[rollei_list] Re: e: OT: Leica vs. CZ lenses
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:57:09 -0800
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc James Small" <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 12:08 PM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: e: OT: Leica vs. CZ lenses
At 02:40 PM 11/16/2009, Thor Legvold wrote:
>Hi Jan,
>
>He found the 85/2 Sonnar, the others I found myself.
Apparently (Marc
>disagrees) there were several versions, and most are a bit
soft.
Thor
Please be precise. I have never suggested that
there are not several variants of the 2/8.5cm and 2/85
Sonnar.
What I dispute is the Henry BS bit about the
lenses being "soft". They are not so, nor were
they, as Henry seems to have opined from his
customary pinnacle of ignorance, intended as a
soft-focus portraiture lens. We have the
complete documentary history of this lens and it
was intended as a razor-sharp reportage lens and
was marketed exactly as that.
I have NEVER seen or heard of a "soft" 2/85
Sonnar save for the lenses which have been
serviced by someone like Henry who probably does
not know what they are doing and gets the
elements out of order of the like. The lens was
intended to be as sharp as it could be, and it is so.
If you EVER receive a "soft" 2/85 Sonnar, get it
over to someone like John Van Stelten who knows
what he is doing and, obviously, keep it as far
as possible from Henry as you can, as he seems to
have demonstrated an ignorance of how to properly
service the lens. It would be nice for him to
admit that he doesn't know what he is
doing. Instead, he invents the bogus tale of the
2/85 Sonnar being a "soft" lens and nice guys like you fall
for such claptrap.
It is best to avoid the Henry BS lectures and his
many foolish statements. We have been studying
the Contax RF system and the CZJ lens output for
some decades, and Henry occasionally pops out
with some corkers which run directly in the face
of known facts and a strong documentary trail.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
The fact is that the only way to test a lens is to put
it on an optical bench and run a bunch of tests using the
aerial image. On a camera one is testing the entire camera.
There are all sorts of variations in lens performance; some
have to do with the inherent characteristics of the design,
some with the specific design, and some with the particular
lens. There are some bad lenses; the Wollensak Tessar type
series of the late 1940's sold as Raptar and Optar (Graflex
house brand) were awful probably due to a design error, and
once in a while one finds an example of poor QC or just a
dog that escaped.
The basic design of the Sonnar and Leitz lenses are
quite different. The Sonnar is derived from the Triplet.
While it is a very much better lens than a Triplet it still
shares some inherent problems. The design was exploited
because it has few glass-air surfaces so is low flare
without coatings. The Leitz lenses are derived from the
Planar/Opic/Biotar. These have a different set of inherent
strengths and weaknesses. They have more glass-air surfaces
so have more flare than a Sonnar. Of course, coating tames
this. History shows that excellent lenses have been made
using both designs. I think the Sonnar type fell out of use
after coatings became available because it appears to be an
expensive lens to make. The f/1.5 has four cemented surfaces
and some pretty steeply curved surfaces, both of which tend
to make a lens more expensive to produce.
Do, when someone compares lenses of different designs
on a camera I must ask what was controlled? How about focus,
film flatness, etc. How many examples of each were tested?
Harry Sherer seems to have a lot of Zeiss propaganda on
his site. Some of the stuff Zeiss published is perfectly OK
but a lot of it is self-serving. One really needs an
independant source for education about optics.
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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