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1960 50mm Summilux


andybarton

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What do we think?

 

IIRC, this is not a very well liked lens, but I would appreciate any comments

 

Thanks

It was of course a slightly updated 5cm 1.5 Summarit -- which was in turn a slightly updated 1.5 Xenon, of 1935. Which means soft wide open, and flarey, though not as much as the Xenon: Imagine ten glass-air surfaces without coating! It did in fact lose nearly half the incoming light to reflection, and lots of that 'lost' light did in fact end up on the film. Coating (in the Summarit) and some rare-earth elements (in the v.1 Summilux) did not cure all these problems.

 

But the most succinct commentary was really Leitz' own: They did secretly redesign the lens in 1961-62, peddled it in an outwardly unchanged mount, and did not confess until 1966! The only possible interpretation is that they understood that the lens was a failure and designed a better one -- but they had lots of unsold v.1 lenses sitting on their shelves, so they could not admit that they had a better lens coming!

 

The competition that forced them to do this was of course Nikon, with their famous RF 1:1.4 5cm Nikkor-S, which was, to cap it all, a modified Sonnnar design!

 

The old man who was there

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Interesting - if one loses half of the light due to reflections (or rather spread it, where it shouldn't be), the extra stop doesn't seem to make much sense...

 

Not so: the f/2 Summar and Summitar each had 8 air-glass surfaces and without coating also lost a good part of the light. The Xenon delivered nearly 1 stop wider aperture with only two more air-glass surfaces. In transmission (T-stop) terms I'd guess the Summitar delivered about T2.4 and the Xenon about T1.9 - enough to be useful, especially when a fast film was about ISO200.

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Interesting - if one loses half of the light due to reflections (or rather spread it, where it shouldn't be), the extra stop doesn't seem to make much sense...

 

Right. And if you can speak of anything like 'the verdict of posterity', then the verdict is that the Xenon was a 'advertising lens', a lens Leitz had to have simply because the Contax had a 1.5 lens too (since 1932).

 

Now a standard Gaussian design like the Planar of course had eight glass-air surfaces, so it too lost lots of light. Sonnar lenses had only six, so it was as 'clean' as any Tessar or Elmar or for that matter, any cheap Cooke Triplet. But Ludwig Bertele achieved this by some acrobatic lens cementing which did seriously reduce the number of free parameters or 'degrees of freedom' that the designer could operate with. Something had to give, viz. flatness of field. It was practicaly impossible to achieve good definition outside the central field. Zeiss still markets an updated Sonnar design, the 50mm ZM C-Sonnar. Go look at its MTF curves (http://www.zeiss.de/photo).

 

Six hundred of whatever--dollars, euros or pounds--is a modest ripoff attempt. The v.1 lens is not rare enough to be very interesting to collectors, either.

 

The old man from the Age of the Sonnar

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It is interesting that for all Leica's fame and history as an optics maker, they really did not venture outside a fairly limited range as designers until the 1960's. There have been spurts of innovation - e.g. 1977-1982 or thereabouts - but only since 1990 have they really taken almost full control of their lens designs, except for a couple of R zooms.

 

Consider the following "Leica" lenses: 15 Hologon/Super-Elmarit (Zeiss), 21 Super-Angulons (Schneider, M & R), 24, original 75/80-200/210 zooms (Minolta), pre-Minolta zooms (Angenieux), post-Minolta zooms (Sigma, Kyocera), 28PC (Schneider) - and, of course, the Schneider Xenon/Summarit/Summilux(1) under discussion.

 

The new 18mm Super-Elmar-M is the widest prime lens Leica has ever designed themselves - 30 years after Nikon had a 13mm, 35 years after Zeiss and Canon had 17mms (not counting fisheyes).

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There was recently a similar thread: http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/customer-forum/85134-summilux-50-first-version-worth-buy.html

 

I have a very early first version and love the results. Without disputing that the next version was "superior", it's worth wondering how dramatically improved it was if Leica could get away with all this: "They did secretly redesign the lens in 1961-62, peddled it in an outwardly unchanged mount, and did not confess until 1966!"

Edited by Runkel
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and, of course, the Schneider Xenon/Summarit/Summilux(1) under discussion.

 

And the Schneider Xenon was in fact based on an earlier (1932) Taylor, Taylor & Hobson design - as was indicated by the Taylor-Hobson British and US patent numbers engraved on export versions of the Summarit prior to 1952, when the last patent expired.

 

In February 1961 I bought one of the last Summarits made and used it on an M2 for the next 5 years. It wasn't nearly as bad a lens as some people would have one believe. In fact I took some cracking colour photos with it, although I will agree it was best used at f2 or above.

Edited by jlancasterd
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Some more information for this lens from the 'Leica Taschenbuch' 7th edition.

Manufactured - 1959-1961

Serial numbers 1 640 601 to 1 844 000

Shortest distance 100cm

Weight 325g

Filter E43

They say from f/2 the image quality is 'quite acceptable' but really good performance can be expected at f/4 and below, having the optimal aperture between f/5,6 and f/8.

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There was recently a similar thread: http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/customer-forum/85134-summilux-50-first-version-worth-buy.html

 

I have a very early first version and love the results. Without disputing that the next version was "superior", it's worth wondering how dramatically improved it was if Leica could get away with all this: "They did secretly redesign the lens in 1961-62, peddled it in an outwardly unchanged mount, and did not confess until 1966!"

You are entirely free to love the results. That is a subjective verdict. But by the objective, measurable criteria of a reliable reproduction of the subject -- i.e. resolution, contrast, flare resistance -- these lenses were underperformers. The point is that with a high performance lens, you can do nearly all the quirky things that low performing lenses do -- and lots of things they cannot do. And many people do regard these things as desirable.

 

And the numbers of v.1 vs. v. 2 are there for all to see. D. Laney and E. Puts, 'Leica Pocket Book / Leica Taschenbuch' 7th edition has the MTF graphs on pp. 137 and 139. The two lenses were nearly identical in performance when stopped down, but the v. 1 was decidedly mushy overall wide open. So it's a fact: Leitz got away with it, in the sense that the British Government gets away with its 'official secrets': they are generally known, but they cannot be mentioned.

 

Rumours, facts, factoids and myths about Leica gear circulated long before the Internet ...

 

The old man from the Age of the Sonnar

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The original question contemplates subjective responses, which are usually best when based on actual usage of the lens in question rather than extrapolation of "the same basic design" back to 1932. My view is that this lens gets a peculiarly bad rap because it was so soon replaced, somewhat of an M5 effect. It surely lags its successor on common objective criteria, but probably not as much as the successor lags the ASPH version. It's very nice for people at f/2, a little dreamy at f/1.4, and not worth GBP 600.

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