Leica vs Nikon vintage lenses

snusmumriken said:

Out of curiosity, where does this information come from? It hardly seems the kind of thing Leica would voluntarily admit.

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From a personal perspective I think it's simply a case of there being only a limited number of options possible in a design before 'copying' gets thrown around. A bit like designing a three wheeled car, there are only a limited number of options for placing the wheels before it falls over. For example the optical design of the first Summicron was only slightly different from the previous Summitar, so perhaps it's a case of parallel evolution and not copy-gate?

As for the other matter of Nikon 'making their own glass' there's the problem of people calling lenses 'glass' to show how cool they are and this gets translated by advertising copy writers into hyperbole. Leica don't have a glass manufacturing factory and I doubt Nikon do either, they may each be able to mould glass they've sourced but the actual formula is designed by them or bought in by them. So they make lenses and not 'glass'.

250swb said:

From a personal perspective I think it's simply a case of there being only a limited number of options possible in a design before 'copying' gets thrown around. A bit like designing a three wheeled car, there are only a limited number of options for placing the wheels before it falls over. For example the optical design of the first Summicron was only slightly different from the previous Summitar, so perhaps it's a case of parallel evolution and not copy-gate?

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I’m sure that’s right. Look at the number of Tessar derivatives, which in turn were based on a Cooke patent. The best ones, however have that extra something that one can only attribute to expertise/skill.

Going to Walmart to purchase a Leica M-A…!

Nikon 2 said:

Has anyone had the opportunity to compare a vintage Leica lens to a vintage Nikon lens…?

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Nikon 2 said:

Does the Leica lenses show better edge definition or superior resolution that you can discern…?

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A former colleague bought an MP with a 50mm lens (>$10K mid 2000's) and while showing it to me, he said that with the purchase, he can have a tour of the manufacturing facility!
It certainly looked like a very desirable system and I recall seeing some tests conducted that showed outstanding results.

To your point, how can one discern this outstanding quality of superior resolution?

For reference, early in my acquisition phase, I bought a Pentax M 50mm f4 Macro lens used off craigslist for a couple of bucks. Since it was so cheap and was handed to me in a plastic grocery bag in the exchange, I didn't think much of it but I started to notice I was getting very sharp results casually using it. Got me thinking just how good could such a cheap used lens be so I tested it using Kodak Techpan shot @ ISO25 and processed in Kodak Technidol.

Below left shows the 100% crops from the center scans of one of those frames using my Pentax 14.6MP K20D, 36MP D800 and my Coolscan 4000dpi. The 4.5X optical enlargement to the right clearly shows much more detail not realized by my scanning methods.

Resolution testing my SMC Pentax-M 50mm F4 macro lens by Les DMess, on Flickr

I know that the methods I used to try and extract the detail from the film is the weakest link but with regards to capturing the detail onto the film, I am still not sure what the weakest link was. Was it the lens, film, method, target?

So in your search for superior resolution, you will want to extract all that glorious detail captured on the frame of film!