[rollei_list] Re: "different types of black boxes" (was: OT / prove it !)
- From: Marc James Small <msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 12:50:07 -0400
At 04:13 PM 4/2/05 -0800, Richard Knoppow wrote:
> I am not so sure about the engineering and lenses. I've=20
>worked on older Leica's. They are very well thought out and=20
>are relatively easy to work on and support. The Contax has=20
>an extremely complex shutter which I would not attempt to=20
>work on. While the Leica rangefinder has a shorter base it=20
>also has a built in telescope so its _effective_ baseline is=20
>equal to the Contax. Contax had to use the wider basline=20
>without a telescope because the rangefinder image is=20
>combined with the finder image.
> Lenses are hard to tell about. The famous f/1.5 Sonnar is=20
>a good lens but the type has some problems. The Sonnar type=20
>has fallen out of use because lens coating eliminates its=20
>main virtue: low flare due to minimum number of glass air=20
>surfaces. Modern designers use forms of the double Gauss=20
>(Biotar) for lenses of f/2 or faster. This is not to say=20
>that the specific lenses made by Zeiss for the Contax may=20
>have had better prformance than equivalent Leitz lenses for=20
>the Leica. Remember that both companies made very advanced=20
>optics for microscopes and other optical instruments.
> Andreas Feninger wrote in one of his books that he=20
>couldn't use a Leica because it impressed him as being too=20
>delicate, so he used a Contax. Knowing what is in the two=20
>cameras I suspect the Leica is the more rugged of the two.=20
>Actually, old screw mount Leica's seem to be very rugged=20
>cameras.
Richard
Even with the magnification in the Leica VF, the Prewar Contax II and III
outdid their LTM rivals, the Contax having an effective base of 69.75mm
against the effective Leica base of 57mm and the M3's effective base of
63.71mm. The overall prize, of course, goes to the Kodak Ektra with its
effective base of 231mm.
I have overhauled both LTM and Prewar Contax bodies and they are both about
equally difficult to work on, though the Contax makes greater use of
component assemblies and is therefore a bit easier to strip down. And the
Contax innards are simply built to unreasonable standards of durability and
tolerance. It is quite rare to ever find a Prewar Contax whose shutter
suffers from anything more serious than worn or broken shutter tapes. The
LTM cameras were certainly held in high esteem for reliability but, until
the advent of the M3, the Contax was the preferred camera for rough-country
and combat use: Capa, for instance, abandoned LTM gear after the Spanish
Civil War and switched to Contax which he used, along with Rolleiflex and
Nikon RF, up to the time of his death. (He had both a Contax and a Nikon
with him when he was killed.) And Leica did not make an appearance on
Mount Everest until the Canadian climb of the 1970's, though the Contax had
been on the North Face before the War and on the South Face with the 1953
Hunt Expedition which finally, in Hillary's colorful words, "knocked the
old bastard off".
As to lenses, no one, not even Leitz, would argue that their lenses
seriously rivalled those of the Contax until the 1960's. Even the great
Max Berek, Leitz' head of optical design until his death in the very late
1940's, repeatedly stated that he designed lenses only to be "good enough
for the job" and not to represent the absolute finest fomula possible. I
am not suggesting that the various Elmars were not capable lenses, but the
Summar was not close in overall performance to the 2/5cm CZJ Sonnar, while
the Xenon/Summarit family did not come close to the 1.5/5cm CZJ Sonnar --
in the end, Leitz completely abandoned the design when they went over to
the second verison of the 1.4/50 Summilux in 1961. (Max Berek had many
estimable qualities but perhaps his most endearing one was the naming of
lenses: the original Elmar was the ELMAX, for "Ernst Leitz Max Berek",
while the Hektor and Summarex were named after two of his dogs, Hektor and
Rex.)
I make far greater use of Leica gear today (IIIc, IIIf RDST, IIIg, M3, and
M6) than of my Contax gear, though for a quiet afternoon of neighborhood
shooting I am likely to use a Contax III and a 2/5cm Sonnar.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx=20
Cha robh b=E0s fir gun ghr=E0s fir!
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