosaric]

On low budget: LTM Elmar 5cm f3.5 can be found for 100-200$. There is nothing wrong with Elmar, great lens for every Leica.

 

[Two23]

I generally try to buy lenses that are correct to the time the camera was made. For my 1942 Leica IIIc I have four lenses from the 1940s. I use the camera because I want a vintage look.


Kent in SD

 

[Hatchetman]

I would go for a clean 50mm Elmar of some sort. Maybe LTM version and M adapter.

 

[NortheastPhotographic]

50mm Planar man! It's as good as any modern Summicron. On film it's as good as any including the APO Summicron. I would say you could find one in your budget. If you have a chrome M2, the chrome Zeiss lenses match the bodies perfectly. It'll leave you with no room for G.A.S.

 

[Marcelo Paniagua]

Agree on Elmar. As much as I love my Summitar, it has a signature that some love, some hate, so there is risk to be dissapointed. I love it, makes stunning portraits, but I know some that dont like it. Elmar is a pretty nice lens, no so expensive, easy to find a good example and is pretty small when collapsed. I use it on my M6 a lot.

Regards.

Marcelo

 

[mandocaster]

Thanks for all the great advice. I pulled the trigger on a Canon LTM 35mm f2 from Japan on Ebay. I'll get the M adapter and hope for the best.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Very smart move! 35 is my favorite focal length with M.

 

[Marcelo Paniagua]

Agree, great lens. Have fun with it.

Regards.
Marcelo

 

[Kodachromeguy]

Hands up those who think bench testing a lens does not give a true picture of how it will perform under every day taking conditions. Personally I think they give a false impression of how good/bad a lens may be.[/QUOTE]

If you look at Dpreview, as an example, it is full of "photographers" who go orgasmic over bench and target tests of lenses. From what I can tell, they don't take photographs, just argue over tests and buy a new camera system every year or two.

 

[BMbikerider]

Hands up those who think bench testing a lens does not give a true picture of how it will perform under every day taking conditions. Personally I think they give a false impression of how good/bad a lens may be.

If you look at Dpreview, as an example, it is full of "photographers" who go orgasmic over bench and target tests of lenses. From what I can tell, they don't take photographs, just argue over tests and buy a new camera system every year or two.[/QUOTE]


My thoughts are along the same lines as well, the bench test is a sanitised way of looking at the particular optic without really taking any photographs. Years ago, the British Magazine 'Amateur photographer' used to test cameras by photographing an old Navy warship which was permenantly moored in the Thames. The pictures were taken from the opposite bank. (About 350 yards). Generally if you could read the name of the ship it was a good lens, if it wasn't, just be careful.

 

[Paul Howell]

Bench testing has it place, I have always tested my lens for a bench mark, but Kodachromeguy is right, the real test is the field in actual use. When I had a Canon 7S I had the 35mm F2, almost as sharp at F2 as at F8, color retention was also excellent, maybe not Leica glass but so close, hard if not impossible to tell images one from the other.

 

[flavio81]

Hands up those who think bench testing a lens does not give a true picture of how it will perform under every day taking conditions. Personally I think they give a false impression of how good/bad a lens may be.

If you refer to tests where they take a picture of a FLAT resolution test chart at a CLOSE distance (say 0.5 to 1.5 meters), then yes, it is a test that is not so meaningful.

Real life has at least two or three different usages:

1. Portrait distances -- and then on a portrait sharpness wouldn't matter so much as other things such as out of focus rendition
2. Landscape distances (infinity)
3. Group pictures -- where distances can be like 3-5m and sharpness does matter.

None of those three are represented by the classic 'test chart' test.

Lenses can perform very different at close distances versus infinity. Some lenses are optimized for close distances, some for infinity.

Pictures of a FLAT brick wall or FLAT test chart will make lenses that suffer from field curvature perform bad; but on real life subjects it is rare to take a picture of a FLAT subject. And a lens designer can choose to not aim for perfect field curvature correction in favor of corrections that would make the lens render nicely, etc. Of course, for a macro lens one wants a FLAT test chart at CLOSE distances to be super sharp... Thus, which are the lenses that test better on the classic 'shoot at a resolution chart' test?... Macro lenses, of course.

HOWEVER, i've seen some magazines (and websites) that do compare lenses using more real-life situations. Even the often maligned Ken Rockwell takes the time to show results of a lens on actual practical usage. This is good.

I love reading at magazine tests, but I must acknowledge that they not always represent actual usage.

Then there are always tests of lateral chromatic aberration, which is fine, but seldom you see tests of longitudinal chromatic aberration. And this one is horrible, because it gives you weird color bokeh... And, news to the digital guys who think everything can be solved with software: this can't be corrected in software!!

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Hands up those who think bench testing a lens does not give a true picture of how it will perform under every day taking conditions. Personally I think they give a false impression of how good/bad a lens may be.

Lens could be good on bench, but extremely boring on photography.

This is my shot for today. Dirt cheap Industar-22 (19 dollars) at M3 ELC.

 

[Pioneer]

Nice photo Ko-Fe.

In the end a successful photograph is up to the photographer, not the camera or the lens.

Your M2 and the Canon 35 will work great. It is more important to pick something and go create photographs than to obsess forever on the best combination.

BTW - I agree with the opinions here that the Leica Elmar 50 is a wonderful lens. The Elmar 50 and the Pentax M 50/2 are probably my most used lenses.

 

[daleeman]

A 35mm on an M2 is a great choice

 

[Huss]

As long as that Canon lens is not fogged/hazed up (they have a tendency to do that) you are set. Make sure to check it for fungus. I have got a lot of stuff (ok 3 things) from Japan that was described as perfect that had fungus in it.

 

[mandocaster]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll check it out. The seller has good feedback. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

 

[NJH]

Best value will be secondhand but reasonably modern Cosina Voigtlander (CV) lenses. My most used and favourites of the CV lenses are the 35mm f1.4 Nokton classic SC and the 21mm Skopar.

The 50mm Elmar-M I have is a really superb lens, nice smooth rendering but also stunningly high resolution at the same time, quite a neat trick to pull off. Also with it collapsed it makes the camera small enough to fit in a coat pocket.